After a day of running relatively smoothly, a few gamers on Xbox One late last night started noticing some issues with their new copy of Battlefield: Hardline (read our review). Turns out that this wasn’t because of bugs or built-in connectivity issues — it was a cyberattack.
Publisher Electronic Arts confirmed last night on Twitter that it was working to fix the problems that were keeping some from enjoying the cops-versus-robbers shooter. Later, it revealed that the issues were due to a distributed denial-of-service attack that targeted the Xbox One servers. This is just the latest of this kind of attack on a major video game. But this is also the only real trouble for Hardline on its release day, which is the first Battlefield game since the notoriously broken Battlefield 4.
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No one has stepped up to take responsibility for the attack.
We reached out to publisher EA for more, and the company declined to comment.
This morning, EA has updated its Battlefield: Hardline help page to say that all versions of the game are running smoothly.
Fans of this series were feeling cautious about Hardline after going playing through months of bugs and broken online code after Battlefield 4 debuted in 2013. It took several patches and updates to get that game fully functioning, and smaller problems then took many more months to address. Naturally, gamers were expecting the worst from Hardline.
Despite this DDoS attack, however, Battlefield fans might be able to put away those fears. Developer Visceral has seemingly launched a solid product, and the evidence is that it mostly survived its launch day. If we were going to see a big problem, it likely would have manifested as thousands of gamers rushed online simultaneously.
Of course, problems could still arise. This weekend is another important test to see if Hardline can survive what are typically peak hours for online gaming.