Interview: How ‘speed’ plays a major part in Battlefield Hardline

As you may recall, earlier this month we sat down with Visceral Games to talk about Battlefield Hardline, particularly the developer's new take on the long-standing series, and how their focus on three key pillars — strategy, speed, and story — will help deliver a complete first-person shooter experience.

While our first conversation focused on the strategy portion of the game, a recent round table discussion with Battlefield Hardline's lead multiplayer designer Thad Sasser and other media outlets centered on speed. During our discussion Sasser answered how various elements of speed impact Hardline's gameplay and how the developer is using feedback from the recent beta to improve the game before launch.

"Speed is very important to Battlefield Hardline, and that’s more than just pure vehicle speed or player speed," Sasser opened. "There’s a lot of other aspects that tie into that. Obviously, we’ve got things like fast cars — probably the fastest in the Battlefield universe. We’ve got increased player movement speed. But it also extends to kind of our generalized design philosophy."

"We want players to be able to get back into the action more quickly. This means an improved UI for deploying on your teammates, or easier way to spawn on your teammates with more vehicles that support team or squad spawning. In addition, we’ve got improved movement mechanics, things like being able to jump through a glass window and shattering it with your feet instead of meleeing it first, or mobility tools like the grappling hook or the zipline that allow you to change your elevation much more quickly than previous titles."

With that, here's the rest of the questions that was asked:

With Call of Duty and Titanfall, they all brought that gimmick of boost jump. How do you plan on increasing the speed of Battlefield without having that gimmick?

Like I mentioned, we do have some of the fastest vehicles in the Battlefield universe. If you take a muscle car and you put a stuntdriver on it, I’m pretty sure it goes faster than any vehicle that’s previously seen in any Battlefield. We’ve increased the base movement speed for the player by a certain percent, so players are actually moving through the world faster. And, of course, the grappling hook and zipline. Obviously, the zipline is a very powerful, fast-moving tool that allows you zipline between two places faster than you can run there.

What motivated your decision to make a more fast-paced Battlefield than we’ve seen in previous Battlefield games?

This is one of the fun things about multiplayer game development, it's highly iterative. That means we've built something, we've playtested it, we've changed it based on feedback. I like to use the mantra 'fail fast, follow the fun,'" he continued. "You try a whole bunch of stuff and you follow the things that work. What we found that really  worked and helped us create a unique identity that was different than Battlefield 4 was focusing on speed — on the faster cars, on the faster player movement, on the faster engagement and the faster back into the battle.

All of these things, we're basically addressing some of the complaints we heard in Battlefield 4 — the whole 'I don't like to spawn in, run for ten minutes, and then get shot by a sniper I couldn't see and then repeat the process.' This is kind of reaction to some of the feedback we got early on in the project.

How does speed work in synergy with strategy and some of the other pillars you’re focusing on?

One of the things about speed is it causes you to react faster. This applies to strategy as well, like, ‘Alright guys, we’re going to breach the vault. You guys go in first, I’m going to throw gas in the hall, you’re going to arm the vault and it’s going to be all good.’ And we get there and, ‘Oh crap everyone died by a molotov. Well, we better replan, let’s quickly think of a new strategy and execute that.’ I think reacting on the fly and the speed at which you can think and outthink your opponents is a critical part of the strategy of Hardline.

What can you say about the decision to switch from the longer engagement range of Battlefield 4 to a much shorter engagement feel that gets players into the action much faster?

One of the things about having a smaller area is it’s quicker to get back into the battle, and I don’t want to indicate that all of our maps are smaller. We still have the classic Battlefield scope of huge maps down to tiny maps, but we’ve shifted the focus on many of these maps to a shorter engagement range, like a 20-30 metre range as opposed to the 100-200 metre range which you quite often get the larger outdoor maps of Battlefield 4. We’ve intentionally shifted the focus so it’s a little bit more personal and moved away from the military realm into the cops and robbers realm.

We’ve seen a lot of people compare Hardline [it’s map sizes/design] to Counter-Strike. Are you happy with that comparison?

Happy to being compared to one of the most popular shooters of all time? Yeah, I’ll take that.

How did you create speed in Hardline without distancing yourself from Battlefield’s reputation for team-oriented play?

Team play is still a very important aspect of Hardline. One of the great ways you can really ensure that teamwork happens and that it’s organic is in the game modes. And I think that as you start to explore Heist, you’ll find that teamwork is critical. You’re not going to lone wolf that yourself, there’s no chance. You might be able to make effective plays by playing alone, but you’ll be far more effective as a team to attack or defend that vault.

