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

With Battlefield Hardline's beta starting this week, we recently sat down with Visceral Games to talk about 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.

As part of a round-table series that will continue for the next few weeks, our initial focus is on the strategy pillar — particularly how it'll affect both the single player and multiplayer portions of Battlefield Hardline.

"One of the things historically important to the Battlefield franchise has always been the idea of teamwork and strategy. And as we have been working on Hardline from the beginning, we've had that on the forefront of our minds, especially when it pertains to multiplayer," Visceral Games VP and Battlefield Hardline executive producer Steve Papoutsis told us.

"We wanted to create game modes that really leaned in to the idea of teamwork and strategy — things where you could have a lot of fun when you teamed up and worked as a strategic team versus just running and gunning through the game.

"But of course we want to also support players that want to kinda just run and gun and play lone wolf style, but rather than punish them for doing so, we took the approach to rewarding those that worked together strategically. So we made things like 'Hotwire' where the more people you have in a car, the faster the ticket rate went up. Things like that where we wanted to reward for the use of strategy, instead of punish those that weren't playing that way," he explained.

So with this increased emphasis on teamwork and strategic gameplay, is Visceral improving the way players can communicate? Turns out, yes, they are.

"We worked really hard with our audio team to enhance the dialogue that you would hear inside of the game, to give you more situational awareness around the player," Papoutsis said.

"So things that would actually clue you in to, like enemies approaching, or things that are happening to you or your squad mates in the game, that was one of the areas where we really tried to pump it up so you'd have more feedback."

Visceral has also taken steps to ensure communication and interaction is easier for people. Realizing how frustrating it can be for more experienced vets to sometimes interact with newer players, Visceral has added a new feature that allows you to interact with a teammate as if they were performing the required action.

"So in previous Battlefield games if you're playing as a Medic or support character where you could give ammo or drop health packs, often we'd see players get frustrated because we'd see some players didn't understand how those mechanics worked, and didn't realize they needed to deploy those items to get benefit from them," Papoutsis explained.

"What would happen is people would be yelling at those people, saying 'Hey you don't know what you're doing noob!' So we thought one way to alleviate that friction was by now allowing players to be pro-active in the acquiring of those types of support elements," he revealed.

"For instance, if you're a character that has the health pack equipped as one of your gadgets, as a player, you can run up to that character, hit a button and get the benefit as if they dropped that item for your. So we put more emphasis on players to be able to get that assistance when they needed it. Skilled players will still know to throw those packs down, but for those people that are new, we made it a little easier to their teammates don't get frustrated with them."

Of course, Battlefield Hardline also offers strategic elements from a gameplay perspective. For example, there are systems in place that encourage non-lethal tactics in both single and multiplayer. There's the new Hacker mode, which is Hardline's approach to the Commander Mode. All of these strategic elements are helping mold a complete first-person experience.

Check back in the coming days and weeks for more talk of strategy and, eventually, speed and story, in Battlefield Hardline.