Unfinished: Battlefield Hardline Beta 06/19/2014

Sweet

Teews

[Insert stupid comment here that doesn't actually say anything because I haven't watched the video yet!]

Surprised he didn't go for the cop knife.

Scrooge McDuck joke.

content! sweet sweet content!

btw hardline did nothing for me, especially next to the destiny alpha. going from one to the other was straight ux whiplash

It really does feel like a it's just a mod for BF4.

HEY GUYS CHECK OUT THIS SWEET BATTLEFIELD 4 MOD... err new Battlefield Game...

Cops and robbers with LMGs and parachutes? This barely seems different enough to even be a mod. Just a map pack with different skins.

It's just disgusting that they want full price for this game. Unless the single-player by Visceral Games is the real draw here this is a mediocre product at an abysmal price point.

The beta even has barely any level destructibility at all. (Granted, neither did the Bf4 beta.) The grappling hook and zipline are also hugely limited and disappointing.

Buy a glorified Battlefield 4 mod for $60. No thanks.

Snark aside I'm not liking what I'm seeing from this. Also, $60. Think about that price.

Ill wait for a sale and maybe check this out then, if its not horribly broken.

Welp this was boring

It's crazy that they're releasing this as a $60 product, unless there happens to be a -ton- of stuff not in the beta, which I don't get the impression there is.

Having played the beta I'm actually tempted to get the game when it comes out. The theme works for me and the gameplay is still fun. I get the battlefield mod accusations but honestly if the game is still fun it doesn't really matter to me.

Is this the beta for the beta coming out in Oct./Nov.?

Battlefield games have always been too 'play it long enough and something good might happen' for my liking. The staged performance they put on would probably require infinite monkeys playing infinite sessions of Battlefield for eternity to get to that particular 'something good'.

What a weird game.

Nooope

Here's a contrary opinion: Hardline is the most fun I've had with a Battlefield game since Bad Company 2 and is easily my most anticipated 2014 release. It's a bit glib to call it a mod. It's much more thoughtful and well designed to compare to any mod I've ever played (maybe CS or Natural Selection but those took years to get where Hardline currently is). Yes, in the ideal world of 1999, this would be a $30 expansion pack. But who gives a crap when it comes to pricing if the game is worth it to you, for me it is and here's why ...

It focuses on Rush. Heist is a clever variation of Rush where the two points need to be held and then the objectives need to be carried to a location. Rush was introduced in Bad Company 2 and was the only thing I played. It is one of my favorite games ever because of it. Why? Because it takes the chaos of Battlefield and narrows down the vast playing field to a smaller objective that teams can focus on. Conquest is cool if you just want to mess around, but you feel like a cog in an aimless machine. It's very, very unlikely to find yourself in a match where 32+ players are communicating and working together. Because Rush/Heist has this tension and momentum, it's a much more unique and exciting mode that continues to surprise me match-to-match. The thing is, you can't design a map that is good for both Rush and Conquest. Rush in Battlefield 3 & 4 were just awful because they were designed for Conquest. Instead of having tons of places to hide, most maps were large open areas for snipers to setup and attackers to huddle in a corner and pray. It functions but its not fun at all.

I've experienced some of the coolest multiplayer moments ever in this beta. On only my 2nd time with the game, I managed to steal a motocycle, drive it up the stairs into a building, get in an elevator (on the bike), run over two cops, drive through a wall, fall 50 stories, land, and drive over another cop. The game is full of moments like these.

It comes to this...

1) Do you prefer Rush to Conquest (forget Blood Money which is an awful small scale Conquest)

2) Do you prefer an annual sequel do smart tweaks to the game's design rather than change the visuals?

3) Do you have money?

For me, it's a no brainer. Of course I wish the game were cheaper and I wish they made its identity more unique (the shared BF4 UI is just lazy, even if it is beta). But I'm really happy to see a developer focusing on making the gameplay something new rather than dressing up the same experience again (as they did with BF3 to BF4, or say any other big annual release AssCreed, CoD, etc.)

