Yep
Yes it is unfortunate but I believe DICE really made the best out of it with how they created this feature for Hardline
Hardline was an attempt to gain casuals from the cod games
Every time DICE tries to get more casual, they, and we, end up with a near-dead game shortly after its release. I think, and hope that DICE have learned by now, that their audience is not interested in uber-casual, or really casual. That’s not the Battlefield market.
Btw, Hardline is 75% off on Origin right now. $5 for standard edition, and $20 for Ultimate edition (base game + Premium).
It is extremely disappointing to see this series get shallower, less skill based and more gimmicky with each iteration. Mass inclusion of game-assisted features, assignments and other nonsense. To add insult to injury declaring the most assisted preset as default and excluding the original altogether. Thank whoever decided to add HC.
I was about to buy Hardline at $20, but then I read the Metacritic reviews:
“This is a subtle mix of Call of Duty, Payday 2 and Battlefield. The multiplayer is like Close Quarters in BF3, which was nicely rated when it was released. The action is much more dynamic than in previous games, cause maps are smaller, not like in BF3/4 where you could camp e.g. on the mountains…”
UGH, and LOL! So, basically, Hardline has nothing to do with the Battlefield title, and is a CoD wannabe P.O.S. And that was one of the few positive player reviews.
Now I get why some Hardline players like tagammo… they’re CoD players, wanting a CoD experience. Well, Battlefield (not meaning Hardline) is not about ADHD gunplay, small maps, and tag-replenishment. It’s about sprawling environments, variable-speed gameplay (not one-speed, but both slow and fast), about class-roles, team-play, communication, etc… All the things that CoD is not about.
So, I think a Hardline / CoD-typed feature, which undermines everything that Battlefield is known to be about, and is sought for by those seeking the Battlefield experience, is best left out of an actual Battlefield title.
Painfully right.
Painfully right
Painfully right again. Three in a row
I opened a beer for this to celebrate. Have a nice weekend everyone. Cheers
It’s not the longevity of a game that matters as much as what it’s sales figures are.
DICE/EA have been doing quite well on the sales front for their titles.
I would say this should encourage DICE/EA to continue what they’re doing, not stop (with regards to BF1).
http://www.cnet.com/news/ea-q4-2015-earnings/
http://www.ign.com/articles/2016/05/10/star-wars-battlefront-sales-top-14-million
You cannot tag ammo in COD. I dont understand why people are so against this. Im always playing support so im never out of ammo, I also am ALWAYS dropping ammo, I have almost 8,000 resupplies.
If someone is too selfish/or dumb to drop ammo, then ppl should be able to take it.
End of story. DROP AMMO OR THEY WILL TAKE IT. Its that simple.
Except those sales don’t represent satisfied customers, DLC customers, ongoing players, or returning customers. They instead represent reputation-equity burned. The lack of satisfied customers, who those sales are predominantly from, represent the diminishing value of DICE’s reputation and brand… which has gone down from Hardline, which had gone down from Battlefront, and which seems to now have gone down from Mirror’s Edge 2. DICE probably wants to be more than makers of vacuous and disappointing software.
Who wants to quantify their reputation as being based on sales from disappointed expectations? If DICE actually made deep-value games, their sales would be even greater.
Battlefront’s initial sales were due to:
Battlefield’s reputation (not including Hardline)
Battlefront 2’s reputation
The Star Wars IP
The Star Wars movie release
Graphics and pre-release visual impressions
Marketing
The natural, progressive, and often exponential growth of the gaming market
… and when the game came out, even with people’s high level of excitement for things Star Wars, for a new Battlefield-esque game, for a new Battlefront, it didn’t impress people.
Battlefront sold on people’s expectations. And people left it. And now they know what to expect from DICE when it comes to another Battlefront game. So, Battlefront’s sales have nothing to do with DICE having done anything right… but only to do with people’s expectations for something entirely different than what DICE ended up actually doing with the game. I wonder how many people buy Battlefront’s DLC? I’m guessing not may, especially since Battlefront doesn’t have even 1/3rd the players remaining as Battlefield 4 does.
Battlefront would have sold more, and would still be selling more, if it has been a decent game. DICE even acknowledged in interview that they got things wrong with Battlefront. And Hardline’s lack of a player-base makes it clear that its gameplay is also not something the Battlefield crowd is interested in. And so, there’s reason to be hopeful that DICE are waking up regarding the reality that the gamer audience simply does not want Hardline, or Battlefront-esque casualness and COD-ness in their large-scale multiplayer games.
I think people will still buy Battlefield 1, because Battlefield players are not looking at Hardline, or Battlefront… they likely either separate those things from their perceptions of Battlefield, or they aren’t aware that they’re from the same developer. But if DICE doesn’t show that they still know what Battlefield is about, with Battlefield 1… there’ll be no fail-safe argument left for people to refer to, when thinking about whether to purchase DICE’s next game, after Battlefield 1.
I thought you already knew.
That’s why I plead for this Battlefield for (almost) Everyone
Too true. In the sense of true BF titles I only consider 1942, vietnam, 2, 2142, 3 and 4 … The rest are alternate world/time/themed offshoots that allowed the devs to explore other options etc.
To me when Dice says “we are going back to our roots” it doesn’t have anything to do with the setting. It’s about core mechanics. Hopefully that assumption holds true. Hopefully they start to remember that a game with solid skill based mechanics will always have a following. I mean seriously just look at the simplicity of the whole that is HL and CS. The learning curve is very small, but the skill gap is huge. The same use to be said of BF.
