Honestly the gameplay between then and now hasn't changed THAT much. Hawken is generally still the same mech sim/arena shooter franken hybrid it always has been.
If there's anything reloaded should take out of seeing these threads pop up every few months, it's that old hawken had way way more atmosphere. And that's pretty valuable in drawing in a wider user base. Most of us fell in love with the very first trailers that came out for hawken. And those of us that are still here, either fell in love with the game play, or are still in denial that Hawken isn't that game they saw in those trailers.
And sure we could argue semantics all day. Like oh some of those assets (sounds and such) where never in hawken. True. Or like, hey Hawken has always been hugely missadvertised, the advertising has never really accurately represented the game play. True. But the fact stands we're all here because Hawken looked sick. And not too rarely do people come around making these threads saying, "hey remember when hawken looked sick?"
This happens alot with "nostalgia goggles". Where people are too busy trying to poo all over each others opinions with the facts, rather than objectively assessing peoples perceptions. For starters you should realize perception is more important than reality. Also Nostalgia is probably one of the biggest, untapped creative tools of our generation. It shouldn't be a dirty word like it is currently.
What's that? You remember this old thing as being way cooler than it actually was? Ok well lets not point that out and call it a day. Lets take those over exaggerated views and use them as guidelines to make this product as good as you thought it was. If you can separate out those discrepancies between peoples glorified views of something, and how it actually was, you can use those views to make it better than it's previous reality, and closer to the peoples aged perception of it. Hit a nice middle ground with a level headed and sensible approach, you've got a golden formula there.
For any game to thrive it needs to draw in a certain amount of casual users in order to keep a healthy base community for newer players to integrate with. And from there you can cycle a certain subset up and up into more serious users. A better atmosphere, cooler graphics, w/e, could certainly help alot with that. I'm not certain it'd be a huge help, but then again it really might be. I mean that type of thing is going to subtly shape your initial impressions of an experience, and continue to grow on and comfort you as you log more time.
Anyways, MSV's super professional game plan:
Make Hawken like, way more cooler sounding/looking
Allow the competitive circle jerk to turn all that fuzzy bunny off if they so desire.
You'll see some people complain about that. They'll cry about how it's not fair because such n such user plays on low settings, and it doesn't make for an even playing field. But really? The knowledge itself for those types of settings will be mostly locked behind the gated community of the comp circjerk. And your average user who stumbles across them probably won't even think more than how it's just a simple setting providing accessibility to a wide range of pc specs. I'm assuming most of them won't immediately see a setting and say "hey this is something that could give someone else the upper edge."
The majority of people who think that are, in my opinion, a weird niche of players who can't comprehend either the joy of competing, and bettering yourself against other similarly skilled players, or the simplicity of just playing a game for their own isolated fun. The kind of person who has no interest in bettering themselves against others, but can't really have fun unless they're doing better than others.
Something something, we all thought hawken was cool, but now it's not, or is it really? and now MSV has made a long post about it pretty much rehasing everything everyone else has ever said on the matter.
/rant
Edited by Massive_Assailant_Stingray, 23 April 2016 - 01:51 AM.