FA+
Shop
Thoughts on the Battlefield Hardline Beta
11 years ago
The following journal may or may not be crazy to you. Enjoi~
With the Battlefield Hardline Clos*cough*Open beta coming to an end... okay seriously I can't even take this shit seriously anymore. For one, it's a demo for marketing purposes, the devs didn't give half a fuck about most of the glitches that were reported, or were seemingly hiding in closets. The Visceral Test Server thing was obviously a scam as they played exactly like normal servers. Oh, and they announced this as a closed beta and got battlelog destroyed with more lag than you can ever get on the Battlefield for a few hours, only to wait a few days and open it to the public. It's an Open Demo, a free trial, with the curtain of Beta around it since they're technically not done with the game for all we know.
Technicality rant over, I had a blast playing Hardline. It's like... Starsky and Hutch merged with Call of the Battlefield: Modern Quarters Premium Elite, with a hint (extreme dab) of Payday. And let's not forget Dead Space, just because they claim this is Battlefield meets Dead Space (source: E3 reveal), probably just to keep it within EA's grip. It's a melting pot of games so large, it does actually feel like its own game genre, I don't see any other games out there like it. EA's lazy genius has done it. Steal from enough games into one, and it looks so different you can't even say it was stolen.
Alright, onto the game modes.
Heist: Remember back to when Rush was introduced in Bad Company 1 and how people said it's not true battlefield and they didn't like it? Heist is getting the same reception. I can see this being brought back in the later Battlefields with some edits, like instead of money it'd be intel or whatnot.
For those of you that haven't played the beta, here's what it is. The game starts with the Criminals having a clear advantage as they spawn right next to the armored trucks, which they have no problem arming (unless they're just that brain-dead, it happens), and they should be able to defend the charges for the 45 seconds it takes. The catch is, arming it the first time takes a good 5 seconds while defusing and re-arming take 1 second. At this point the cops have probably traveled across the map and are now having a mexican standoff with the criminals. If the cops manage to defuse both objectives, this is where you should leave as there is no way that the team that was too incompetent to defend with a clear advantage, is now going to break the disadvantage that they're at. Anyways, once the timer does run out, the doors explode. For the love of god, do not stand in front of the charge as it goes off, it will actually kill you in this game. Now all the criminals have to do is grab the now exposed packages and bring them to the dropoffs. There are two, but each can only take one bag. If the Criminals can manage this quick enough, the cops most likely aren't defending the drop offs. However, wait too long and they should be swarming, so this is where the game truly takes place. This is the unique part of the game where you have to move the package either high speed down the highway past a police roadblock (if this is defended and you're not using a motorcycle, you're fucked), and to the top of a building (you'll have better luck trying to steal the enemy helicopter to get the package up if the enemy team is competently defending this point). Criminals have 100 tickets for the entire duration. LE wins if those are depleted, CR wins if both packages make it to BOTH dropoffs.
My thoughts on this... I love it, it even feels somewhat like a small campaign. The only issue is, if the enemy team is somewhat competent and your team are the Flinstones, you're gonna have a bad time.You won't be able to one-man-army this for the most part. The only way you'll be able to do that is if you're a criminal and get the package, you might have a chance if the enemies aren't too bright when you're alone. Seeing as most people that play this game don't know the difference between attack and defend, let alone their right from left (you're always driving down the wrong side of the road in someone's eyes), this gametype isn't the best. It'll be amazing for competitive play though, or if you're lucky enough to have 2 teams that know what they're doing and give a fuck. It does give you that sense of adrenaline that a cops n crooks game should give you when the teams are like that, while still giving you that battlefield all out war feel. There's even a mix of the distance shooting that you should have in a battlefield game, and then it'll bring you inside of buildings for those close quarters feels that you'll get in Call of Duty, or BF3's CQ DLC.
Blood Money: The more simple of the two modes introduced to us and the one I like better because you don't need to write a college paper in the chat feed to explain stuff to teammates, Blood Money brings in a game where you have to be tactical about what objective to go for, not just blatantly attack the red objective because it's red. Still there's no way to stop that one guy from doing it, but hey.
What to do: Someone slipped up and left a whole lot of money in the open. Take it. Bring it back to your vault. And don't let the enemies take more than you. Basically there's a safe in the middle of the map that you have to take money from. The more people taking money from it at once, the faster you can take money, each carrying up to 500k. Once you have money, bring it back to your vault and poke it to deposit the money. Rinse and repeat. If you or someone dies while carrying money, each 100k is a green glowing wad of cash that you walk over to pick up. Fill your vault to 5M before the enemy does. But there's a catch. You can steal from the enemy vault just like the money pile, and the enemies can steal from yours. I've won a game where the enemy had us 4.9M to 0. We brought 5 guys to their vault and they went down to 2.4M and meanwhile we had another 5 run to the money pile. Our vault went from 0 to 5M in seconds and we won that round. Tactically, you need to decide where you need to go. Are the enemies hard-pressed and trying their damndest to raid your vault? DEFEND. Is the game kinda even? Where are there less enemies at, their vault or the pile? Are the enemies about to win? Pull out all the stops and get to their vault.