I’ll more than likely buy BF. I am a day one series fan, but this time I’ll wait to make my decision after beta play.
Well if Dice is going back to what made the original few games so great, I guess there was some silver lining to Battlefront and Hardline being !!!
Bad Company 2 wasn’t dead shortly after release. It’s all about balancing interests.
They introduced HC to balance the poo poo.
That’s largely because:
- The PC audience had been starved of Battlefield since 2142
- Battlefield fans understood that BC2 was a console game, and accepted it as a console game… while expecting that a Battlefield 3 would be coming
The general atmosphere was that BC2 being released for PC was a good sign of a return to PC Battlefield, and that BC2 was tiding people over until Bf3. BC2 wasn’t the full Battlefield that people wanted, but they understood that BC2 was a spin-off game, and a console game, and didn’t evaluate it out of an expectation that it was to be a full-fledged Battlefield.
Since BC2 was announced, it was interpreted as a sign that a Bf3 was going to follow afterwards, and a lot of players looked at BC2 through the lens of that expectation. Unfortunately, Bf3, which sold on hype similarly to Battlefront, wasn’t the full-quality Battlefield experience that these people had been anticipating.
Battlefield isn’t an unknown quantity. If DICE just made the Battlefield, filled with all the depth and dynamics-producing elements that people rave about, it would be their biggest game to-date. There are varying opinions about Battlefield, but there is a core understanding, shared across its largest and longest fanbase, of what Battlefield is, and what it’s potential is. So far, it seem that DICE don’t want to realize that penultimate Battlefield game, and they’ve had a bad habit of selling the series short on numerous occasions, since Bf2. But all DICE have to do is the full, non-compromised Battlefield, and they’d have their most praised and best-selling game of their existing history.
Didn’t see any poop, but it’s all about that balance.
Battlefield 3 didn’t die either, nor did Battlefield 4.
Pleasing the casual audience is important. All that matters is that they don’t go too far and forget about the invested players.
Indeed. Battlefield 3 was a huge letdown to many Battlefield 2 fans. In my opinion we never got a true sequel to Battlefield 2.
On the other hand we never got a true sequel to Battlefield 1942 either…Hopefully Battlefield1 is a prequel of both. So far I am optimistic but extremely critical.
Battlefield 3 didn’t do nearly as good as it should have done. And now, Battlefield 3 is nearly dead when I do a server search - receiving as few well-populated servers results as BC2, or maybe less at times. I can find as many populated Battlefield 2 servers right now as I can Bf3.
Battlefield 4 is a different story. It had a rough launch, and a lot of its maps suffer from arena-style design, small areas, boring and non-dynamic flag-spacing… but it is overall a very good game, and one of the better Battlefields. It also is the game that is most similar to Battlefield 2 - and that it is, while also being one of the better Battlefields, is very relevant.
Battlefield 4 still suffers from noob flight mechanics, meaningless jets, smallish maps, non-creative capture-point design: they’re just flag, with nothing that distinguishes the strategic importance of particular flags and surrounding areas… which is a consequence of arena-style design. But Battlefield 4 also did a lot of things well: The environments are more detailed and realized than Bf3’s, squads are larger than Bf3’s, a Commander role (which could be improved upon)… and more, though I haven’t played Bf3 is so long that I’m now unfamiliar with all the changes between it and Bf4.
But generally, the theme difference between Bf3 and Bf4 was that many of the things which people on the BfUK forums asked to have in Bf3, which DICE didn’t add in Bf3 (sometimes even dissing the community when they stressed how much they wanted to have them in Bf3, is my memory), ended up being added in Bf4… and people consequently have found Bf4 a much more satisfying game for it.
Also, Bf4’s mapping took a big step forward in the Final Stand DLC. Before Final Stand, there were some good maps, but a lot of mediocre maps that didn’t have breadth to them, and which were excessively arena-styled.
I don’t know what DICE think of Battlefield, and they’ve seemingly spent most of their years fighting the loyal and longest-lasting community’s wishes for a Battlefield 2+ game… but if ever DICE decided to just do it - not cater to casual / arena / CoD-styled ideas, and just went full out on the biggest realization of the Battlefield concept ever, it would be easy for them to end up with one of the greatest games ever made, which would top the sales of all their other Battlefield games. But for some reason, DICE have seemed to just not want to do that.
Eventually, if DICE doesn’t do it, then I think there’s a huge space for that realization to be fulfilled within, which another developer could claim with a Battlefield clone. But I’d love to see DICE commit to it, and do it, themselves. Bf4 was the closest modern Bf game to Bf2, but it is still a bit casual and gong-show clustermess because of its arena-style mapping (and usually smaller maps, its unlimited sprint, its obnoxious constant explosions that can be heard from everywhere on the map (because the maps are small, and all the fighting is pretty much a stone’s throw away)… and to the extent Bf4 favours more arena-style gameplay is the extent to which Bf4 is an inferior game to Bf2.
A series doesn’t improve by always presenting various smaller quantums of what was does better before… which is what we’ve been getting from Battlefield since it returned to PC. Battlefield 4 does some things better, for sure, but it also goes too casual in its map and flag design, its lack of unique strategic capture points, its unlimited sprint, etc.
If DICE made the penultimate Battlefield game, it would sell more than any before it. And many people who say they want tag-replenishment now would play it and love it more than if DICE made the generic noob-arena game that would do all the things like tag-replenishment, nondescript capture points, etc.