I’m Here for the Bang-Bang: On Battlefield: Hardline, First-Person Shooters, and Storytelling

Battlefield: Hardline is the latest release in the long-running first-person-shooter series, but, of the many changes to the series (including a new lead developer, Visceral Games), the one that has seemingly had the most effect on its critical reception is a shift from a standard military shooter (the first few games in the series took place during World War II, and a recent shift has brought them to present day) to hard-boiled cops-and-robbers-styled action in major American cities, including Miami and Los Angeles.

Truthfully, it’s not a good time for Hardline to come out. Recent events in Ferguson, MO and Cleveland, OH (as well as many other situations in other cities) have brought issues of police violence, police brutality, militarized police, systemic racism, and the role of police in their neighborhoods into stark light.

This is not a good environment for a game where the primary draw is large scale, urban combat between police and robbers.

My initial reaction to Hardline was one of bemusement. It is a tone-deaf release, and interviews with the developers were awkward and uncomfortable, as journalists asked some questions they were obviously ill-prepared for. After spending some time with it, however, I felt like the game established itself as something worthwhile, despite the inherent issues in a release of this type at this time. I felt (and still feel) that the game skirts the issues being discussed in many communities, and that its staging as a CBS-styled cop show was a smart way to get around these issues.

The truth is, Hardline does a lot of things right. The game does encourage you to play stealthily, though the rewards are oddly slanted towards better weaponry as opposed to better stealth approaches. The game has a varied cast of characters, as the primary heroes are a male Cuban immigrant and his partner, who is a woman of Asian descent. One humorous exchange early in the game has the woman, Khai, decry karate as “mystical bullshit,” noting instead that she takes Krav Maga to defend herself on the streets. There is a lot of work early on to establish these characters as fully-formed entities, not bound to any racial or gender stereotype. This work does tail off as the game progresses from cop show to Michael Bay-styled cop movie, but it’s still good work, and a lot more than what other shooters have to offer.

However, as some critics have noted, Hardline makes many missteps. Here, I’ll let Austin Walker, who writes for Paste, take over:

As it turns out, you can’t simply layer a set of new systems over old ones and expect something meaningful or consistent to emerge. No amount of external incentivization (not least of all this sort of incentivization) could counter the fact that Battlefield Hardline is a game built for lethal violence. At one point, a character in the second half of the game jokes about the benefits of leaving law enforcement behind: “Well at least we won’t have to fill out a bunch of paperwork later.” But you never had to. There’s never been any disincentivization for violence in Hardline. There’s only been the most limited encouragement imaginable to keep your weapon holstered. Only bonus points.

Bonus points aren’t enough. We don’t expect the police to arrest people instead of shooting them so that they’ll get bonus points. We expect them to arrest suspects because, however cynical we might be, we generally hold out the hope that someone who seems guilty could, maybe, be innocent. Tamir Rice. The best of us believe that even folks who have (allegedly) committed petty crimes deserves the chance to live healthy, productive lives. Mike Brown. We tell stories about “proper” use of legitimized police violence because the very notion that they might use it wrongly — that they might murder someone in broad daylight as he begs for help, as he begs for air — is so devastating, so terrible, that we can’t bear to confront it alone.

Obviously, this is pretty powerful, damning stuff. Hardline does seem to do the minimal possible work to incentivize stealth play. It does feel like there’s another half of the mechanic and reward system missing, lost in a programmer’s recycle bin somewhere. It does feel like a cop out to have the game wave its hand cynically at these issues and say “all cops are bad.” Indeed, the world of Hardline paints a police under seige, but it’s not just in language of the military that I mean that. Additionally, it’s a world full of temptation, where drugs and money can just-so-easily get missed in evidence catalogs, where an underpaid officer can skim a few grand here and there without really hurting anyone. For the police in Hardline, the temptation is too great, and they succumb.