We’ve also done things like encourage team spawning a little bit more. Moving the satellite phone to the mechanic class is a pretty big deal. Traditionally, this has been a gadget used mostly by recon to stakeout a great sniping spot. We’ve made this a deliberate choice to move this to the close-ranged engagement class because he’s more likely to be in the heat of battle and think ‘where can i place this nearby that allows me to get back into the battle’ and at the same time provides an organic benefit to his teammates that also want to get back into the battle quickly.

Do you worry that some of the increased emphasis on speed can alienate some of the traditional Battlefield players?

You’re never going to please everybody. We know this isn’t a military game. It needs to be its own distinct game from Battlefield 4. There needs to be a reason to play this versus a reason to play Battlefield 4.

We feel these are the right steps forward in creating our own identity for Hardline, and creating a slightly different experience from what Battlefield 4 has to offer. If it was just Battlefield 4 again, well you can already play Battlefield 4, but Hardline is going to give you a different experience, a faster-paced experience where it’s easier to get back into that battle more quickly.

What happened to counter-knifing?

We removed it. We felt it discouraged from the melee play and you might have noticed we have more of an emphasis on melee weapons in Hardline. In Hardline, we've got all of the new blunt weapons like the sledgehammer, the police baton, the lead pipe, the crowbar, and we've got a bunch of new knife animations as well. This was a deliberate choice on our part to go back to a little bit more of a simplistic system that was less about necessarily timing something in response to something, but rather more about player action. It's more about you landing that hit before the other guy landing that hit.

Now we did keep the automatic kill from behind in because that’s really a great humiliation tool. A lot of players like to sneak up behind that pesky sniper and use the hammer or crowbar and have some sort of spectacular animation. We know that’s popular, we kept that in. But the front knife, the side knife, that’s no longer automated. Now it’s going to be more about your skill as a player when it comes to engaging the enemy.

Some of the respawn timers in the beta felt a little long, are you addressing that?

One of the things about a respawn timer is that changing that can drastically affect the pace of the game. You know how players can spawn on squad mates? If you had no respawn time, players would continually keep spawning on each other and that would break the flow of the game. This is something that we’ll look at, but we’re reluctant to say yes or no we’ll change that. We want to do what’s best for the pace and flow of the game.

Based on the feedback from the beta, what kind of response have you received?

We’ve gotten a ton of feedback. I want to say overwhelmingly positive, but we’ll say mostly positive. A lot of players really like that it feels different than Battlefield 4. They like that it has its own identity and vision. And they find it to be a lot of fun. I’ve had a lot of positive comments on the way the game plays right now, and that’s without us doing any specific tuning for it. Obviously, no one thing is going to please the entire population. I think that’s impossible.

Have we seen all the vehicles?

No sir, you have not. We still have a couple of surprises. I’ll talk about one of them — we have speedboats. You’ve probably seen them in the promos for Riptide. The boats are cool — they add a change of pace. They’re armed so they’re powerful when used properly, but they’re also tricky because of the waves, because there’s no cover on the water, so they add an interesting new dynamic that you’ve experienced before in Battlefield 4 but it’s different in Hardline.

For newer players of the franchise, how do you expect them to adjust to the quicker speed?

I think they’ll feel right at home. The quicker speed doesn’t hit you in the face like a, ‘Wow!’ If you don’t have previous Battlefield experience, I don’t think you’ll notice it too much.

With Hardline’s launch approaching, what kind of work you doing now that could change what we saw in the beta and what we’ll see at launch?

I can’t promise very much, but we look at all the feedback and we’ve got a huge list of things we’re going through, we’re prioritizing, we’re sorting, we’re seeing lots of feasibility of changing this or fixing that. There’s no way we can address it all, but the things we can address we’re going to push hard on it and make the game as much more improved as we can.

Is there one specific thing from the beta that you’re looking to address as a priority?

For me the biggest thing is damage feedback for both players on foot and in vehicles. There’s sometimes a lack of notification when you take damage and you don’t know that you’re wounded. This is something we really want to address. I think it’s particularly a problem in vehicles where you could be down to 27% health but not even realize it and then you feel like you get one-shotted. If you could rewind it and watch it, you could see that you’re actually really damaged, you just didn’t know. So this is one of the big things that we’re really focused on, improving that feedback loop between the player’s hearth state and the damage he’s taken.