Provi said:
Frostiken said:
...but Tribes was greater than the sum of its parts.
Can't Hawken be more than the sum of its parts as well?
The problem there with Hawken is that we've got little data to go on, but from what I've seen there's not a lot to it. Ignoring the staple FPS elements and gameplay, you can apparently capture territory, build defenses, and you have neato jetpacks to propel you around. Tribes, now keeping in mind that this is late-90s / 2000, brought dozens and dozens of new concepts to FPS gameplay that hadn't been seen before. The large outdoor environments, the high playercount, multi-seat vehicles (in fact multiplayer vehicles were pretty much invented by Tribes), jetpacks, the pack system, and the overall concept of generators / turrets / defenses. Nothing had ever before been seen like it, and I daresay that nothing that ambitious has been seen since.
Hawken appears to just rehash some old gameplay with nothing to really draw interest except for the graphics. It's hard for me to acknowledge that it could be greater than the sum of its parts, particularly because we haven't seen any "parts" which either means they haven't shown them to us, or they simply don't exist. You would think an exciting new gameplay gimmick is something you'd want to show off, so given the lack of one, I assume none exists. The graphics and "mech" aspect appears to be that hook, and given the timeless rhetoric of "graphics > gameplay"... well...
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Let's say Hawken adopts all of the game mechanics you wished it had from the mech games you mentioned. In that case, Hawken would still having nothing to separate itself from the rest. It would still be an amalgamation of ideas from other games, like it is now.
I think that's being a little generous, after all FPS games haven't been called 'Doom clones' for over a dozen years now. Jumping around shooting things isn't an 'idea' anymore, no less  than saying 3D environments are.
I'm not saying that every game has be some sort of absurd artsy-fartsy indy gimmick, but you gotta have 
something. You don't even need something new - you can even take an old idea and polish it with your own twist. The game needs something memorable. Natural-Selection exploded onto the FPS scene with its inclusion of a 'Commander' mode predating Battlefield 2 by three years, as well as heavily asymmetric gameplay. Hell people are still putting RTS in FPS and pretending it's something 'new'. 
Now, NS was pretty revolutionary, so back up a bit - Dystopia had its excellent Cyberspace, and even barring that, something as simple as the implant system worked well enough. A page you can bring up to customize aspects of your digital mans in more ways than just their guns and armor - hardly a new concept, but the kind of implants and how they supplemented gameplay so well is what made it work.
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars was, at its surface, a good game. It got great reviews, it sold well, yet... nobody played it. The game completely flopped as far multiplayer counts go. I attribute this to the fact that the game's only hook was 'the successor to W:ET.' Even to this day, W:ET is still more popular. Wolfenstein did something new, QW just tried to create a game in a sterile lab engineered to be 'fun' to people who like W:ET, and because of this, it wasn't any fun at all.
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I think we've become too concerned with the 'newness' of games that we overlook the most important aspect of them: whether they are fun. In the end it doesn't matter if they innovate if they are still boring games for those who play them.
First of all I think the 'fun' aspect is overrated. Yeah, you heard that right, but mostly because 'fun' is such an ambiguous term it's like describing Will Ferrel movies as 'funny' in the same sentence as Dr. Strangelove. Sure, they're both funny, but one's only funny if you're a total idiot.
Take Minecraft - sold a batrillion jillion copies, yet the game doesn't actually have anything 'fun'. You literally have to make your own fun, and yet players are happy with that. Not my cup of tea, but I can respect the fact that the gameplay is something different.
Which one of these do you think is more 'fun'?
A or 
B?
A or 
B?
A or 
B?
My stance on this is the reason more and more AAA games are tending to revolve around extremely linear gameplay and cutscene after over-the-top cutscene is because by turning the games into heavily scripted movies you've taken the ambiguity of 'fun' out of the equation. People can't criticize your gameplay when you aren't playing... It's the reason you get shot in the face once in MW1, by MW2 you got shot in the face three times.
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What kind of innovation are you looking for in Hawken? Is the innovation you're looking for really innovation? Is it realistic for a team this size? Is it fun for most players?
Define 'most players'. This even goes as far as which platform it's being played on. The PC crowd is going to tolerate slower, deeper gameplay more than the spazoid Xbox crowd will. I don't even know how the game feels, all I've seen is a couple Youtube videos, within which it appears they're playing with an Xbox controller. I can think of a few things that would at least retain the pacing while bringing out the mecha aspect, notably equipment upgrades and localized damage. The entire point is that the criminal sin of this game is that it's mech, but appears to go absolutely nowhere with the mech aspect. So you bring out the mech aspect - that's the innovation I want.
Using it to explain why you can take tons of damage, have unlimited ammo, and can fly around the place doesn't convince me of anything.
I'm also somewhat annoyed that the weapons themselves are the stereotypical FPS variety - the long-range ultra-precise high-damage hitscan weapon, the 'grenade launcher' weapon, the 'machine gun'... you can only go so far with these, I admit, but seriously, seeing the 37,592th iteration of the Quake railgun is sickening and yawn-inducing.