Interview: Talking Battlefield Hardline’s story with Visceral Games

Over the past month, GameZone, along with a handful of other sites, have been participating in round table discussions with Visceral Games regarding Battlefield Hardline, the upcoming installment in Electronic Arts long-standing Battlefield series. As we've mentioned in the past, Hardline's development has centered around three key pillars: Strategy, Speed, and Story. While we've already talked strategy and speed, our final round table discussion revolved around story.

This past week, we talked to a number of developers at Visceral Games regarding a variety of aspects related to story. From story inspiration to campaign length, we asked it all — and below are the answers.

How did you approach the campaign of Battlefield Hardline differently than past games in the franchise?

From the beginning I think there was a couple of things that were important to us. From a gameplay perspective, the general feeling was to get off of the rails a little bit, to provide a lot more choice of action and player involvement. There's nothing wrong with a good ol' fashion thrill ride, super-scripted single-player experience, but I think it leaves a lot on the table. We really wanted to do more than that, so we wanted to bring as much player choice, and agency, and variety into our experience as we could, so structurally it works a little bit differently than any Battlefield has before in terms of providing a lot more opportunity for the player to do stuff.

The other big one was tone. I felt like there was a kind of story and a kind of world that was underrepresented in games. Games typically spend a lot of time explaining some super complicated plot about a guy trying to take over the world. My favorite stories were a lot more character based, and we wanted something with a different tone that gave players more choice.

When you look at the blend of characters and their personalities

We've got two protagonists in this game that are the most important. One is the player character, Nick, a Cuban American guy. The other is his partner Khai, who's Vietnamese American. One of the really interesting things that we hit on early, those nationalities are not an accident. We thought it was kind of interesting in that previous Battlefield games were about American adventures abroad fighting wars in other countries. If we have protagonists in our game who are actually people whose ancestry went back to countries in which US politics adversely affected. So we have these two characters that have this conflicted sense of who they are as Americans, and yet they're fighting on the police force. Nick is very gung-ho about doing the right thing and being a good cop, and Khai is a little bit, shall we say, has a foot further into the dark side. You see that pretty quickly in the beginning of the game. So Nick and Ki have a kind of interesting series of exchanges throughout the game as to who's going to step further along that line and who's going to pull the other back. And I think the pendulum sort of swings throughout the game on that, in what I hope is a surprising way.

Just having talking protagonists also helps a lot as to who Khai could be. None of the other Battlefield games have had that. When you have a character that can talk in a Battlefield game, that completely changes the kind of story you can tell. I think that, to me, is what makes this an exciting entry into the series from a story perspective.

What sort of steps are you taking to encourage a Battlefield player from skipping the campaign and going straight into the multiplayer?

You can't make someone have fun. There's no — you can try tricks, or bribery, or hiding things behind walls. I find our best bet by far is to just do something really good and let the word of mouth take care of itself. We wanted to bring some of the things that people love about the Battlefield multiplayer and having a more organic structure — and there is some crossover, like the money you earn and experience can get you things in multiplayer — but for the most part we just want to make something good and have people discover it.

Do you expect players to have any difficulty transitioning from a more military-based story to a more urban, police story? What can expect to see that's going to make Hardline definitively different?

Our story is much narrower focused. You're not finding a nuke; the world is not up for grabs. Our characters concerns are lot more personal. Our story has a lot more focused. We really only have two cities that you really go to, two separate locations which is Miami and Los Angeles. So I hope some of that focus lets us dial down into the new places your at. In a lot of shooters you go to tons of amazing, beautiful places but they just sort of whizz by so fast that you don't get to sink your teeth into them on a story level. Getting away from that big, sprawling world and getting into the personal story of a few people creates a more intimate and meaningful experience for the player.

That extends to the characters and characterization as well. We want to have a game that at the end of the game, you know the names and something about each of the major characters.

Can you tell us about the plot structure?

