With all the talk surrounding the cops and criminals fantasy present in Visceral Games’ upcoming shooter, Battlefield Hardline, you might recall a little Kickstarter project that surfaced in back April of 2012 called “Police Warfare,” a new first-person shooter in development at what was then a studio called Elastic Games.
While it certainly caught the attention of many shooter fans anxious to see the idea fully realized, it didn’t last very long. Only days later the studio abruptly and mysteriously cancelled the Kickstarter, leaving this note behind:
“Hey Guys,
Thank you so much for the incredible response to the game. We’re shutting down the kickstarter account but this is by no means the end of Police Warfare. News will be coming.
-EG TEAM”
With Battlefield Hardline now in the public’s eye and on course for launch this October 21, it’s hard not to jump to conclusions and speculate that perhaps the ex-Elastic Games developers somehow became involved in Visceral’s Project, and that the “news” that was “coming” was in fact the announcement of Hardline.
During our recent trip to EA’s headquarters in Redwood City, CA, we asked lead multiplayer designer on Hardline, Thaddeus Sasser, if there indeed is a connection between the two projects or studios. His answer was rather surprising.
“To my knowledge, there is none,” he said.
It’s clear that the ideas and concepts for both projects are awfully similar, so how could there not be some sort of correlation? Sasser explained his point of view. “So, if you go and think about a cops and robbers game set in the Battlefield universe, you’re going to come to a lot of the same kind of conclusions we arrived at.”
“So, this is one of my favorite things in the industry. I like to call it ‘design convergence,'” he explained. “Smart people thinking about the same subjects often arrive and some very similar ideas, and I don’t think that this means games are derivative or that this one is necessarily copying that one or the other. You see a lot that in the media. No, I think the game is kind of its own creation, and once you start to think about the breath of what Battlefield has to offer, and the ways we’re spinning it, I think you’ll see that this is its own game. It’s not copying any other game. It’s not based on any other game. It’s not – I’ve seen this game compared to everything from – oh man, you name it. If it’s a modern shooter and it’s got anything vaguely related to cops and robbers, we’ve been compared to it. So, I think you’re inevitably going to draw those comparisons.”
Looks like we won’t be finding out about the fate of Elastic Games and Police Warfare any time soon, in that case.
At least you’ll still be able to play Battlefield Hardline when it launches on October 21.