Battlefield veteran reveals hilarious vehicle that had to be axed because it was impossible to balance

As with any multiplayer franchise, the Battlefield series has been held together by stringent balancing with frequent patches. Hardline, a maligned 2015 spin-off game, was designed by Visceral Games, the team behind the brilliant expansions of the third game, but the team wasn’t able to include everything they wanted.

In an interview with VideoGamer on the latest episode of our podcast, Hardline’s multiplayer lead designer Thaddeus Sasser explained that there was a hilarious vehicle that had to be cut from the game. For one Hardline map, a drivable Segway was planned to be introduced, but the team had accidentally made it one of the most powerful vehicles in the game.

Battlefield Hardline’s forgotten Segway

Speaking to VideoGamer, Sasser revealed that a Segway vehicle was designed and finished for Battlefield Hardline’s Black Friday map. Added as part of the Criminal Activity DLC map, which Sasser admits very few gamers actually played, the map was supposed to include a Segway vehicle that gamers could zoom around on, but it was resulted in a massacre.

“We had to cut that, sorry. No more Segway for you,” Sasser told us. “We had the Black Friday Mall map, and we had the Segway in the Mall map. And we had to cut it out because the testers would ride the Segway up and down the escalators and kill the entire team.”

“It was hilarious, but it did not make for a fun map.”

BATTLEFIELD VETERAN THADDEUS SASSER

As the map revolved around using the escalators to get into the action, the scrapped vehicle was primed for virtual slaughter. Cop players running up the escalators would be mowed down constantly by robbers zooming around on the hilarious vehicle.

“It was not good,” Sasser laughed. “It was hilarious, but it did not make for a fun map.”

Sasser explained that Hardline’s existence before the true boom of live service gaming meant that a lot of scrapped ideas never got their time to shine. While games like The Finals can benefit from hilarious short-term events with unbalanced loadouts, Hardline’s silliness was just a few years before the curve.

“If I could have unvaulted that for Halloween or Black Friday, if we had that ability, oh my God, that would have been amazing. ‘This week only, get your Segway on!’”

Nowadays, almost a decade after, Sasser is working on NetEase’s upcoming free-to-play hero shooter Marvel Rivals. For more on that project, read about how the game director believes datamining only hurts players and devs.