EA have decided to take an interesting turn with “Battlefield: Hardline”, moving away from the franchise’s original premise of massive, large-scale battles based around war events, and into a setting of cops vs robbers. The game will also feature a single player campaign, something which is still a relatively new idea for the series, even though fans and critics have had mixed responses to the campaigns of the last two games.
Now, EA have released three new screenshots from the campaign, showing an incredible level of detail and beautiful graphics. The screenshots themselves are in a very high resolution, and can practically be used as wallpapers. They show several scenes of the game, including a close-up of some characters’ faces under proper lighting. What is clear from those pictures is that the game will easily be one of the best looking titles of all time.
But then again, this has been the main focus of the “Battlefield” series ever since the third installment, which saw the much improved version of the “Frostbite” engine and significantly amped up the explosions and visual effects of the game. It’s no surprise that “Hardline” is pushing this trend to the limit, but hopefully EA won’t forget to actually develop good, solid gameplay to go with it. After all, no matter how beautiful a game is, it doesn’t matter much if the gameplay experience is shallow.
“Battlefield: Hardline” is going to change the theme of the game quite a bit. The new setting has been seen as somewhat questionable by fans, as it seems a bit extreme for robbers and police officers to use helicopters with machineguns, rocket launchers, and various high-tech gadgets in their shootouts. In addition, the new gameplay style will significantly change the pacing of multiplayer matches, and the game will likely not feature the massive battles that the series became known for.
This definitely shouldn’t mean that the franchise is dying, as the changes could very well revive it and breathe some new life into the series. It’s true that some fans have been wanting a change of scenery for a while, although making so many changes at once might be a bit too much for a single installment.
On a positive note, the recent delay of the game is a good indicator that EA want to give it some more polish this time. One of the biggest problems with “Battlefield 4” was its buggy state at launch, as the game had numerous technical issues, especially on the PC. This was mostly attributed to a rushed release, as EA wanted to meet certain deadlines in order to better compete with Activision’s “Call of Duty”. In the end, their actions backfired and lead to criticism towards the title.