I started streaming that evening with the intent of expanding my viewer-base and assisting newcomers with helpful advice and necessary team direction. About an hour into the stream, Lead Dev TJ appeared in chat and asked to play with me! He added me as a friend and we went about TDM on US West servers and dominated.
For verification, he sent me his e-mail address and I confirmed it was him. He also had the tag [ADH] in front of his name in game.
He shared some useful knowledge on development and was generally very friendly towards everyone in the chat. Great guy. While there haven't been many patches lately, you can be assured that they're hard at work preparing the game for release. Among other things, TJ stated something along the lines of "80% of my time is devoted to optimization at the moment."
I'm going off of memory here, but that's the just of what he said about optimization. I also learned that Intel and nVidia have been cooperative with the devs, making it easier for them to optimize Hawken for Intel and nVidia products. AMD, on the other hand, hasn't helped at all.
Further, I was informed that Hawken is being developed with the hard-core gamer in mind. Though it may not be the team's primary focus, it is high on their list. TJ did state that he used to be a professional gamer, so I can assume he has a background in a highly-skilled environment. Sadly that's all I got from him on the subject, as there were a fair amount of questions being thrown around. Next time I'll be sure to archive the chat for future reference.
Other things I learned from the evening:
- They're working on fixing the matchmaking system and aim to bring back the server browser.
- TJ's favorite mech is Assault.
- There may eventually be a penalty for leavers.
- The team is still unsure about how they should go about balancing games and rating player skill for matchmaking.
- New maps, weapons, mech optimizations, and customization are in the works! We can expect a lot more variation and depth added onto the existing mech classes.
It's refreshing to see such big names so involved in the community. I'm excited both for the release of Hawken and whatever comes next from Adhesive!

 

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