Not too long ago we were visiting Visceral Games’ headquarters in San Francisco and while we were there we had a chance to chat with one of Battlefield Hardline’s game’s designers, Ben Gaciu. The crown jewel in BF Hardline (and the franchise in general) is its multiplayer focus so we asked him some questions about the game’s multiplayer and its creation.
COG: Why do you feel that Cops n’ Crooks is a suitable setting for a Battlefield game?
Ben: It’s an interesting question. I think when Steve and Ian first came up with the idea, we really wanted to put our own spin on the Battlefield franchise. When Visceral decided “Hey! We’re going to make a Battlefield game!” We didn’t want to just make another one, we wanted to make our own, and I think that’s where the Cops n’ Crooks idea comes from. We started watching a lot of movies like Heat, The Town, Bad Boys II and started looking at all those fantasies, and it’s a really cool place for fantasy fulfillment.
We didn’t want to make it realistic, you know, you’re never going to see thirty two cops firing on thirty two criminals in the middle of downtown LA while they shoot a helicopter or whatever, but you do see that in action movies. And that’s the kind of the stuff I think gamers really want to play, it’s that fantasy fulfillment they see from Hollywood that really speaks to this theme.
“We didn’t want to make it realistic, you’re never going to see 32 cops firing on 32 criminals in the middle of LA while they shoot a helicopter, but you do see that in action movies.”
COG: How many game modes were dreamed up in the process of making this until you finally nailed it down to these five that are being shipped with the game?
Ben: So Hotwire’s a really good example. We wanted a mode about stealing cars, because that’s cool. So we sat down in a room and came up with a bunch of ideas for Hotwire, we tried them all out, and they all sucked. They were all really not fun to play, they were like, I think we got up to Hotwire 5 or something. We played them, and we tested them, and then we iterated, iterated, iterated, and then we went, you know what? This isn’t fun, next! Let’s do this one! Play it, iterate, iterate, iterate, not fun, next!
It’s all about not staying precious with your ideas. It’s all about recognizing that it’s not fun and moving on; and Hotwire, specifically, we just looked at each other, and went, okay, what’s fun about this mode? What do we want people to experience? And it’s really simple, one of our engineers basically just said “Dude, it’s steal cars, drive fast!” And we simplified it to that, and it’s such a fun game mode, and it leads to some really cool Battlefield moments.
I think that’s a process we used on every game mode we developed, just playing it, testing it and iterating, iterating, iterating, and really trying to find that core of what is this, and what makes it fun?
“It’s all about not staying precious with your ideas. It’s all about recognizing that it’s not fun and moving on…”
COG: Speaking of which, is it true that Rescue was originally a 32 player mode?
Ben: It was a 32 player mode, that’s pretty good, you’re the first person to reference that actually, I don’t know how you h-
COG: I heard from Brian (Laughs)
Ben: Oh, well, there you go! Yeah, no, we actually went to one of our gate reviews with Rescue, it’s these internal milestones we have, and we had Rescue as a 32 player mode, and it wasn’t terrible. You know, it was actually kind of fun. But it wasn’t really fitting the theme of what we wanted Rescue to be. So again, we kept iterating on it, we came up with ideas such as, what if you have to lock down a room of hostages, and there’s like seven hostage rooms? And we played that, we have that, we coded that, and we tried it and that wasn’t fun.
Then we thought, what if you first have to take hostages to this place and then to that place and then over here; what if there’s some escape you have do with them? And none of that stuff was really resonating until we said, well, what if we just cut the player count? We knew we wanted to have these competitive, more e-sports focused modes and we said, what if we turned this into one of those? What if we just tried it out? And the first day we tried it, it became fantastic, like we knew we had it and that was the special thing.
It’s all about having that time to do that. We play test the game every day for at least an hour every single day, we play it, and lately, it’s been more like two hours every day on the way to launch. I think it’s very important that we do that and that we iterate.
“We knew we wanted to have these competitive, more e-sports focused modes and we said, what if we turned this (Rescue) into one of those?”
COG: How do you think that these two new modes – Rescue and Crosshair – are going to get more attention from the community compared to single squad game modes in previous games?
Ben: The biggest thing I think with these modes for us is getting more eyes on them early. So not only our development team, but getting a lot of focus testers in, we have a bunch of people that are really big in the community, on the Battlefield forums, or big on some streaming networks or on YouTube, or even pro gamers you know, and getting them to come in and say “What do you like about this? What don’t you like about it?”
We have our own opinions, but that’s not exactly what the community necessarily thinks, so it’s all about listening to the community, listening to their feedback, thinking about what they would want to play, and I think that we really nailed it with these modes because everyone that plays them thinks that they’re really fun.
When we came back from PAX-East, we had a Rescue mode there, 5 on 5 Rescue mode, you know, people just flowing in, and everybody had something positive to say about it. Which was really surprising to me, I thought we would get some “Hey, this isn’t the 64 player mega thing that we’re used to!” But I think people really liked that, and it resonated with them. Now, we still have the 64 player modes, you know, you can still player 64 player Conquest on a big map, but there’s these more intimate modes that I think are going to resonate just as easily.
COG: And are a little more unique to this game specifically.
Ben: Exactly, and I think fit the theme really well. Again, going back to the way Rescue was developed, it’s like, okay no, but what does this theme really speak to? And it speaks to some of the smaller settings.
“…it’s all about listening to the community, listening to their feedback, thinking about what they would want to play, and I think that we really nailed it.”
