Speaking during its latest financial call, Electronic Arts revealed that July’s Battlefield Hardline beta was played over 1.7 million gamers, feedback of which partly attributed to the shooter’s delay into 2015.
Said Patrick Soderlund, Executive Vice President of EA Studios: “We launched the beta at E3, and we saw a tremendous pickup of players. We had over 1.7 million players in the beta.
"And what made me happy was the fact that we had a stable environment, people got to play the game, and it functioned really well, which is kind of the first thing we’re looking at when we look at a beta.
"Then, we allowed people to play for a little bit longer, maybe, than we planned, because we found a lot of feedback from players in there, providing us valid information and feedback around features of the game and how the game felt, etc."
Soderlund also admitted that one of the primary complaints from players during the beta was that "the cops and robbers fiction maybe wasn’t shining through properly".
"Is it playing like a military game, but it should be a cops and robbers game? We saw ideas around asymmetric gameplay, a bunch of really strong, good, well-thought ideas that we decided to listen to,” he continued.
"And having a long discussion with the team, and looking at where we were, we felt like the best thing for us was to give the development team a little bit of extra time and get the game to where we think it needs to be in order to be successful."
Battlefield Hardline is scheduled for release on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, Xbox One, Xbox 360, and PC in early 2015.