Battlefield Hardline’s 1st expansion has Tommy guns, 4 merciless maps, and crazy action (interview)

Electronic Arts is taking the wraps off the hands-on previews of Battlefield Hardline‘s first expansion pack today. Battlefield Hardline: Criminal Activity has a lot of things to like for hardcore fans of the franchise. And I know, because I played alongside some YouTubers who were among the best Battlefield players in the world. They destroyed me, but they also showed my how fun the four new maps in the expansion could be.

I had a chance to talk about the design of the multiplayer expansion with Zach Mumbach, multiplayer producer at Electronic Arts’ Visceral Games studio at the company’s headquarters in Redwood City, Calif. Mumbach said that the team whipped the downloadable content together in the past few months, after taking into account what they learned from the March launch of Battlefield Hardline, which takes the fast-action shooter combat of the past military games and turns it into cops-and-robbers mayhem.

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Mumbach said that the team added fun weapons like the Tommy Gun (which EA has to call the M1A1, for licensing reasons) and four new maps that create a lot of room for foot-based and vehicle-based action. Visceral added cars such as lowriders in response to fan requests.

Here’s the edited version of our conversation. Check out our full preview story and our hands-on videos.

GamesBeat: What did you guys learn from the feedback you got on the main game?

Zach Mumbach: The interesting thing for us — obviously this was our first Battlefield game as a studio and our first competitive shooter. We brought in people from other teams who had experience in that area, but just the making-of process, we learned a lot.

Once the game released, I don’t know if you could call this learning, but we play the game every day. The whole team plays the game at least an hour every day, if not more. We have a good grasp of what the game feels like, or so we think. What happens when you go public, though, is that you realize, “Oh, crap. They’re way, way, way better at this than us.”

You have to think differently when you’re designing levels, specifically with snipers. We don’t have a lot of good snipers working on our team. When we’re playtesting, I hear the whiz-bys. I know they’re shooting at me. But I’m not worried. They’re probably not going to hit me. I go in the main game with the public, though, I have to play completely differently, because the snipers don’t miss.

GamesBeat: I experienced that this morning.

Mumbach: This is a shark tank. These are the best Battlefield players in the world here.

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GamesBeat: They didn’t warn me at all.

Mumbach: Yeah, it’s a lot of heavy hitters in there.

GamesBeat: So that might have affected how you would set up the maps and so on?

Mumbach: It affects our layout. It affects how much cover we give. We were concerned at one point about making sure the snipers have enough cover. We realize now that we don’t need to worry about that. They will find those spots. That was one of the biggest things. When we made the maps, we thought, “Oh, this could be a cool sniper perch!” But the things we designed as sniper perches are not what they’re using. They’re finding different spots that naturally make sense to them. They’re the one class you kind of don’t need to worry about. They will find their way to fit in to each map.

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GamesBeat: Were you already going on this DLC when the game launched, or did you have some time gather reaction to the game before you started the DLC?

Mumbach: No, we kicked off this DLC when we finished the main game. We had a lot of time to react to main game feedback. It wasn’t as if we had a separate group working on the maps. It made making this DLC a little bit difficult, because we’re crunched for time, but it also made it easier in that we were able to get the reactions from the maps in the main game.

That’s why we have Code Blue as the size it is. The most popular maps in the main game were a similar size, maps like Row House and Bank. There was clearly a desire for more of that style. We definitely tried to react to feedback.

GamesBeat: What would you say about each of the new maps? What’s the thinking behind them?

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Mumbach: Code Blue, in Miami, the idea with that map is that we wanted one central focus, which is the dance club. Everything else is built around that dance club. Most of the gameplay and action takes place in the club. The whole deal is, we wanted to do the light show. We wanted to have this intense music and the insane crazy light show in there, to have a real visual spectacle and a different environment than anything in any other Battlefield game. There are no crazy neon lights and all the stuff shining in the rest of the series.

GamesBeat: And a central room where everyone converges.

Mumbach: Right. You have the open space and the balconies, too, but the point of the map is to drive everybody to the center. With Backwoods, we wanted to do these rolling hills and this open forest. We had some of the forest stuff in Everglades, which was cool, but it’s just a different style. The way we built the trees in Everglades, they’re all clumped together. We’re making paths. The way we do it in Backwoods, they’re more scattered around. It’s about using the hills and terrain and sneaking in between those trees. It’s the biggest map in the pack as well. We wanted to build a pickup truck, so we wanted this muddy, dirty area where you could roll around in your 4×4 pickup.