It's sort of structured like a series of television, or a mini-series. Each chunk of the game is like — we call them episodes. They are like TV episodes, like when you quit out of the game you'll get a 'Next on Hardline' and you'll see a bit of what's to come. And when you return, you'll see a 'Previously on' summary. So every time a new episode starts, you're introduced to a new environment and sort of a new goal. Generally speaking, our goals are pretty concrete. You start a level, you have to do something, and by the end you do it. I play a lot of shooters and just over and over again in shooters you get sort of fatigued from the goal changing so much within a given section of the game. One of the things we strived to do on a story level is not do the forced failure thing where you break in, get to the area where you're supposed to get to, but the thing is gone and the bad guy continues on and you have to keep going. We wanted every chunk, every episode to have its own sort of rising thing, have a satisfying conclusion and then reset the story to where you have to do a new thing.

From a single-player story and gameplay perspective, what sort of things are you doing differently to avoid mimicking some of the things we've seen in the past? Like, you know with a lot of first-person shooters, you're going to get that cinematic, slow-motion breach, or that falling skyscraper set piece. What sort of things are you doing differently to set Hardline apart from that?

Predominately, we're rounding our story into these characters. While we certainly have our set pieces and we've certainly constructed aspects of the narrative towards something we knew would be a cool moment — you have to start with some kind of landmark that you're going to build the train around. We're making sure we're not just playing with every tool on the utility belt just because it's there. We really tried to keep things realistic and a lot of that can actually be credited to the director of the project who comes from a theater and TV background and he knows what works consistently and what doesn't work consistently from a story perspective, so that really helps shape the events in a meaningful way.

I think the kicking open the door sequence in the first-person shooter is something we've all see enough of, so we kind of have a little bit of fun with the kicking open our door sequences. We do some gags based on the whole 'time to kick open the door moment' and we also have a skyscraper moment that makes a very unexpected version of the typical first-person shooter thing. So we were aware of those kind of common things and as often as possible we tried to make them our own.

One of the things that we did, we made a thing called the Lame List with a bunch of screenshots and sequences that once had their place but are overused or dumb, or things that were just not allowed to be pitched. Like, for example, one of the things on the list was the 'follow this guy, but not too close so he sees you. So walk slow, then the guy might turn around and then have a conversation.' It's super frustrating and games keep doing it and I don't know why because it's never been fun. To use one of those tropes, there had to be some sort of twist on it to make it interesting and take advantage of the fact that people thought they know was going to happen. It's something we used on Dead Space too because there's just as many horror tropes and by being able to know what people expect and give them something different, you can turn that into something rewarding.

Can you tell us about the nuances players are going to find out about each character?

That would all be creeping into spoiler territory and we want these people to be as fresh as possible, so we're hesitant to say too much.

There are reasons why individuals become police officers and there's different kind of police offers, and different kind of people. We decided to explore the gamet of some of those reasons. Then there's also reasons people become criminals. They feel compelled to be a criminal, some can get out, some end up that way and there's different perspective.

Everyone who you meet that's a cop in this game is not necessarily a good guy. You meet a lot of criminals; a lot of them are not bad guys. One thing I am happy with is everyone in the game world, because it's kind of a funny game — we tried to tap into that 80's action cop buddy movie thing — it's a little more lighthearted than people are suspecting it's going to be. It's got some fun, and we hope the characters are compelling. Everyone in the game is a mess, they're all kind of messed up people. Going around and labeling which is a good or bad guy, you realize very quickly that is a very relative term in our game world. Everyone is just trying to work their way through the world as best they can. Good guys and bad guys have never interested us in figuring out how our story works.

Has the growing tension with police in America, like for instance the events in Ferguson, caused you to look at characters that you'd written prior or caused you to rewrite any dialogue that maybe you didn't think about before, but then these events made you question.

To be honest, the vast majority of our stuff was well in the can by some of the specific events you mention, so it wasn't like 'Oh God, we need to think about what we're doing in a different way.' To be honest, we were thinking about that stuff from the beginning just because to be a responsible creative professional you do have to take a step back because no one really cares what you intended; once you make something it's out in the world and it belongs to everybody so you have to think about how things might be interpreted even if you didn't mean them that way.

