With Battlefield: Hardline arriving this fall, it will mean the Battlefield franchise has seen new arrivals in back-to-back years. This doesn’t point towards the series being turned into an annual one though, with EA Studios EVP Patrick Söderlund telling Polygon:
It doesn’t necessarily mean that we need to annualize Battlefield and that’s the way it’s going to be forever and ever. I understand that some people may look at it that way, but that’s what happened.
Söderlund also revealed that the idea for Hardline goes back more than 10 years:
Karl-Magnus [Troedsson], who runs DICE studios, and Steve Papoutsis, who runs Visceral, basically met in Barcelona almost three years ago and they came to me and said ‘Hey, we have an idea.’ Actually, the idea of a cops and robbers type Battlefield game has been with us — me and the DICE team — for more than ten years. There are early prototypes from, like, 2000 or 2001 of a game that we called back then Urban Combat. This has been lingering and we’ve been wanting to do something like this.
In a separate interview with Polygon, Söderlund mentioned, “The EA that I’m trying to help build isn’t an EA that needs to annualize everything.”
Do you think we’ll see Battlefield 5 in 2015?