My thoughts are like this: this mode has vehicles that matter for both sides, therefore it's better (jk). Although the spawn truck was beneficial to the cops (occasionally necessary), this is the mode where it matters and both teams have one. Put the truck where people need to be and people can spawn in on it. This is also very key to destroy if you see it, yet no one ever does apparently. And then there's the attack trucks. For some reason they're more armored than tanks, so that needs a fix, although their firepower is underwhelming. Most infantry weapons do more damage than the truck's HMG, and the truck's grenade launcher takes 2-4 grenades to hit next to someone to kill them. However if used right, it's still very deadly. (don't get me started on the alt primary for it, the flechette cannon is miserable). They also have attack helis here (they're essentially scout helis but are called attack helis). Their guns are somewhat underwhelming, especially vs light vehicles (fine vs armor). The LMG cannot harm armor, but does a ton of damage to infantry. It's just hard to place a hit due to the low RoF. The minigun doesn't do much damage to infantry, as per every battlefield game, but you'll score more hits and kill faster, plus it hurts armor. The gunner also gets a minigun, though it's hard to aim it with a bad pilot. The game mode itself is very fun, and flanking is possible, which is something I like the most.
Game Mechanics:
Interrogations: Performing a nonlethal kill via bat, stick, or taser, will let you go to the downed enemy and if you hold E on them, it shows the entire enemy team on your entire team's map for a few seconds. I love this and it'll be very key in competitive gaming.
Zipline/Grapple: Love the zipline, though the grapple is fairly broken and obsolete thus far. The zipline is very OP vs snipers. For the mechanic itself, it's a good way to flank into a building.
Battlelog: ಠ_ಠ
Cash for Guns: So you have to earn the set of attachments and the gun, then buy it with in-game cash? Decent I guess. I'm not opposed to it.
Origin: ಠ_ಠ ಠ_ಠ ಠ_ಠ ಠ_ಠ ಠ_ಠ ಠ_ಠ ಠ_ಠ ಠ_ಠ ಠ_ಠ ಠ_ಠ ಠ_ಠ ಠ_ಠ ಠ_ಠ ಠ_ಠ ಠ_ಠ ಠ_ಠ ಠ_ಠ
$70: ಠ_ಠ
Melee: The nonlethal animations take a long time, but the interrogation is worth it. Plus the animation is sexy. The lethal takedown (knife) is also very sexy and fast, but then you can't reveal the entire enemy team. A fair trade I guess.
Ranking System: I really hope every single rank isn't a fucking spade.
Ballistic Shield: ಠ_ಠ Seriously though, it should not be able to protect your back so reliably when you're not using it, plus it really should give you a big speed penalty and not allow you to get in certain types of vehicles.
Looking Around Walls: Peekaboo, I headglitch you!
80-100 (70-100 Squad) Kill Assist Counts as Kill: Yes! Yes!
Survivalist: Seriously who the fuck thought self-revive would be a good game mechanic? *insert inappropriate yiff material here*
Charge Revive for More Health: No one's gonna charge their revives, so this puts you at a disadvantage when you get revived. Good.
Patches: I'm coming for all of your patches/tags. Again.
Laser Tripmines: I don't understand how half the time the laser doesn't even show up, but the other half it does. I do love how you can limbo under the laser, or jump over it though.
Can't Destroy Breaching Charges/C4: Dumbest idea ever. Explosives should be able to destroy these, but for some dumb reason they don't.
Tear Gas: Love it. And somehow I've killed people with it.
RPG not a OHK vs Heli: ಠ_ಠ
No Need to Repair Fully to Undo Disable: I have a love-hate relationship with this one. I love it, but it needs to go back to the old way where you have to get it back to 100% for it to not be disabled. No one has used this against me yet, just me using it myself.
Camera: No experience but I like the cone of sight idea better than the tugs showing everyone that's not crouched in the vicinity.
Decoy: No one expects it in this game, so it works well.
The Taser: I love you.
Sniper gets an SMG as a secondary that can one-up an M16: ಠ_ಠ
Pics of my Beta stats to show experience with the game:
http://imgur.com/F2HmaIQ,yCKsE20,tO.....IdBCGP,5wDFtPm
And of course, youtube vids. Not mine but I have some clips in them. (links above the video in case embedding fails)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLLpjhp-3zE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_Jrv8nRf2s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJb-1qGPHCQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0CWzLcP_Vs
If you have any questions about my experiences with this game or whatever, feel free to ask.
