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Alright folks, here we go that massive write-up I’ve been promising for weeks. Finally got off a rotten potato and onto something… less potato-y. Still can’t play Hawken above 25fps, dammit. Anyways, this represents several months of on-again-off-again playing of console Hawken, or HOWKEN as we’ve come to call it. I’ve split it up over three posts: this one, a mech review, and where to go from here to PC. I’m going to preface each of them with a tl;dr because it is a shitton of reading and I know some of you have short attenhey look a kitty.
tl;dr HOWKEN is evidence of a development company trying and learning when it comes to framework, but lacking in QA, graphic and UI design, and an understanding of game mechanics. It’s not the shitshow people harped on about in the early days, but its also… not great.
Spoiler
Graphics/UI
tl;dr y’all’re bad at this fuzzy bunny
Spoiler
Problems:
Framerate. Holy hell this is what keeps me from playing most nights and is the single greatest point of population loss on the consoles by report. The vast majority of posts on social media, reddit and the forums about dropping the game have to do with the abysmal framerate. Anytime you have more than, like, 6 mechs on screen at the same time the game starts shuddering and the internal temperature climbs. Even with graphical tweaks and texture reductions, the game simply struggles to run on Xbox.
(I was going to do a comparison of HOWKEN and Overwatch’s reduced graphics settings, but Xbox live ate the Overwatch comparison video :( )
In both cases the graphics do not measure up to their PC counterparts but Overwatch runs butter-smooth. Yes, this is because the engine was designed from the ground up to run on console and yes HOWKEN is a shitty port of U3. That is no excuse for this level of graphical degeneration in 2016.
The poor graphics aren’t mitigated by the devs confusing choices of what graphical features they left in. Not only is film grain in without any means to turn it off, dynamic shadows remain on which a) is a useless drain on the system and b) let’s you see mechs through the goddamn floor still. Ideally the upcoming patch will address that oversight, but I’m not holding my breath.
Then there’s this fuzzy bunny.
Seriously? ADH fixed this, didn’t they? What’s it doing in HOWKEN?
The game looks terrible, comparatively and absolutely and unless that gets fixed, I really don’t think HOWKEN is going to have much of a life on consoles.
UI:
We all know what HOWKEN looks like at the moment. It looks like a third-year university project that got phoned in. Everything from the menu to the mech web uses harsh colours that don’t fit the muted, low-transparency, subdued tones found in game. Additionally…
Why the fuzz does the mech web lag? How did this get fuzzed up? This isn’t gameplay, this is an interactive menu. Come on, guys. This fuzz makes it really, really hard to take your work seriously and gets people thinking of the clusterfuzz that was the APB port.
I understand the tiny menus of the PC version (which needs a store overhaul at the very least) are not suited to console, but can you please make HOWKEN look like the sleek, slick and professional menus present on PC?
Speaking of sleek and slick, can you at least take a course in graphic design if you’re not going to hire a UI person? It doesn’t take someone with a BA to tell what’s wrong with the text in this picture.
The UI doesn’t just look janky, it operates jankily as well. When trying to view new mechs, it constantly tells you every time you switch a tab that you haven’t bought the mech. This is downright irritating and makes exploring the options frustrating.
In game, you can’t switch your mech’s weapons, for no reason I can figure out because there are availble buttons to map that function to.
There are some other menu-driven problems regarding the button mapping but those might just be personal and solveable with some remapping on my part, but that would take more time away from playing the game.
On the deep end of the UI issues are the aforementioned lack of “mech glamour shots”, you know the pics of them when you get killed. Some time spent in spectator mode and photoshop would glam these Reloaded mechs up, a measure that I think we can all agree they need.
Also this weird thing where the entire screen shakes when you swap MIRV/KLA in post-game.
Successes:
The server browser/gameplay type menus were transitioned well. Ditching player’s ping information is sometimes frustrating, but since it’s virtually impossible to diagnose or adjust this on console its removal is not the worst idea. The star system is still dumb though, particularly since matchmaking is a joke, but that’s outside the scope of this discussion.
