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Battlefield: Hardline dev promises smooth launch after BF4’s troubles

Bucking recent trends of rocky releases for Electronic Arts’ server-dependent, Visceral Games’ creative director Ian Milham has made the bold promise that Battlefield Hardline will be playable at launch. Game Revolution‘s Heath Hindman caught up with Milham at the Tokyo Game Show and asked him for comment about Hardline‘s launch stability, particularly in light of the Battlefield 4‘s fraught release.

“What you’re basically asking is, ‘Is your game going to work?’ and the answer is yes, it’s gonna work. We actually started on this more than a year before Battlefield 4 came out. We’ve been working with the DICE guys for a long time; some of our engineering work is actually in Battlefield 4 and things they’ve been doing since then. It’s in pretty great shape now and all that work is gonna come into what we’re doing.”

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Milham acknowledged that there will of course be a few hiccups in any game of this size, but he is overall confident that the game will avoid major problems. That confidence is bolstered by one successful beta and the promise of another on every launch platform in the coming months, in addition to extensive play at recent trade shows. The promise of stability is also likely tied to the game launch’s recent delay from October of this year to early 2015.

Battlefield Hardline will arrive on PC, PlayStation, and Xbox consoles on March 31, 2015

Will Fulton
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Will Fulton is a New York-based writer and theater-maker. In 2011 he co-founded mythic theater company AntiMatter Collective…
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