Battlefield Hardline is possibly the best FPS game of 2015.

[josemlopes]

Well, its a rather crappy year for FPSs.

Wolfenstein:TOB felt a bit unninspired and even a step back from TNO and I loved TNO.
Then we have Halo 5, Rainbow Six Siege, CODBlops 3 and Battlefront. I guess the MP for Halo 5 could be fun, Rainbow Six Siege looks like trash and CODBlops 3 is more COD, something that like Halo is getting a bit tiresome by now, but that is something that Battlefield Hardline already suffered, Battlefront, well, we will so how that one goes, so yeah, this year FPS games get a huge pass from me where the only true reccomendation I can give is Wolfenstein even if I dont think its a "must buy".

 

[woodlandkammo]

Battlefield Hardline is going up against heavy hitters such as Evolve, Nothing, Nothing and Nothing. Later this year we'll have Black Ops III, Nothing, Star Wars Battlefront EA, Nothing and Nothing.

This year has been shit for first person shooters so I'm not surprised Hardline is the best one so far.

This. So much this

 

[TheYellowCellPhone]

I was nearly level 140 in BF4 before I stopped playing (roughly 250ish hours), and I uninstalled Hardline maybe two days after getting it. I like FPSs a lot because I like shooting dudes and admiring guns and reloading endlessly. All my top-played games are FPSs, I did a season of comp TF2 because I like the game so much, I give games like CoD a pass because it is fun to load them up and shoot guys while aiming down sights, and holy shit, Hardline was one of the most unpleasant FPSs I've ever experienced.

The campaign is okay. The opening like 40% setting up the betrayal is straight slow, unskippable tutorial garbage, but after you get to meet all those colorful characters and you have a motive in the story for once, the campaign really picked up. I liked the level areas, I loved the desert level where you're in the redneck utopia, I dare say it's one of my favorite singleplayer FPS levels in a long time.

But the multiplayer (what undeniably gives you the most playtime in Battlefield, cut your SP bullshit) is straight shit. I would write down my thoughts, but Angry Joe communicates it way better.


The gamemodes are fun, Hotwire and Blood Money are these really unique gamemodes after BF3 and BF4 made no new attempts to add gamemodes. But what Joe doesn't touch on is the egrigous weapon balancing. All weapons on BF4 fulfill some sort of niche and have long TTK because short TTK feels like you're being cheaped out and dying instantly. Most weapons in BFH are completely useless and are completely, 100% overshadowed and outperformed by a handful of guns, and the TTK is record-breaking short so dying instantly is a thing you have to get over. No weapon variety, class balancing that they did real good on in BF4 is reverted back to Assault/Operator = god, and there has been very little done by Visceral in the way of addressing this.

The game is practically dead on PC. At practically any point in time, BF4 has ten times the players ingame. The only reason it's moderately alive on consoles (by the way, BF4 is still more popular even then) is because there are so few games on the current gen systems.

Fallout 4 has yet to come out, and The Old Blood was pretty spectacular. I'm so certain BFH is going to bottomscore everything, shooter category or just as a game.

 

[Bat Vader]

And this line would've lead me to believe that your gaming history BEGAN this year, if I haven't seen you praising CoD:Blops in another thread. So we have to put it around 2010. Which is even more depressing. Oh whatever. Hardline is shit, OP is a fanboy of such ridiculous proportions that he began deciding on the "best FPS of 2015" in bloody August and this thread is bollocks.

Was there really any need to make this personal and insult the OP like that? What's wrong with liking Battlefield: Hardline and Call of Duty: Black Ops? The thread isn't bollocks. Just because you disagree with the OP doesn't mean the thread is in anyway wrong. Just an FYI, I disagree with the OP too.

 

[Strazdas]

I find it quite remarkable that a reskin of a battlefield game may genuinely be the best shooter of the year. I really cannot think of anything else to compete with it.

 

[Ambient_Malice]

It is both baffling and depressing that in 2015, as people sit around bemoaning how modern FPS games are all "corridor shooter Cowadooty clones", Battlefield Hardline was released to middling reception. It's a stealth-oriented police FPS that encourages the player to approach situations tactically and non-lethally, especially since on the recommended higher difficulties, you can only take a few shots before going down.

Nu-uh. It's a corridor shooter Cowadooty clone. A model example, in fact.

Since when was CoD a stealth series? Outside of "stealth" moments? You may as well call Metal Gear Solid 3 a corridor shooter Call of Duty clone. It has FPS combat and corridors and heavily linear map design, after all. Just saying.

The game has some mild commentary on police violence and how police feel pressured to close ranks and all that jazz. But the story is about crooked police vs hardened criminals.