Technicality rant over, I had a blast playing Hardline. It's like... Starsky and Hutch merged with Call of the Battlefield: Modern Quarters Premium Elite, with a hint (extreme dab) of Payday. And let's not forget Dead Space, just because they claim this is Battlefield meets Dead Space (source: E3 reveal), probably just to keep it within EA's grip. It's a melting pot of games so large, it does actually feel like its own game genre, I don't see any other games out there like it. EA's lazy genius has done it. Steal from enough games into one, and it looks so different you can't even say it was stolen.
Alright, onto the game modes.
Heist: Remember back to when Rush was introduced in Bad Company 1 and how people said it's not true battlefield and they didn't like it? Heist is getting the same reception. I can see this being brought back in the later Battlefields with some edits, like instead of money it'd be intel or whatnot.
For those of you that haven't played the beta, here's what it is. The game starts with the Criminals having a clear advantage as they spawn right next to the armored trucks, which they have no problem arming (unless they're just that brain-dead, it happens), and they should be able to defend the charges for the 45 seconds it takes. The catch is, arming it the first time takes a good 5 seconds while defusing and re-arming take 1 second. At this point the cops have probably traveled across the map and are now having a mexican standoff with the criminals. If the cops manage to defuse both objectives, this is where you should leave as there is no way that the team that was too incompetent to defend with a clear advantage, is now going to break the disadvantage that they're at. Anyways, once the timer does run out, the doors explode. For the love of god, do not stand in front of the charge as it goes off, it will actually kill you in this game. Now all the criminals have to do is grab the now exposed packages and bring them to the dropoffs. There are two, but each can only take one bag. If the Criminals can manage this quick enough, the cops most likely aren't defending the drop offs. However, wait too long and they should be swarming, so this is where the game truly takes place. This is the unique part of the game where you have to move the package either high speed down the highway past a police roadblock (if this is defended and you're not using a motorcycle, you're fucked), and to the top of a building (you'll have better luck trying to steal the enemy helicopter to get the package up if the enemy team is competently defending this point). Criminals have 100 tickets for the entire duration. LE wins if those are depleted, CR wins if both packages make it to BOTH dropoffs.
My thoughts on this... I love it, it even feels somewhat like a small campaign. The only issue is, if the enemy team is somewhat competent and your team are the Flinstones, you're gonna have a bad time.You won't be able to one-man-army this for the most part. The only way you'll be able to do that is if you're a criminal and get the package, you might have a chance if the enemies aren't too bright when you're alone. Seeing as most people that play this game don't know the difference between attack and defend, let alone their right from left (you're always driving down the wrong side of the road in someone's eyes), this gametype isn't the best. It'll be amazing for competitive play though, or if you're lucky enough to have 2 teams that know what they're doing and give a fuck. It does give you that sense of adrenaline that a cops n crooks game should give you when the teams are like that, while still giving you that battlefield all out war feel. There's even a mix of the distance shooting that you should have in a battlefield game, and then it'll bring you inside of buildings for those close quarters feels that you'll get in Call of Duty, or BF3's CQ DLC.
Blood Money: The more simple of the two modes introduced to us and the one I like better because you don't need to write a college paper in the chat feed to explain stuff to teammates, Blood Money brings in a game where you have to be tactical about what objective to go for, not just blatantly attack the red objective because it's red. Still there's no way to stop that one guy from doing it, but hey.
What to do: Someone slipped up and left a whole lot of money in the open. Take it. Bring it back to your vault. And don't let the enemies take more than you. Basically there's a safe in the middle of the map that you have to take money from. The more people taking money from it at once, the faster you can take money, each carrying up to 500k. Once you have money, bring it back to your vault and poke it to deposit the money. Rinse and repeat. If you or someone dies while carrying money, each 100k is a green glowing wad of cash that you walk over to pick up. Fill your vault to 5M before the enemy does. But there's a catch. You can steal from the enemy vault just like the money pile, and the enemies can steal from yours. I've won a game where the enemy had us 4.9M to 0. We brought 5 guys to their vault and they went down to 2.4M and meanwhile we had another 5 run to the money pile. Our vault went from 0 to 5M in seconds and we won that round. Tactically, you need to decide where you need to go. Are the enemies hard-pressed and trying their damndest to raid your vault? DEFEND. Is the game kinda even? Where are there less enemies at, their vault or the pile? Are the enemies about to win? Pull out all the stops and get to their vault.