What's funny to me is how pissed off people are when I tell them it's actually fun and worth checking out. I've gone back to BF4 and BC2 to see if I'm crazy, but I really have zero fun in BF4 and it's hard to get over the inferior controls of BC2 (at this point). All the people are talking shit about Hardline, which I think is pretty lame. Definitely try before you buy. But may be try before you talk mess about it too!

It seems like a limited game compared to the rest in the series also there was grappling hooks and zip-lines in Battlefield 2: Special Forces.

Good job EA, you're completely saturating the market full of your half-assed and boring Battlefield games.

Le deployment, c'est vrai? Oh la la.

Max Cash should l2fp. Getting carried every round :/

This looks okay to me. The biggest issue I have with it actually has nothing to do with this specific game, but rather the Battlefield series in general at this point. BF4 felt too similar to the third one, and pretty much every Battlefield game launch has had serious issues.

I'd rather just wait and see how this one turns out and then maybe pick it up on a Black Friday sale.

I'll buy it ...for $15.

I'm holding out hope for a great single-player experience. Dead Space 2, for all the criticisms horror fans level against it, was a fantastic action game.

Not sure Jeff and Brad know what a grappling hook is for

Man, I have high hopes for Call of Duty this year...

As someone who hasn't played a BF game since Bad Company 2, this has my interest. But Destiny will probably have all my time and money :)

I'm not gonna say the game is like, amazing or whatever, but I will say that anyone judging it solely by this video should try and reserve judgment. I love Jeff to death but he definitely could've used some more rounds before doing this video because it's pretty clear he doesn't have a great understanding of the game yet and the video was pretty boring as a result, which is a bummer because the game can get pretty crazy. It's basically like a Michael Bay version of Heat.

Not to shill my own wares here or whatever but I was streaming for like half an hour the other day and I think that gameplay's wayyyy more interesting than Jeff's here. I'm not commentating over it and I'm not like, a pro player or whatever; I just legitimately think that people even half-interested in the concept should watch more videos on the game (not necessarily mine) before judging it solely on Jeff's performance here because the game, while still kinda rough, can be way more fun than he makes it seem.

Watching these games being played with a controller is just... uuuuuugh.

The respawning creates a weird disconnect with the premise. At least in Battlefield it made sense because they are two huge countries with big armies duking it out; but here it's strange that there is an endless stream of criminals coming to get this money and a large army of cops defending it. Maybe that will change but it would make more sense to have this round-based with no respawns, but then it wouldn't really be a Battlefield game. I'm just puzzled by the existence of Hardline.

The beta was okay; though I never played Battlefield 4. Doubt I'll actually pick this one up, either.

Visceral is just doing the single player? Like Brad, I thought they were doing the whole thing. Huh.

This doesn't give me high hopes for Battlefront. Yeah, yeah... I saw the E3 video. I've been promised a lot of amazing thing at E3 over the years. It's just... when was the last time EA released a high profile title that didn't have a slew of problems? I'd love for Battlefront to be that game, I'm just skeptical.

@lonelyspacepanda: You can safely land the bike from the skyscraper fall? I watched a guy jump off a building with his bike but didn't see the outcome because I was too busy jumping out of a helicopter and para-chasing two criminals base jumping toward the drop-off point and killing them in mid-air.

I totally agree that people who say this game is boring are crazy. Jeff's video here isn't going to help, either.

Is para-chasing a word? If it isn't, it is now.

This video really doesn't tell the entire story.

Here's my assessment after nearly 20 hours of beta:

• Jeff is right about it feeling like a BF4 mod. The rest of the game might still make it a viable $60 offer, but the beta definitely hasn't convinced me yet.
• Heist has incredible moments and Jeff really didn't show much of that in the short time frame here. I actually think Blood Money is inferior to Heist, but we'll see I guess. Heist benefits very well from a small coordinated squad.
• They may have used lower texture resolution to reduce the Beta download size. We'll see if it looks better later.
• The netcode and engine seem to be an older version of BF4. It doesn't include any of the netcode improvements that have been patched into BF4 recently. It's dead in the water if they don't implement this prior to launch. You can even see an example of this in Jeff's video, when he dives behind a car and still gets shot a second later.

