Battlefield: Hardline is happening, but DICE is still fixing Battlefield 4

Publisher Electronic Arts is working on a new shooter in the Battlefield series, but this doesn’t mean that it’s finished with the Battlefield game it released in October.

Developer DICE, which produced the last entry in the military combat franchise, posted a blog today explaining that it is still working on fixing Battlefield 4. This comes after news leaked earlier this week that Dead Space developer Visceral Games is working on Battlefield: Hardline, which takes players out of a war setting and has them controlling cops and robbers. EA confirmed that game is in the works. That prompted fans to wonder if the company would ever fully fix Battlefield 4, which has had a number of bugs and connectivity issues since its release.

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“I want to be sure you all understand that introducing Hardline in no way means we’re done working on Battlefield ,” DICE vice president Karl Magnus wrote in the blog. “Nothing could be further from the truth. The Visceral team is leading the development of Hardline, while the DICE team continues to drive BF4. We are committed to giving you the best BF4 experience possible.”

That “best experience possible” includes a major update to Battlefield 4 that should improve how it performs online. The studio will also continue to monitor the game for bugs and other issues, but DICE isn’t just planning on fixing what is broken.

“We launched and are planning to expand our community test environment,” wrote Maguns. “You can see the CTE as our labs environment in which we’ll continue testing out new additions and improvements before we go live with them.”

The studio is also planning features like rentable servers and more.

DICE’s and Battlefield’s futures are probably both linked to how much support Battlefield 4 gets. Many gamers found the shooter to be quite busted when it originally launched and never went back to it. This led to EA promising in December that DICE would not start work on any new projects until it fixed Battlefield 4.

The problems didn’t stop Battlefield 4 from selling well. It was the fourth best-selling physical game at retail in the U.S. last year, and it is extremely important to EA’s bottom line. That’s likely why DICE is out today explaining its plans to support the shooter for the long term, so that consumers don’t shy away from picking up Hardline, then Battlefield 5, and then Hardline 2.