Battlefield 6 is a return to the formula EA completely broke ten years ago

The Battlefield name conjures different tenets to different people. To the particularly unimaginative, it evokes a battlefield. A big ol' field where dozens of players have a battle. A field of battles. But DICE's long-running, large-scale multiplayer shooter series is more than that. Elder millennials will remember its capacity for spawning feats of derring-do on early Youtube, like mid-air fighter jet pilot swaps, shooting fighter jets out of the sky with one incredibly well-timed rocket launcher shot, and other stunts with fighter jets somehow involved in them.

It's been the housing for bombastic six-hour solo campaigns which at one point were an annual counterpoint to COD's single-player component, except with more destructible scenery (and fighter jets). It's been both a historical reenactment, and a futuristic speculation. Nowhere in its fabric, prior to 2015, was there anything even remotely related to the police in Battlefield.

'Nuts to all that', thought EA. What this series needed next was a police procedural that leaned into narrative and NCIS-type tropes, made by the studio behind the slow, atmospheric Dead Space games. Now that's Battlefield.

Who knows who signed that project off or why. All we know is that Battlefield Hardline released in 2015 as a result, emerging into the world as a very enjoyable cop drama that was totally miscast by having the BF name slapped onto it.

The single-player campaign of Hardline is what would happen if WWE acquired the movie rights to CSI Miami. Gangs dealing narcotics are widespread and emboldened, engaging in all-out turf wars in the Floridian city. Something must be done, and that thing involves cops in aviators getting into armed encounters of an absolutely improbable scale. Detectives Nick Mendoza and Carl Stoddard find themselves at the heart of this drugs war after a bust they were assigned to goes bad, and as they go rogue and try to take down the major players themselves, they uncover corruption happening on their very own force.

Numerous double-crossings, prison stays, and stealth missions later, the credits roll on a campaign that tries its best to make large-scale gunfights with assault rifles feel like plausible police work, and never truly succeeds. But had it not felt beholden to the existing pillars of the franchise, Hardline would have had a much better shot.

In between the armed battles, there's quite a lot of moving around very slowly while crouched and taking down bad men in vests, for example. Critics of the game at the time reserved a lot of their displeasure for these sections, in part because Hardline is primarily a shooter and thus its stealth mechanics ran shallow, but also because, well, what are you doing sneaking about and hiding behind schooldesks in a Battlefield game?

Conceptually it's in a Catch 22. As PCGN noted at the time, the big blazing firefights don't feel very much like being a cop, and the sneaky sections don't feel very much like Battlefield. The ideal solution would be something like Ready or Not, or SWAT 4. A real police procedural that has you following protocols for breaching doors and for arresting perps, and the fact that it isn't able to offer any mechanics that feel distinctly and deliberately like police work is a large part of why you haven't heard Hardline's name much in the past decade.

But there's something here. In amongst all the spent bullet casings and undercover cop movie cliches is a tense narrative in which the corrupt individuals within their own force make life increasingly difficult for the player character Mendoza. There's a sense of unbeatable odds, a real personal vendetta to pursue, and some nice environmental variation in its levels, which oscillate from sprawling compounds to tighter domestic spaces.

Meanwhile in multiplayer, Hardline got more of a pass from critics at the time. In its scramble to make something close to the expected Battlefield online experience feel thematically linked to its central cop drama, it arrives at one particular mode that gained traction at launch: Hotwire.

Hotwire is more or less Call Of Duty's Hardpoint, with muscle cars replacing fixed zones. As either a team of crims or vehicular law enforcement, you seize a motor and start driving it around, aiming to stay in control of it for as long as possible, because while you're at the wheel, your opponents' tickets are draining. A neat cops-and-robbers take on traditional large-scale FPS gameplay.

Although they didn't fill the servers when Hardline launched, its other modes also fold in the law vs lawlessness dynamic to reasonably good effect. Heist, as the discerning will have surmised, pits one team as bank robbers raiding the vaults for cash against first responders tasked with stopping them from extracting those spoils.

Blood money is a spin on that same theme, filling a crate of cash in the middle of the map and requiring both teams to try and capture and extract it. Then there's Rescue and Crosshair, the two slower-paced, no respawn, competitive modes. In 5v5 matches played via three-minute rounds, they're essentially Counter-Strike in cops' clothing, all about extracting or protecting hostages.

Not all of these modes are inspired, but they are all bolstered by that typical Battlefield depth of loadout customization, meaning you can tailor your gear to play in specific roles as you familiarize yourself with what's required to be effective in each mode.

But that's as close as Hardline gets to really embracing the Battlefield online experience. Ultimately that's what damned it among the critics and community in 2015. Battlefield is a series of games that do one thing better than anyone else: huge militarised conflicts fought in first-person, featuring ground and air vehicles and a variety of player classes and weaponry options. Hardline isn't that, so why release it as a Battlefield game at all?

Hardline could also have been a game that did something specific, in a different and better way than other games. In the years between SWAT 4 and Ready or Not, there's been something of a police procedural vacuum which Visceral Games might have been able to fill, if it wasn't so beholden to franchise conventions.

What do you make of Battlefield 6 so far? Was Hardline deserving of the backlash? We're over in our community Discord to pick up the conversation.