Publisher Electronic Arts’ cops-and-robbers shooter finally has a firm release date.
Law-enforcement action shooter Battlefield: Hardline debuts March 17 in North America. Players taking on the role of police or thieves on the streets of Los Angeles in this game for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. This is one of the biggest releases for EA’s fiscal fourth quarter, and it should help the company finish its year off strong. The publisher just announced the results of its fiscal Q2, and it demolished analyst expectations.
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Battlefield is EA’s marquee shooter franchise. Battlefield 4, which debuted in October 2013, ended last year as the fourth top-selling new physical game at U.S. retailers. The publisher likely wants to keep that going on an (fiscally) annual basis, and that’s where Hardline comes in.
EA originally planned to release Hardline in time for this holiday shopping season. But the company decided to delay it into 2015 after running a public beta in June.
“The feedback [from the beta] spurred us to start thinking about other possibilities and ways we could push Hardline innovation further and make the game even better,” an EA spokesperson wrote in a blog in July. “The more we thought about these ideas, the more we knew we had to get them into the game you will all be playing. However, there was only one problem. We would need more time. Time that we didn’t have if we decided to move forward with launching in just a couple of months.”
We’ve reached out to EA to ask if it will have another beta now that Visceral is getting it ready for its new release date. We’ll update this story with any new information.