Battlefield: Hardline Beta Impressions

For this year's Battlefield installment, EA and long time franchise custodians, DICE, have chosen to ditch full-scale warfare in favour of a cops and robbers setting that's somewhat conceptually indebted to Counter-Strike. EA announced a PS4 and PC exclusive beta at E3 last week, to which I was lucky enough to receive an access key. 

Series veterans seem to be of the opinion that the differences between Hardline and its direct predecessor, Battlefield 4, are only skin deep, and what lies underneath the new lick of paint is functionally identical to what's gone before. Be that as it may, as a person of limited experience with the series, I've had a blast with the beta so far, although not entirely without reservation.

This early preview build features two game types; Blood Money and Heist. Blood Money involves police and terrorist teams attempting to procure cash from a centralised point and return it to their bases. In Heist, however, the terrorists begin the game having just disabled a convoy, again carrying cash, and they must break into it, steal the dough and escape, whereas the police must prevent this happening within a predetermined time limit. Success as either faction in either mode requires planning and forethought, and the scale of the single urban map included is truly impressive. Established Battlefield devotees may have seen it all before, but those more used to modern shooters with a somewhat tighter focus will feel like a child in a sweetshop, albeit one that sells Kalashnikovs rather than gobstoppers.

The learning curve can be very steep for newcomers given that there is little to go on in terms of tutorials save for a short instructional video for each of the two included gametypes which explain your overall objectives, but brush over the basics entirely. Any perceived hurdles in terms of complexity are easily overcome after a few games, however. 

All this praise comes with one large caveat, though. The beta build's performance on PS4 is wildly inconsistent; although the frame rate never dips into the realms of unplayability, it fluctuates almost constantly, even when there's not a lot going on. This causes a lot of variance in terms of input latency, seriously undermining the play experience. DICE are clearly aiming for a constant 60 frames per second here, but based on this beta, they're a long way from achieving it. Of course the usual disclaimers about this being a work in progress version of the game apply, but with it due to drop in October, sweeping engine changes are out of the question and time for optimisation work is limited. 

It's critical that DICE and EA avoid the well documented technical issues that plagued Battlefield 4 for months after its release, and make stability their utmost priority with future iterations. Judging by Battlefield: Hardline's current state, however, in game performance clearly hasn't been afforded the importance it maybe should have been. Only time will tell if the full retail release fares any better.