Yup, pretty much every stereotypical cop tv-drama to ever enter existence.

Sure. But that sort of storyline is pretty rare in FPS games. Hardline is trying to be a cop TV show in game form. That much is obvious from the episodic structure.

I've played every PC FPS game released this year, and Hardline is the cream of the crop in terms of innovation and polish.

And this line would've lead me to believe that your gaming history BEGAN this year, if I haven't seen you praising CoD:Blops in another thread. So we have to put it around 2010. Which is even more depressing.

I'm afraid you're about a decade or so off. The "greatest FPS game of all time" has only one real contender in my heart.

First and only game I ever preordered. FPS masterpiece. Every other FPS game before and since flails kind of miserably in its majestic shadow, begging for attention. I suppose I tend to be attracted to FPS games that remind me of Perfect Dark to various degrees. They're poor substitutes, but I make do.

It has a mission where you spend the first section on a relaxing drive as your passengers chat.

Where I come from, we call it "padding" and "glorified cutscenes".

Is it really a cutscene when you're the one driving the car? This form of storytelling is GTA V's bread and butter. In fact, the whole mission (Chapter 8) wouldn't feel out of place in a GTA game, as you drive into the desert to get a safe cracking device from a community of "patriots". One half expects to meet a hitch-hiking Trevor Phillips along the way. What makes it significant is this section annoys shooty-shooty-bang-bang FPS fans who find it "boring". It's on a whole other level to the stuff Call of Duty has toyed with, like the brief excursion in the floating city in Black Ops 2. FPS games where you can actually go places without things leaping out to kill you just to hold the audience's absurdly low attention span. It's a welcome reminder of Perfect Dark's more iconic missions where you walked around and completed objectives for a while instead of blasting people willy nilly.

 

[RJ 17]

Soooooo what's the point of this topic? Judging by the overt level of bias in the OP, the author is essentially just standing on a soap box saying "I really liked this game!" with no intention of being convinced otherwise. That's all fine and dandy, but there's no real point of discussing the matter since it's opinion vs opinion, and the author certainly isn't going to be convincing people that didn't like the game to suddenly think it's great.

For the record: I thought the game was about as bland as could be story-wise, and as for the multiplayer the lack of load-out options was just silly when compared to all the customization available in BF4.

 

[zumbledum]

i was going to strongly disagree with the op , then i thought about what fps have released this year, is it really only evolve? so by way of there being nothing good about i guess it limps over the line. unless dirty bomb or maybe killing floor 2 releases. oh how i hate these open beta launched but not launched bs, "yeah were taking your money but its beta we havent launched yet so we have no accountability!"

but "of the year" was always a tad arbitrary and with the overall slowdown of technical capabilities (we aint doubling power year in year out anymore) the "of year" title needs to die and be replaces with "current" for my mind.

and if were going current well then shadow warrior remake for solo, warframe and payday 2 for co-op. pvp i play less of these days just dirty bomb atm.

 

[Aiddon_v1legacy]

Except it REALLY isn't; it's just another run-of-the-mill, dime-a-dozen FPS flooding the market. It's only pretense to identity being its setting...which is just ripped from the billion mediocre cop shows you see on network TV all the time. Going from one mediocre comfort zone to another is not praiseworthy.

And that's before we get into another problem with this line of thinking: what other noteworthy FPS releases have there been this year? Wolfenstein and Evolve? That is a LOW bar to match, let alone clear. Even the rest of the year for the genre looks dull with CoD churning out yet another entry, MS churning out Halo 5, and Destiny trying to keep people's attention with The Taken King. Not a great selection.

 

[NiPah]

I'm not big on Multiplayer FPS games so I never picked up Battlefield Hardline, it looks fun from some of the LPs I've watched but at it's core it just seems like another Battlefield game with cop elements.

I wouldn't say that's a bad thing, but if you weren't interested in Battlefield to begin with then this doesn't seem like it'd be my cup of tea.

 

[Ambient_Malice]

Except it REALLY isn't; it's just another run-of-the-mill, dime-a-dozen FPS flooding the market. It's only pretense to identity being its setting...

There's also the stealth-oriented gameplay? Is Deus Ex: Human Revolution also another run of the mill, dime a dozen FPS? Hardline's underlying game mechanics are different to the the other Battlefields, and Call of Duty, especially. Good luck finishing the average Advanced Warfare or any other CoD without shooting anyone. (Can can finish the first mission in Black Ops without firing a shot, but that's an anomaly.)

And that's before we get into another problem with this line of thinking: what other noteworthy FPS releases have there been this year?

