Battlefield Hardline Delay Pushes Back Battlefield 4's Final Stand DLC

Battlefield Hardline's delay until early 2015 won't mean fans have no new Battlefield content to play during the year's final quarter. Coinciding with the delay of Hardline, the release of the fifth Battlefield 4 DLC pack, Final Stand, has also been pushed back.

During a call with Electronic Arts investors yesterday, EA CEO Andrew Wilson mentioned that Final Stand is now "coming Q3." The company's fiscal Q3, to which he was referring, runs from October 1 through December 31.

Final Stand hadn't been given a release date previously--after all, the fourth DLC expansion, Dragon's Teeth, is not even in the hands of non-Battlefield Premium members yet. But with Hardline originally being scheduled for October 21, it's likely that Final Stand would have been released well in advance of that.

Hardline's delay stems in part from feedback received during last month's beta. EA Studios boss Patrick Söderlund said during the call that the beta had more than 1.7 million players--an impressive number, considering it was only available on PC and PlayStation 4. EA said it allowed the beta to go on longer "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.

"And things like the cops and robbers fiction maybe wasn't shining through properly, you know? 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.

"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 series creator DICE's GM, Karl Magnus Troedsson, said in a blog post yesterday that the extra development time will allow the game's single-player, multiplayer, and stability to be improved.