COG: You mention showing off the game to pro players. What’s it been like as a developer, having that resource of a pro player’s feedback?
Ben: Those guys have insights you wouldn’t even think of, they’ll jump up on everything, get some crazy angle, they’re so amazing with their sniping skills, with the shots that they make, with the way they use the guns, so getting them to come in here and play has changed the entire game, honestly.
A lot of it is subtle things. A lot of it is like, map layout, where do we put the hostages in a Rescue mode? Or, where are the escape points in Heist mode? When we get community members in, when we get focus testers in, there’s a different look that we’re looking to get from them. It’s like, okay, is this fun for the general populace? Is there some things we can do to improve the sort of modes?
Once we get the pro players in, they’re all about a completely different thing, they’re all about trying to exploit the mode, exploiting different corners, different places you can go see; so the things that they bring are a lot more subtle, but it’s equally important I think, it’s going to be huge when we come out and hopefully be a competitive game.
COG: With the popularity of Payday and Coop Heists in GTA Online, were there ever any plans for a coop mode in Hardline’s development?
Ben: It’s an interesting question, a coop mode in Hardline, really it’s… we wanted to give a different flavor. Now obviously when we started making the game, Payday hadn’t been a thing yet, Grand Theft Auto 5 hadn’t come out, but really what we wanted to focus on was combining the Battlefield idea, with the theme of cops and robbers. So that is a much more open environment, it’s a much more, especially on the multiplayer side, a broader setting. So, it’s still keeping that Battlefield flavor, we didn’t want to change it completely, but it’s adding in this layer and integrating it into the Battlefield experience.
COG: Speaking of those two games, why do you think that this cops and criminals fantasy has sort of been getting a resurgence in video games?
Ben: That’s a really good question. You know, when we first came up with the idea, a big part of it was “Hey, nobody is doing this!” And I think that’s probably what a lot of people thought. You see action movies set in here all the time, and really intense crime dramas, why don’t games explore it as much? And I think a big part of that is, it’s very hard to pull it off.
You know, if you’re making a big dude with a giant hammer, nobody is going to say “That giant hammer shouldn’t be that big!” or “His handle’s off” or “He doesn’t have that kind of ring! That doesn’t exist!” But when you make something in a real world setting, people are going to call you out on that stuff. And I think that’s part of the reason that it’s harder to make a game in this setting. It’s probably getting a little more popular because we’re getting better as developers overall.
“Pro gamers have insights you wouldn’t even think of… so getting them to come in here and play has changed the entire game, honestly.”
COG: There is destruction in Battlefield Hardline, but it doesn’t seem to be as frequent in this game as compared to 3, 4, and Bad Company 2. What was the thought process behind this choice?
Ben: It’s all about gameplay, and being a more infantry focused game, we wanted to create more routes specific to players. I would say there’s kind of two types of game experiences, there’s the Battlefield first person shooter that’s a more sandbox-y play area, and then there’s other FPSs that have more defined routes, you go this way, you go that way, you go the other way and that’s what’s fun about it.
I think we wanted to be somewhere in the middle, we wanted to be sort of like a hybrid between those two things, and it was important to us, especially being infantry focused that it was fun as a route based game, that it was, you know, we don’t have giant tanks in our game, so the fact that you do have fun just running around is really, really important to us.
COG: In this game, the 64 player battles are only available in Conquest and Team Deathmatch. Blood Money, Heist and Hotwire are 32. Was this because you wanted to make the game more focused or was 64 players just too chaotic?
Ben: Yeah, we just found that, again, through testing and through iteration, it turned out to be a little too chaotic for what we wanted the vanilla experience to be. Now, you can go set your own server to whatever counts you want, you can make anything 64 player if you want – not Rescue and Crosshair – but you can make the other modes 64 players and have a blast playing you know, Blood Money at 64 players if that’s what you’re into.
But when we thought of the average player going into their menu and hitting quick match, did we want them to see Blood Money as a 64 player experience? Well, probably not at first. It didn’t work quite as well in that setting, and so, that’s why we just did whatever was right for the game mode and it just so happen for our three bigger game modes, it turns out that it wasn’t quite as fun at 64 players, at least, not for the average gamer we didn’t think.
COG: Fat chance, but will there be mod support?
Ben: Mods are really interesting, more games now I think are becoming mod-able, so I don’t think ruling it out of the Battlefield experience overall is a thing we should do, it’s just very, very time consuming to make those tools for people. So the more feedback we see about that, the more of a community desire to make mods, the more I think we’ll have to work on it, we’ll have to respond. That’s kind of been the whole ethos of this game; taking community feedback and responding to it. So, yeah, there’s nothing in the works right now, but I’m not going to rule it out of the future of Battlefield.
COG: For you personally, what do you think is the most exciting thing about this game’s multiplayer?
Ben: Probably the speed that everything goes at. You know, we’ve made the run speed a little bit faster, we’ve made the time to interact with combat quicker, so you’re not running across an entire desert before you get there, and we’ve really emphasized spawning you into the action a bit more. The cars are fast, you drive around the streets of LA and they’re super-fast and you’re skidding around a corner and shooting people or shooting a helicopter or it’s just a quick game, and I’m really excited to get this in the player’s hands and to see how they feel about it and how they like it. You know, the beta was a blast playing with a whole bunch of people that liked our game and I’m just really excited to get this game out.
COG: Thank you so much for your time.
Ben: Thanks a lot!