The Beat, we wanted to do an inner-city housing project setup. That’s the one with the crazy apartment complex in the middle with the three levels. It has the custom shop. It’s bigger than Code Blue. It’s not as big as our biggest maps, but it’s big enough to have vehicles.

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We knew we wanted to do the lowrider. That was a fan request. People wanted to see that vehicle specifically. And so we knew that if we were going to do that vehicle, we had to have hydraulics on it. And we wanted it to be a night map. We wanted that urban nighttime feel. If any movie inspired it, it would be something like End Of Watch, that kind of vibe.

With Black Friday, a few years ago there was this famous YouTube video of a bunch of guys on motorcycles robbing this mall. They robbed a jewelry store in a mall and it’s crazy how efficient it is. They roll inside the mall on these motorcycles, trash the jewelry store, and they’re out of there in a minute. We wanted to do a jewelry store robbery in a mall ever since we saw that. We also wanted to make a map that was a long, linear, enclosed space, a map that had a front that was going to push back and forth. All of our maps have a ton of different flank routes. We wanted one that was built more like Metro in BF3, a head-on fight.

GamesBeat: I found I could survive better at short range against these folks. Anything that was long-distance….

Mumbach: You have a lot of really good snipers in there. The number one Battlefield sniper period is sitting in there. When we were making the game, we had these guys here six months ago or so. We were still making the main game, but we were pretty much done as far as layout. We had all the maps. So we said, “Okay, let’s bring in all these YouTubers, and we’ll just whoop on ‘em. We’ll have a devs versus YouTuber match.”

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One of the dudes went like 55 and 0. They just wiped the floor with us. It was the most humbling day ever.

GamesBeat: What are those guys going to appreciate in some of these other things, like the new weapons or gadgets?

Mumbach: The focus as far as weapons in this pack is the Enforcer. We had a little issue with the shotguns that we fixed. We wanted to give more shotguns, and the battle rifle. The battle rifle is the long-range Enforcer weapon. A lot of these guys are using the battle rifle. The classic Enforcer will run with the shotgun, but you can sort of change the dynamic of the class by using the battle rifle.

GamesBeat: It feels like there’s more of an infantry focus in these maps.

Mumbach: Pretty much, yeah. Backwoods has a lot of vehicles. You’ll see a lot more vehicle maps in future packs. With the turnaround time, it made more sense for us to make more high-quality infantry maps rather than try to rush some big maps for this first pack. While we were working on the first pack, another portion of the team started on the second pack. It’s going to have a way longer burn, so we can afford to make some bigger maps and try some cool experimental stuff.

The M1A1, that was mainly — immediately, when we announced the game, the community was like, “We want a tommy gun. We want a tommy gun.” That’s all we heard. That’s why it’s free. It’s not actually premium. Everybody gets that gun. The day Premium comes out, if you have Hardline you will get that gun in the title update.

GamesBeat: Why is that, do you think? I played with it. It’s a fun gun, bouncing all over the place, but….

Mumbach: It’s not the easiest gun to use. That’s by design. The deal with that gun is you can use it on any class, which is unique for Battlefield. Maybe Battlefield 4 has done that? But we definitely don’t do that anywhere else. A given type of weapon is for a given class. But we’re letting anyone run out there with the tommy gun. Now, because of that, we can’t make it overpowered. Otherwise you’re going to have a game where it’s just 64 tommy guns. It has its strengths, but it’s not an overpowered gun. It’s more about the glory of killing people with the tommy gun. Sorry, the M1A1. I’m not supposed to say tommy gun. Someone owns the phrase “tommy gun,” I guess?

GamesBeat: It looks like a lot of fun. Should keep people busy for a few more months.

Mumbach: Yeah, it should spike up the players again. Every time you drop a pack it’ll bring more interest to the game. For us, regardless of all that, as a development team making our first competitive shooter, having the ability to continue working on it after it’s released is really valuable — not only for this game, but for whatever we end up doing in the future. Whatever we do next, we’ll apply everything we’ve learned from doing this.