So, it's been a long, long time since I last played Hawken. I started playing in the very beginning, in the betaest of betas, years ago, and Hawken filled that little void in my heart reserved for a customizable mech shooter. Unfortunately, the game has not been as originally advertised for a while now, and it looks like it's going to keep going down that road. As a caveat, before I continue: Again, I have not played in months, and I will readily admit that nostalgia probably colors a lot of my opinions on the direction of the game. I hope my opinion is still considered, however.
I grew up with Mechwarrior/Battletech, Armored Core (very different kind of mechs,) and for a while, I even put my faith in Chromehounds, a game that I wish so badly had gotten the praise and sales it deserved. So when Hawken was first revealed, I was thrilled. Then I played it, and I was hooked. The visual customization was fairly standard, but appreciable. The tech point mechanic was fantastic. Every modification was almost negligible, but still just enough to be felt in-game. The speed of the mechs was absolutely refreshing, like a perfect balance between the thundering footfalls of Mechwarrior's titans, and the insane breakneck pace of Armored Core's Gundams on coke.
And then there were the new things Hawken brought to the table. Instead of the usual fare of desolated, bare open battlefields, we pilots were funneled into cities, complexes, forests. Our battlefields make us giant mice in a giant, fully-realized maze, littered with detail, ample cover, and numerous chances to really make the vertical capabilities of our mechs count. Not to mention the gorgeous skyboxes and the animations therein that frequently remind us that yes, we're in a war, and everybody's losing. I remember the first time siege mode and missile assault were introduced. I loaded up that barebones geometry and played a few entertaining rounds of what felt like your simple territories gametype. Then the finished build was released, and those points we were capturing actually mattered for something, and really drove home the scope of the game. We weren't just random schmucks in speedy rustbuckets anymore- those enormous ships, high above us, that we were trying to defend, they were fighting the war just as much as we were. In Hawken, we are constantly reminded that we are all part of something bigger. That the world isn't over yet.
And the cockpits. Does anybody else remember the old cockpits? The grunge, the grime, the sheer cobbled-together-ness of everything? Hawken managed to truly present a war-torn, devastated world falling apart without relying on any barren, empty swaths of desert or volcanic mountains, staples of a genre that has been dying for years. It was the breath of fresh air that we sorely needed.
I know I'm getting overly poetic, here, but I'm trying to make a point. If nothing else, Hawken is unique not for its mechanics but for its setting. For the way it realizes that setting. There is, in my search, nothing else like it out there. No other mech game that manages to narrow the scope, yet broaden the weight behind our encounters. There is something really special here, which is why it kills me that I've had to shelve it for so long.
I'm not really sure when the game started to decline, but I remember the big moment it hit me was when the cockpits changed. Chronologically, I have things a little confused, but I remember constant futzing around with the tech point system, with mech stats, with player rank and matchmaking- all things one should expect in a beta. But then those beautiful, grimy shitbuckets we got to sit in went away, and were replaced with some sleek, clean nonsense that bore no sensible geometry to half of the mechs we piloted. This, to me, was the Big Red Flag. Because instead of gaining something with a change, we lost a lot. Prior to the cockpit UI change, we had different cockpits for each tier of mech; a subtle but appreciated touch that added to the charm and feel of what we were piloting. They might have even been different for each individual mech, I can't remember. The point is that we lost a massive amount of immersion with this change, not just aesthetically with the change in textures but with the sheer homogenization of the cockpit styles as a whole. I believe the reason for this had something to do with VR, but lets be honest- they could have prepped the game for virtual reality without downgrading the experience. What did the devs do in response to this loss of immersion? Add bobbleheads.
And don't get me started on that health bar. I already rambled about that unreadable seizure of red blue and yellow years ago. Suffice it to say, the UI update was, at least for me, a downgrade in quick coherency as well.
Around the same time as the UI update, the nuances of the tech point feature were thrown out the window as well. The devs literally just up and said, "we can't figure out balance, so we're going to stop trying." While it's respectable to admit defeat, especially on something so complicated, this was death knell number two. Over the next several months, and subsequent updates and hotfixes, I watched what was a gem, a literal gem, albeit unpolished, get reduced into a reskin of a modern FPS. Ironically, this was happening while mainstream FPSes were embracing and continue to embrace more and more complicated and intricate customization and immersion. That's not to say Hawken is dead or like any other game, it clearly isn't, and I wouldn't be making this post if I thought these things couldn't be reversed or changed. But somewhere along the line, nuance, depth and player choice were systematically compressed into a very limited range of features. This has hurt the game immensely, in my eyes. I believe TTK was dropped at some point during this process as well.
So why am I making this post? Because, quite frankly, I'm disappointed, and I'm hoping somebody will listen. I was really, really excited when I heard Hawken got a new developer, one that was actually updating and seemed to be tweaking a lot of the core of the game, based off of what they hinted at in their blogposts. Like so many others, I'm sure, my head filled with thoughts of the glory days of Hawken and the resurgence of a genre ready to be taken off life support. I was thrilled. I even reinstalled the game, for a while, though eventually I couldn't get past the constant reminders that the game was a ghost of its former self.
So imagine my reaction, when I hear that after all this time, all these hopes and dreams, that the "big update" we all hoped was coming, that we all waited on with baited breath for over a year was... console ports. Not only that, but that the current game plan is to leave the PC version relatively untouched and simply add content. This is done under the guise of preserving what the devs call, "Classic Hawken."
I played Classic Hawken. I played it years ago, and it had a breadth of customization and immersion that rivaled and in some cases even exceeded all other options on the market. Classic Hawken had intricate stat customization, detailed (if limited) cosmetics, weapon choice, and a consistent, dirty aesthetic that was everywhere. The game has simply not been Classic Hawken for years now. It's been a watered-down, drowning corpse in the longest death throes for an IP I've ever seen. And there's a reason for that.
I want to have faith in the new developers, I do, especially since as far as I can tell there simply are no other options for this genre. Mechwarrior Online is a money-grabbing joke, M.A.V. is gradually losing its promise, and Titanfall is... well, it's not really a mech game. Also, Origin. But with this recent update my hopes are not very high. The only planned changes to the core of the game that I've seen, besides optimization and menu UI, have been the removal of the third weapon choice and chassis customization. This is the exact opposite direction Hawken should be going in. You guys have something beautiful here, with all this opportunity for growth, and you're turning it into a Frankenstein's monster of Call of Duty and TF2/Overwatch with a mech skin.
And that's all well and good, and I'm sure that game will be great. But it's not Hawken. I remember Hawken. And the mech genre sorely needs the real Hawken back.
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