My thoughts are like this: this mode has vehicles that matter for both sides, therefore it's better (jk). Although the spawn truck was beneficial to the cops (occasionally necessary), this is the mode where it matters and both teams have one. Put the truck where people need to be and people can spawn in on it. This is also very key to destroy if you see it, yet no one ever does apparently. And then there's the attack trucks. For some reason they're more armored than tanks, so that needs a fix, although their firepower is underwhelming. Most infantry weapons do more damage than the truck's HMG, and the truck's grenade launcher takes 2-4 grenades to hit next to someone to kill them. However if used right, it's still very deadly. (don't get me started on the alt primary for it, the flechette cannon is miserable). They also have attack helis here (they're essentially scout helis but are called attack helis). Their guns are somewhat underwhelming, especially vs light vehicles (fine vs armor). The LMG cannot harm armor, but does a ton of damage to infantry. It's just hard to place a hit due to the low RoF. The minigun doesn't do much damage to infantry, as per every battlefield game, but you'll score more hits and kill faster, plus it hurts armor. The gunner also gets a minigun, though it's hard to aim it with a bad pilot. The game mode itself is very fun, and flanking is possible, which is something I like the most.
Game Mechanics:
Interrogations: Performing a nonlethal kill via bat, stick, or taser, will let you go to the downed enemy and if you hold E on them, it shows the entire enemy team on your entire team's map for a few seconds. I love this and it'll be very key in competitive gaming.
Zipline/Grapple: Love the zipline, though the grapple is fairly broken and obsolete thus far. The zipline is very OP vs snipers. For the mechanic itself, it's a good way to flank into a building.
Battlelog: ಠ_ಠ
Cash for Guns: So you have to earn the set of attachments and the gun, then buy it with in-game cash? Decent I guess. I'm not opposed to it.
Origin: ಠ_ಠ ಠ_ಠ ಠ_ಠ ಠ_ಠ ಠ_ಠ ಠ_ಠ ಠ_ಠ ಠ_ಠ ಠ_ಠ ಠ_ಠ ಠ_ಠ ಠ_ಠ ಠ_ಠ ಠ_ಠ ಠ_ಠ ಠ_ಠ ಠ_ಠ
$70: ಠ_ಠ
Melee: The nonlethal animations take a long time, but the interrogation is worth it. Plus the animation is sexy. The lethal takedown (knife) is also very sexy and fast, but then you can't reveal the entire enemy team. A fair trade I guess.
Ranking System: I really hope every single rank isn't a fucking spade.
Ballistic Shield: ಠ_ಠ Seriously though, it should not be able to protect your back so reliably when you're not using it, plus it really should give you a big speed penalty and not allow you to get in certain types of vehicles.
Looking Around Walls: Peekaboo, I headglitch you!
80-100 (70-100 Squad) Kill Assist Counts as Kill: Yes! Yes!
Survivalist: Seriously who the fuck thought self-revive would be a good game mechanic? *insert inappropriate yiff material here*
Charge Revive for More Health: No one's gonna charge their revives, so this puts you at a disadvantage when you get revived. Good.
Patches: I'm coming for all of your patches/tags. Again.
Laser Tripmines: I don't understand how half the time the laser doesn't even show up, but the other half it does. I do love how you can limbo under the laser, or jump over it though.
Can't Destroy Breaching Charges/C4: Dumbest idea ever. Explosives should be able to destroy these, but for some dumb reason they don't.
Tear Gas: Love it. And somehow I've killed people with it.
RPG not a OHK vs Heli: ಠ_ಠ
No Need to Repair Fully to Undo Disable: I have a love-hate relationship with this one. I love it, but it needs to go back to the old way where you have to get it back to 100% for it to not be disabled. No one has used this against me yet, just me using it myself.
Camera: No experience but I like the cone of sight idea better than the tugs showing everyone that's not crouched in the vicinity.
Decoy: No one expects it in this game, so it works well.
The Taser: I love you.
Sniper gets an SMG as a secondary that can one-up an M16: ಠ_ಠ
Pics of my Beta stats to show experience with the game:
http://imgur.com/F2HmaIQ,yCKsE20,tO.....IdBCGP,5wDFtPm
And of course, youtube vids. Not mine but I have some clips in them. (links above the video in case embedding fails)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLLpjhp-3zE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_Jrv8nRf2s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJb-1qGPHCQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0CWzLcP_Vs
If you have any questions about my experiences with this game or whatever, feel free to ask.
What I just said is the greatest thing you've read in the past however
long it took you to read that journal. 
Carson_Coyote
~carsoncoyote
The "beta" ended? I guess I can uninstall it now. x3
USAF_Growlmon
~usafgrowlmon
OP
Yes, but there will be another beta in the fall before the retail release. I doubt it will use the same build as the prior beta so it'd be in your best interest to ask EA Support, though that never seems to go anywhere.
