Some aspects of Battlefield Hardline are being changed based on feedback from beta testers, DICE's Steve Papoutsis tells VG247 in a discussion of plans for the police-themed shooter. Here's his outline of major alterations:

There’s a handful that really stand out. The first one is something the community asked for, and that’s having faction-specific weapons. In the beta everyone used all the same weapons. We wondered if people would like it if they were invested in their P90, but when they were on the other faction they couldn’t use it? Previous Battlefield games have had faction-specific weapons. After the feedback from the beta we’ve decided to make them faction-specific. There’s some weapons you’ll only get when you’re a criminal and vice-versa. It’s an easy one but it was surprising to us.

The other big change is more around explosives and some of the heavy duty weapons. Obviously with Battlefield you have this really solid foundation of rock, paper, scissors gameplay. The heavy weapons counter the vehicles, etc. There’s a great balance that the team has created over the years. We wanted to include RPGs and mines – and we did – but people felt that it took them out of the fiction a little bit; that you could just load up a character and equip an RPG. So that wasn’t an easy thing to get rid of because it’s part of the balance.

The design team came up with a cool ideas based on that feedback. One is to have some of those more powerful weapons be pick-ups so it creates a secondary objective. Some of the modes, like in Hotwire, the RPG cache is one of the objectives. If you control that cache your team has access to the RPG. And that creates more interesting gameplay. We also came up with the notion of ‘junk in the trunk’ – what if we allowed players to equip special items to their vehicle instead of their inventory loadout. It goes back to movies where bad guys pop open the trunk to grab something big. When you play the game, if you set up your vehicle loadout to have a specific weapon in the trunk and you control the vehicle you can use that item. So now you want to get a vehicle to get access to a specific weapon, which also fits the fiction better.