I’m not being a fuzzy bunny here, but there is literally nothing that I can think of that looks appealing from a player perspective.
That was pretty bleak, but it gets better from here on out.
Items & Internals
tl;dr Creativity! Balance! Keep it up!
Spoiler
Problems:
Orblord - So we’ve beaten orblord to death in terms of discussion, so I’m going to keep this brief. The community will be pleased with the balance change to orblord as it has received a significant nerf to the point where only max-rank. What that nerf has revealed however is that at max rank...
(Xbox live ate 8 vids demonstrating the problem)
It’s still probably the best option, aside from some niche mechs. Does this mean that it’s broken? I don’t know. More community playtesting at a higher level and against higher level opponents than I can reliably find is probably necessary. Fundamentally, however, I think the very interaction of the extractor, repair kit and item orbs needs to be reworked from the ground up.
Heavy Armour - Worthless.
Makes goddamn everything easier to kill. There’s a reason it never made it into the game the first time around guys. I would maybe consider it on the Charge, as it has good synergy with its damage reduction ability, but that is literally the only mech I would select it on. Here’s how the damage reduction stacks - not worth on Bruiser, but over the secondsd that the charge uses it, you mitigate a quite a bit more damage.
Actually… changing… internals
Successes
MG Turrets - So. Much. Dakka. Turrets on console are useful to the vast majority of players due to autoaim and let me tell you when you run into a nest of 5 of them, you rapidly reconsider your life choices. This is much easier to accomplish in randoms because a LOT of players run them. For HOWKEN, I believe the MG Turret balance worked out.
Spark thing/lightning turret - A really cool item. Initially I thought this thing would be what breaks S2’s primacy on Origin and Wreckage, but it is pretty short range and needs line of sight to damage you. Basically, it does damage to a mech based on how many mechs are around it, in the form of a bolt of lightning. This is pretty much the ultimate anti-deathstar weapon. Two of these, cleverly hidden near a chokepoint and the deathball is gonna be in trouble. Three, and it’s probably over for a mech. That being said, it’s pretty niche due to those requirements.
Mixed Bag
Air Compressor - The light AC is useless across the board. The distance moved is irrelevant, the fuel consumed is stupid and its a useless gimmick. Nepa mentioned he found it useful as a 1-slot on Origin and presumably Uptown for jump pad cancelling, but with the plethora of other more useful, less punishing 1-slots at this point, I disagree. The medium is a good call on mechs with a large fuel tank, like Infil and Rocketeer and whatever new mechs have a decent tank. On other mechs, you’re probably gonna feel the fuel loss, so you’re trading short term maneuverability for long term sustainability. In this video I probably made a mistake in using the Infil as a test mech - its larger fuel tank makes the differences more difficult to see.
Below, you can see the interaction of the ACs and the ACs with heavy armour. Interestingly, while the various ACs do not register much difference on the infil’s fuel tank, the heavy armour does. This suggests its penalty is additive, similar to how the speed boosts are.
The New Ones
Sorry guys, I stopped playing before the drop of the new stuff. Maybe hestoned will be so kind as to give us a rundown, as I know he’s been trying the speed internals.
Servers
tl;dr ...
Spoiler
tl;dr I was going to do a whole spiel about servers and the quality, but honestly, it’s about what you expect from Hawken at this point. Reloaded does respond to serious problems relatively quickly and the servers would benefit from better hosts, but it is what it is. Population is another problem, which you all can take a look at HERE. There are several groups across PS4 and Xbox that try to organize high tier games, and those are basically your only hope of a decent game. I could feel myself get worse the more I played this damn game just because I didn’t NEED to push myself.
So that’s that. Sorry it’s so fuzzy, life has been incredibly rough for the past several months and I just wanted to get this off my plate. Phew. See you all when the PC patch drops.
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