Does the fact that Battlefield: Hardline is being released a year after Battlefield 4 mean that the series is being annualized? According to EA, it does not.

According to an article on Polygon, EA Studios executive vice president Patrick Söderlund said, "Karl-Magnus [Troedsson], who runs DICE studios, and Steve Papoutsis, who runs Visceral, basically met in Barcelona almost three years ago and they came to me and said 'Hey, we have an idea. Actually, the idea of a cops and robbers type Battlefield game has been with us — me and the DICE team — for more than ten years. There are early prototypes from, like, 2000 or 2001 of a game that we called back then Urban Combat. This has been lingering and we've been wanting to do something like this."

In a nutshell, Hardline's release just means that EA is letting DICE and Visceral make the game that they want to make. It just so happens that they wanted to create a cops and robbers-esque, Battlefield-styled game for release this year.

Söderlund said, ""It doesn't necessarily mean that we need to annualize Battlefield and that's the way it's going to be forever and ever. I understand that some people may look at it that way but that's what happened."

So, for the moment, we can rest assured that the beloved Battlefield series won't suffer from annualization, which certain fans might fear will degrade the overall quality of the games. Battlefield: Hardline will be released on Oct. 21 or PC, Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4.

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