The release of cops and robbers shooter Battlefield: Hardline only a year after Battlefield 4 might conjure up thoughts of rival Call of Duty’s annual release cycle, but EA vice president Patrick Söderlund says that the company won’t necessarily follow in Activison’s footsteps with their flagship shooter series.
”It doesn’t necessarily mean that we need to annualize Battlefield and that’s the way it’s going to be forever and ever. I understand that some people may look at it that way but that’s what happened,” he told Polygon.
Instead, Söderlund suggests that Hardline is more a result of Visceral and DICE’s long-standing interest in making a police-themed game.
”Karl-Magnus (Troedsson), who runs DICE studios, and Steve Papoutsis, who runs Visceral, basically met in Barcelona almost three years ago and they came to me and said ‘Hey, we have an idea’. Actually, the idea of a cops and robbers type Battlefield game has been with us — me and the DICE team — for more than ten years. There are early prototypes from, like, 2000 or 2001 of a game that we called back then Urban Combat. This has been lingering and we’ve been wanting to do something like this.”
And for those of you wondering why, instead of marketing new games, EA don’t instead spend their time fixing up the buggy and frequently troubled Battlefield 4?
“We still have things to make it better,” said Söderlund. ”Everything that we’ve fixed with (Battlefield 4) will go into Hardline. Once people get their hands on the netcode patch, which I think is profound, that will take care of a lot of the complaints around Battlefield… and how responsive the game is.”