I do think when people experience our game they'll see right away that it's not a social commentary. This is a world where police are jumping out of skyscrapers with parachutes in the multiplayer; it's not exactly a realistic police simulator. We're going for sort of an exaggerated cops and criminals kind of world.

But of course, we're paying attention to the world and I do think the issues came to the forefront in a way that we hadn't expected when we started, but you have to know anytime you're taking action that happens in the "real world" that we all inhabit and see; you have to be responsible for how you show things. And I think we have. So no we didn't have to freak out and change anything because we were thinking about it the whole time.

How are criminals going to be portrayed throughout the game?

We can't really talk about that without spoilers, but from the beginning part of what appealed to us was seeing things on both sides of the law and having characters that aren't all good or all bad. These are characters that all know each other. There's no one bad guy with an elaborate plan. You will already know the bad guys and the bad guys will already know you. What we wanted to provide is a world where the "bad guy" just has a different perspective than you on what should be done, so he's not a mustache twirling plot type. There's no Russian general that's so bad even the Russians don't like him or anything.

What was the reaction when you first pitched this whole idea of "cops vs. robbers" and breaking away from Battlefield's traditional war theme to explore the war on crime?

Actually it went smoother than we ever dreamed. We thought it was going to be controversial, but DICE themselves had their own version of this idea going back long ago. They thought about it for sure, so they were like 'Yea, that's a no brainer. We should totally do that.' So that part was easy. It was more about 'Well, what makes Battlefield, Battlefield?'

It was a pretty natural choice. We're a different studio, we're going to do things a little different, it's going to feel different anyway, and as gamers we're also tired of the same game coming out every year that feels the same. So we were thinking, here's an opportunity to take the gameplay we love so much and change it up but really make it feel like a different world, and I think they understood the value in that.

Could you talk at all about the length of the campaign?

I always hesitate to talk about game length just because it always seems to blow up in your face and it's always variable. What I will say, this has been the most variable game length in all of our testing. It's over 100% one way or the other based on how people play because we've provided so much value. I don't think anyone will think it's too short or not providing value.

Traditionally, Battlefield DLC tends to focus on multiplayer. Any chance we can see some single player story DLC?

We have some ideas, but we're taking a wait-and-see approach a little bit with what people think, what resonates, what characters really land. I think it's definitely on the table, but nothing has been announced or predesigned yet.

Without spoiling anything, are you writing Hardline with the possibility that, should it do well, you can leave it open for a sequel?

We didn't write it to set up any sequel. Of course, there's all kind of 'Oh man, what if we did this, then we could do that' kind of ideas on the table. But there's no 'core setup or this is what's going to happen next or don't do that we're going to save it for the sequel' kind of thing. From the beginning we aimed to tell one story and tell it well, which we think we've done. I also think if there's an opportunity we would be happy to give people more of these characters.

What are some things you took inspiration for when writing the story for Hardline?

Lethal Weapon was a big one. Just getting that feeling of two people together in a series of escalating f**ked up situations. Capturing that kind of 80's action movie vibe was really important. What I love about those movies is that they didn't take themselves terribly serious. That's one of the virtues of are game, it tries to channel that energy. So Bad Boys, Lethal Weapon, Out of Sight…

We did a lot of factual research also. We read a lot of UN reports on drug smuggling. I had a background image on my computer, this depiction of the cocaine value chain that showed how the cost of a gram was as it came to the United States. Thinking of how that ecosystem of coke shifted away from Miami, and how the technology and law enforcement has changed that since then and why it mostly comes from other places; it's not so much by sea anymore.

The big instigating moment in our game is the 80's in Miami were really bad and it was drugs that were ripping Miami apart. Of course, that ended in the early 90s and drugs are now going through Mexico. Well in our game drugs are going through Miami again. Drug crews are just killing each other. Cops aren't trying to hunt down drug crews to kill them; they're trying to figure out why all the drug gangs are killing each other. That's the story, and that's what starts everything off.

---

While our discussion about story marks an end to the roundtable discussions, you'll be able to go hands-on with Battlefield Hardline when it releases in just a few weeks on March 17, 2015. If you're an EA Access premium member you'll get to play it even earlier on Xbox One.