All in all: The new game modes are refreshing. Don't preorder and don't buy it on launch. It may be heavily discounted shortly thereafter and the content we didn't see in the beta might make it a viable purchase.

I really disagree with Jeff's notion that this game doesn't have a place. Infantry-centric maps have always been very popular in the BF series, and BF4 is no exception (just look at all the full infantry-only servers out there). It definetly has it's place, and gameplay wise the beta of HL is promising. But in the end, 1 map and 2 modes don't make a very convincing demo for a $60 game. We'll see how it pans out after it's released.

It sure is a good thing that the only people who live in Los Angeles -- you know, the second most-populated city in the United States -- are elite, one-man-army police officers and life-long criminals in tweed jackets who are apparently more battle-hardened than the mujahadeen. :b

Whoever says Hardline seems to recall "Heat" by way of Michael Bay hit the nail on the head, in my opinion. It's kind of a "hey, here's a bunch of faceless, indistinguishable character models with zero personality and no connection to the player piling bodies on top of bodies AND CHECK OUT THESE EXPLOSIONS!"

Especially coming out side-by-side with the new Rainbow Six game, Hardline doesn't seem to offer anything new to the shooter market.

Paydayfield...?

So far Hardline is good for me, i like Battlefield well enough, but being able to play it without some annoying parts like lame people using tanks as artillery from their spawn, snipers in bushes, random mortar explosions etc... is nice.

I think it's silly people try to judge it by calling it a mod, when some of the best multiplayer games are mods.

This isn't really wowing me and I just got Battlefield 4 since the netcode isn't a total mess now. So not gonna go pay 60 dollars for this.

I'd contest that I witness/partake in several cinematic moments every time I play a Battlefield. It demands situational awareness to survive long enough, but it's the biggest enabler of breathtaking emergent scenes in gaming I know.

Can't speak for Hardline as I'm not in the Beta, but I share the same scepticism as many. Potentially fun but an insulting price point given its BF4 DNA.

Seems ok, but I just can't justify a $60 price tag when I'm sitting here with BF4 feeling like I haven't gotten my $60 worth out of that yet and I've had that game since the PS4 launch...and you want me to buy ANOTHER one EA? No thanks....I'll continue to trot through BF4 trying to get my full priced experience out of that one and by that time happens BattleFront will probably be out

And after seeing Rainbow Six: Siege, I think that game stole some thunder from this. Sure, it's not out this year and sure it's super early footage, but THAT is the criminals and SWAT experience I'm looking for

That bus sandwich looked pretty good.

I'll wait until I see what the full game is before saying what it should and shouldn't be. As a beta though, it's just been a fun couple of new infantry maps. No complaints here.

Wow. This looks bad. Really bad. I thought the PS4 is the power house of the next gen consoles. What graphics do the Xbox One users get. Even more washed out textures?

This game is like if that Battlefield: Vietnam pack for Bad Company 2 was a $60 stand-alone game but included more maps in an attempt to justify the sale price.

BF3: $60
BF3 Pass: $50
BF4: $60
BF4 Pass: $50
All other versions of BF4 in order to see which one works best: $240
BF Hardline because you're a mindless sheep helping the AAA industry kill itself: $60
BF Hardline Pass because you don't have a single horse in your stable, YOU HAVE SHEEP: $50
Having a good time despite paying to receive a planet-scale ramming: Priceless

For everything else, there's Mastercard far better shit on the radar.

This PS4 beta runs at 900p ish at the moment with what I hope are unfinished not-fullscale visual resources. Visceral have however stated that they intend to get both the PS4 and the Xbox One version of the full game to run at 1080p60.

If they would just steal the Fragile Alliance gamemode from kane and lynch 1/2, I would be happy. At the moment though, it feels to much like a battlefield game instead of a heist game.

It really doesn't help a quick look if the player playing isn't that great in the game. Nothing personal, I hope going forward we can have quick looks by people who are some what familiar with that franchise.