We already know that Battlefield Hardline isn’t going to be a typical Battlefield game. In Hardline, players will get to experience a lot of stealth action, which is quite a break from the combat that we’re all used to in previous games. Speaking to GameSpot, Visceral has highlighted how this stealth system will work.
Explaining a scenario where players attempt to take enemies head-on, but wish to go into stealth mode to get away from the fight, the developer said:
We’ve got a system in place now that we’re calling ‘last known position’. There’s two things you’re encountering: one, you get detected and everybody has heat-seeking AI. They know exactly where you are and start shooting you to death. That sucks, clearly. The other thing is, you don’t feel like you have an opportunity to get away from the guys and go back to that undetected state. So we’ve put in this idea of last known position. Enemies will now track where they think you’re at.
However, Visceral has yet to fine-tune the system. Executive Producer Steve Papoutsis said:
Let’s say you’re standing where you are right now, and that’s the last time they’ve seen you–if you can move away from that position and stay out of their line of sight for X number of seconds–they will then cool back down and go into what we’re calling their search state. So rather than being totally dumb and going, ‘Oh, nobody’s around, let’s go back to playing cards’, they’re aware of you, they just don’t know where you’re at. That puts them back in that state where you can then use a freeze on them, or stealth up behind them and take them out.
Papoutsis also said that Visceral is aiming to ensure that Hardline’s stealth system in fair, and that players have the option to use a “non-lethal approach” to combat majority of the time. The game’s stealth action also ties in with its narrative in that protagonist Nick Mendoza isn’t a trigger-happy person right off the bat.
Battlefield Hardline will launch on March 17, 2015 in North America and beginning on March 19, 2015 in Europe for the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, Xbox One, Xbox 360, and PC.
[Source: GameSpot]
