Anyone tried Hawken yet? F2P reference

(Bloodbite) #1

I’ve given the open beta for Hawken a brief try. I have to say I quite like the feel and pace of the game.

I was struck with the F2P nature of leveling and was wondering if there was a way of keeping that into consideration for our discussions for DB when the time comes to test that side of things.

The referencing I have in mind is… I find it interesting how each mech has a leveling setup that, while it’s possible to argue you can P2W and unlock things quick with an insta-payment for ingame currency/credits, the actual freebie side of things doesn’t feel like a grind. What’s more it was one of those moments where it made me consider throwing some cash at the game simply because I liked it, despite me being a tight arse most of the time.

Again, I’m not saying we should launch into yet another discussion about F2P before DB is ready for testing what SD have already sketched out, but… BUT…

… I’d recommend all of you that have a strong view about the F2P side of things that you want to argue when the time comes to try out Hawken and see what I mean. A career based leveling system per class, kind of like their mech based leveling, that is outside of the session based XP system and could be considered in a way that feels as seamless like it does to me in Hawken, and grindless (which I think Tribes did feel very grindy pre-GOTY edition, haven’t tried it post).

I think it would help not only in considering how to cater our expectations based on a competing title that seems to be getting the F2P model ‘right’, but also expand on what we may not have considered since we’re all so used to thinking of this only within the confines of an FPS model. I have to say Hawken opened my mind as to why my current thoughts for DB went only so far because of those unintended genre based confines.

There is also Warface, but that’s a closed beta at the moment, so if any of you are in that, I suppose it’s not something you can talk about at the moment due to the usual NDA, but it is worth keeping an eye on that title too because it does seem to have some “class” based similarities, at least in the eyes of the uninitiated and the simpletons out there. We saw those stoopid comparisons between TF2 and Brink afterall… I reckon it’ll happen with Warface.

(Bangtastic) #2

i played the russian open beta of warface back couple of months ago… now with gface here in Europe and im actually able to play it but this game doesnt have a nice feeling.

The sliding stuff was kinda sluggish, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHnIThC4i4Q, no good footage, but you get an impression

i didnt played the closed beta version though to say whether things improved, if u want i can test it for you… i guess its just the same ^^. for me its just the usual F2P fps just as, AVA arctic combat, all this korean fps titles are pretty much the same. The only good thing about is the coop campaign mode^^ And graphics are just nice on screenshots^^

Conclusion: Warface is for me rather a disappointment. Its not the quality game, I was looking for. Its just worth playing couple of sessions. I will test it again, and give you actual feedback whats good or bad about the game. I dont think there is big NDA right here, since ppl are talking about and uploading lots of vids… i mean in eastern europe, asia the game available for a long time, without vpn connection np. I guess SD will also introduce a platform such as GFACE.

You know it feels like every other korean Unreal engine FPS, everything looks the same, feels the same, like an empty shell of a game.

The only F2P FPS title i really enjoyed was APB:Reloaded (third person), it isnt superior to other games gameplaywise, but it does things different than other games, that is what i appreciated and i spent over hundred of hours in this game. Bad thing about is pay2win, but you can do pretty well with standard weapons^^

I just discovered Renaissance Heroes, some japanese arena shooter clone, but it isnt so bad actually.

Warframe will be available on steam soon, looks cool, but i dont think it will make it. Cool thing about is the ninja style gameplay, i will give it a shot.

Hawken or Mechwarrior, dont know which one will be better… I enjoyed playing Earthsiege II as a lil kid :slight_smile:

I played Insurgency 2 which isnt a F2P game i think it has great potential to go beside CS as a COD/BF3/CS (infantry gameplay) mix.
Weapons feel great since you can one hs ppl^^ but spread can be crazy at times, ADS is a must. Old insurgency players are complaining that it is too fast paced oO

(kilL_888) #3

i have played the tutorial for hawken and i “hacked” myself into the russian version of warface. hawken seems to be a great game and i definetely will take a look at it again, once it’s released. is it released already? no clue.

warface is as mediocre as it can get. it has some nice features like sliding on the ground and climbing walls but it’s not implemented very well. overall it’s just mediocre and i’m not interested enough to get invested into it. it does have a PVE aspect which differentiates it from other first person shooters but i don’t find it engaging enough.

generally i think there are almost too many free2play titles on the market. everyone tries to get a piece of the pie and since call of duty is the most popular shooter of them all, everyone tries to copy it. so, even though there is a pletora of games to choose from, they all offer almost the exact same things. and since i’m not a fan of cod, i don’t want to play any of these.

(tokamak) #4

The luxury of a retail product is that you’re not competing for the time of a gamer. Not directly at least. Gamers can go on binges where they buy whole stacks of games, half arsing them and moving on.

With an F2P title the amount a player invests into a game is tied to the amount of time he spents on it. That way the market seems to saturate faster because there’s a hard limit of time a day a player can spend on one game.

(Bangtastic) #5

just played now warface… its a browser game oO^^ ok better back to QL^^

(Nexus_) #6

I’m pretty sure the reason for the sliding on things like stairs in Warface is because of Warface being a CryEngine 3 game and that’s just how the CryEngine 3 physics are I believe, I tried Crysis 2 a while ago (CryEngine 3 game) and I’m pretty sure it was the same feel. Also when you scope in CryEngine 3 it seems to have an unusually long start lag for the scoping, idk, those are just 2 features of the CryEngine 3 imo, I’m sure some people like it, I don’t like the sliding but the start lag on scoping is something I’m not sure how to perceive due to a lack of time playing on the CryEngine 3. I’m pretty sure that Crytek purposely added these featuress to the CryEngine 3, but maybe it’s a result of their bad coding lol, it wouldn’t surprise me if that was the case.

But anyways, Warface is pay2win, and pay2win = bad. It doesn’t seem that Crytek will ever develop a game without problems according to all of their game releases. I find it funny that Warface would actually be ok if it wasn’t pay2win, but of course Crytek has to give the one game of theirs that has no problems (imo) such a gigantic problem that it makes the game useless. Warface is similar to this game imo, but this game beats it in every way I can think of imaginable, it would really just come down to a preference of the art style, atmosphere, game play/mechanics/engine, and the user’s opinion on pay2win. Luckily as of lately it seems that the pay2win trend is dying in society.

(Bloodbite) #7

Warface might still get some tweaks and things for the shoddy responsiveness you were getting… then again it may just be too powerful an engine to be in a browser for most current systems?

I’ve tried it recently, and I mentioned the NDA thing because I believe the closed beta aspect of things right now is about their GFACE platform, and how they’re integrating it into the game, so it’s not something we should be talking about outside of their forums… but what I tried from the CryEngine side of things, I didn’t actually feel like things were sliding during the training level… but I do have an excessive amount of hardware power AND there wasn’t any ping/lag entering the equation for that single player level.

Right now it’s still a very unpolished game, whereas Hawken is better than most retail games. More polished looking and with superior netcode than a lot of AAA retail releases. I actually didn’t mind playing on servers that saw me sitting there with a 200 ping.

I don’t think the Hawken release date is really going to matter either. Open Beta’s are really promo periods pre ‘gold’ release, and everyone’s profile XP and purchases carry over.

(SinDonor) #8

I like Hawken a lot, but not enough to drop money on it.

With that being said, if they added a campaign (co-op too), opened up all the “pay for” stuff, and had some other modes like Horde/Bots etc, I’d gladly pay $40-$50 for it retail.