Dying Light by Techland. Talented developer, brilliant game. GOTY material in some aspects.

but "of the year" was always a tad arbitrary and with the overall slowdown of technical capabilities (we aint doubling power year in year out anymore) the "of year" title needs to die and be replaces with "current" for my mind.

*Cough* Well, Perfect Dark was remastered for Xbox 360, and rereleased on Xbox One. So that makes it the best FPS of this current time as well as all time.

edit:

Soooooo what's the point of this topic? Judging by the overt level of bias in the OP, the author is essentially just standing on a soap box saying "I really liked this game!" with no intention of being convinced otherwise. That's all fine and dandy, but there's no real point of discussing the matter since it's opinion vs opinion, and the author certainly isn't going to be convincing people that didn't like the game to suddenly think it's great.

There are certain reasonably fact-based things that can be analysed and compared. For example, "Hardline is a Battlefield 4 reskin." This is nonsensical, unless you bring the multiplayer into the equation, which was developed by different staff. Hardline is a stealth FPS set in Miami where you drive police cars and cuff people - enemies are usually in small groups to aid stealth and distraction creation. Battlefield 4 is a reasonably straightforward FPS set in China where you drive tanks and fight an entire army as really poignant electronica pulses in your ears and makes you cry manly tears. To use an analogy, it's like calling Perfect Dark a GoldenEye reskin.

I can say "CoD4 is a Delta Force: Black Hawk Down clone" and back it up by pointing to gameplay and artistic similarities. (Not least of which was plagiarising Novalogic's Delta Force logo.)

 

[the_dramatica]

Arms of telos, toxxik, mud air, legions: overdrive reflex and unreal tourny 4 all could easilly take that away, however they all have skewed release dates.

 

[TristanBelmont]

Isn't it the only big shooter out at the moment?

 

[Ambient_Malice]

Arms of telos, toxxik, mud air, reflex and unreal tourny 4 all could easilly take that away.

Those are all MP-only games or MP games with SP which is basically MP with bots. I've always considered MP FPS games to be a subgenre. For example, in the context of this thread, Hardline could be an absolutely atrocious multiplayer game and still be the "best FPS of the year" based on the campaign. I wouldn't know since I don't play Battlefield or CoD's MP. Competitive multiplayer doesn't really interest me. I was always the person wanting to play co-op in Perfect Dark instead of Combat Simulator. Certainly, Deus Ex had pretty dull MP, and it was the best RPG of 2000, IMO. (But disqualified from best FPS because Perfect Dark exists.) Same goes for games like STALKER, which had okayish MP, but fantastic SP.

The genre and audience split between MP and SP FPS is a much larger topic -- a very interesting one -- but probably beyond the scope of this thread. Also, it occurs to me that one could quite reasonably argue that Superman 64 is actually a pretty fun game -- if they focused on the multiplayer. Superman 64's MP wasn't awesome, but it was entertaining enough.

 

[Aiddon_v1legacy]

There's also the stealth-oriented gameplay? Is Deus Ex: Human Revolution also another run of the mill, dime a dozen FPS? Hardline's underlying game mechanics are different to the the other Battlefields, and Call of Duty, especially. Good luck finishing the average Advanced Warfare or any other CoD without shooting anyone. (Can can finish the first mission in Black Ops without firing a shot, but that's an anomaly.)

Uh, that's because it's an RPG first and an FPS second; heck, the reason people went for stealth runs in the original title was because it wasn't very good at shooting. Furthermore, stealth is an OPTION in the series, as you can choose to either sneak around and hack everything in the vicinity or you can just fuse all organic matter with the wallpaper using a grenade launcher and a plasma rifle if you so please. Not a good comparison. And that's before we get into how the "stealth' mechanics in Hardline are pretty clunky and clearly show that the designers were not used to such a shift in gameplay (which is why you're better off just replaying Thief 2 or Dishonored for a stealth fix). Or how the single player campaign is still a pathetic afterthought. Or how the arrest mechanic stops making sense when the main character is on the run. Or how the story itself is just a boring, milquetoast cop show ripoff we've seen a billion times before.

Isn't it the only big shooter out at the moment?

Not the only one, but it's slim pickings for the genre this year. Furthermore, it's just going to be forgotten as soon as something bigger like Halo 5 comes along. Just another mediocre entry in the Battlefield franchise, not helped by coming off of Battlefield 4 which was also ill-received.

 

[Ambient_Malice]

Here's what I don't get, though. If this is a corridor shooter, then doesn't that mean we have to go back and reclassify Crytek's Far Cry and Crysis as corridor shooters? Because this "roam the semi-open island, use your scanner to mark people, use stealth or combat to proceed along the route of your choosing" is pretty much Far Cry's formula. And back in 2004, people were fawning all over it.