Impressions of the Battlefield Hardline beta weren't entirely positive, and it's this wealth of feedback that caused Visceral to ask EA for some extra time to develop their game—that's according to this interview with Visceral's Steve Papoutsis over on VG247. He also revealed a few of the changes that have already been made, including newly faction specific weapons and the option to stow special weapons in a vehicle's boot.
The two factions of the game—cops and criminals—will now boast their own specific guns, a change requested by the community that I think will better suit Hardline's underlying premise. But there are other, equally big changes being made. RPGs and mines will no longer be quite so easy to attain: it seems they'll now be pickup item that both sides will have to find before they can use them. Here's Papoutsis explaining the new systems in more detail:
"The other big change is more around explosives and some of the heavy duty weapons. Obviously with Battlefield you have this really solid foundation of rock, paper, scissors gameplay. The heavy weapons counter the vehicles, etc. There’s a great balance that the team has created over the years. We wanted to include RPGs and mines – and we did – but people felt that it took them out of the fiction a little bit; that you could just load up a character and equip an RPG. So that wasn’t an easy thing to get rid of because it’s part of the balance.
"The design team came up with a cool ideas based on that feedback. One is to have some of those more powerful weapons be pick-ups so it creates a secondary objective. Some of the modes, like in Hotwire, the RPG cache is one of the objectives. If you control that cache your team has access to the RPG. And that creates more interesting gameplay. We also came up with the notion of ‘junk in the trunk’ – what if we allowed players to equip special items to their vehicle instead of their inventory loadout. It goes back to movies where bad guys pop open the trunk to grab something big. When you play the game, if you set up your vehicle loadout to have a specific weapon in the trunk and you control the vehicle you can use that item. So now you want to get a vehicle to get access to a specific weapon, which also fits the fiction better."
Visceral and EA recently blew the bloody doors off Hardline's Hotwire mode, which is pretty much Need for Speed but with rocket launchers. Here's a video of it in action.
