Battlefield Hardline is rumored to be the next game in the Battlefield series, according to a lot of research performed today by multiple Internet sleuths. Samit Sarkar over at Polygon packaged it all together nicely:
The leak began with the discovery on the Better Battlelog forums of an initialism for a Battlefield game, “BFH,” listed for PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Windows PC, Xbox 360 and Xbox One. The forum poster also discovered four soldier classes: Enforcer, Mechanic, Operator and Professional.
After that, the logo above was posted on web developer Koen Vlaswinkel’s personal website, taken from the Battlelog website. He “and the Battlefield Daily Twitter account also posted artwork and icons that mention the two sides in the game, SWAT and Thieves, and modes such as Blood Money and Heist.” These images, including a riot shield, taser, handcuffs, money, and police vehicles, did nothing to dispel the rumor.
But wait – there’s more. Vlaswinkel also found proof that Visceral Games, the studio behind the Dead Space series, could be the studio developing the game. He “discovered an image of the word ‘visceral,'” which goes along with a report from earlier this year about a cops-and-robbers game codenamed Havana in development at Visceral.
I guess we’ll just have to wait until EA’s E3 press conference at 3:00 PM (Eastern Time) on June 9, and hope that the publisher will clear this up then.
UPDATE: EA has gone ahead and officially announced Battlefield Hardline. And it looks like we will learn more at this year’s E3 Expo.