Yet, Hardline offers no commentary, no prescription for change. The Wire, the landmark TV series from HBO and David Simon, offered many alternatives to the deadly cycle that is the drug war, including what felt like a thesis statement in the “Hamsterdam” storyline in season 3. For all of the darkness inherent in The Wire, there’s a glimmer of hope, even if the system eventually beats us all down. In The Wire, the only way to win the game is to not play at all. Hardline seemingly does not have that option.

The problem, eventually, is the same one that every shooter faces. There are masters to serve when making a “Battlefield” game, and Hardline is forced to work within these parameters. Most modern shooters are akin to pornography. Sure, you can try to shoehorn some plot in there, but most people just want to skip to the fucking.

What then, do we do with the first-person-shooter? It’s not a fix to confine them to distant lands where armies of Americans and Europeans battle Osama Bin Laden impersonators over the fate of the world itself. The smaller-scale conflict of Hardline is refreshing in a market full of world-ending scenarios. The more personal, stealth combat, limited as it is, is a necessary addition to the first-person-shooter space. It’s not a fix to confine them to fanciful science-fiction scenarios, because there are real-world issues and situations that shooters can address effectively, ala Spec Ops: The Line, which put the player in the role of a soldier slowly losing his mind on the battlefield, reality being ripped from him as his role in a war lengthened.

There’s just the problem of that word. Shooter. It’s so confining, so limiting. There’s no room to let the story breathe, no opportunity for a B-Plot, nevermind a C-Plot. The plot in most of these games is just to get us from one set piece to another. The pizza guy comes in, and the hot housewife takes his pants off. Who cares about motivation?

Even then, if you removed the campaign altogether, the multiplayer in Hardline is perhaps more strange in today’s context. Again, from Walker:

I admit that I wouldn’t even raise an eyebrow if these modes popped up in a Battlefield 4 expansion. But here, they feel wrong for one big reason. Whereas Battlefield 4’s multiplayer conflicts between the US, China and Russia reflect on open war between nearly-matched factions, the “cops vs robbers” premise of Hardline demands (and fails to deliver) asymmetry. Whether in reality or in fiction, criminals rarely engage in sprawling 32 vs 32 shootouts with police. They cower in small rooms and struggle to maintain spatial and logistical control. They leverage the ethical motivations of police and civilians to maintain an advantage. And in 2015, criminals simply don’t have the firepower or hardware that police have gained access to via post-war military runoff.

One could argue that removing the motivation and characterization from the action makes it worse. At least the campaign is trying. The multiplayer takes the things we know and love about modern Battlefield games and reskins it as urban warfare. But, we know how urban warfare really works, right? It’s municipal fines that stretch on for years. It’s stop-and-frisk laws. If the people really wanted to fight back against the police, they’d have to be guerillas. They couldn’t fight them openly. Occupied people can’t fight back this way.

Could Hardline have duplicated this in its multiplayer? Perhaps, but again, that’s not what Battlefield is. That’s not what we’re looking for when we play these games. That name connotes a certain style of gameplay, and Hardline unfortunately has to follow that style guide, for better or for worse.

Finally, there’s the issue of privilege. Walker’s review affected me in a way I hadn’t anticipated. I do recognize that I have a certain privilege as a white man to say things like “it’s just like a bad cop show” without having to care about the real-world implications of things like cop shows, or shooters, or anything like that. I’m no fan of police, but I’m far less likely to get shot in the street by one. This is an important distinction. I can dislike police and play Hardline and abstract it far enough from what real policing is to still enjoy myself. Is that okay? I don’t know.

Ultimately, I like and appreciate Hardline. I think the first half, in particular, slows down the gameplay and makes it more thoughtful and less reliant on huge setpieces. I think the multiplayer has some clever modes, and the paring down of the action makes things more intense and fun. But I can’t deny that Hardline has issues, both as a game and as a piece of art. I just wonder if those issues are unique to this game, or to the genre itself. After all, the last thing you want in your pornography is to see pictures of the stars’ kids.