Starhawk

Fans of Incognito's 2007 multiplayer-only Warhawk have been waiting for a few years to find out what new studio LightBox Interactive is up to. Made up of former members of the Warhawk team and led by Incognito/SingleTrac vet Dylan Jobe, Lightbox recently revealed their new game at an event in Austin, TX. Starhawk is the spiritual follow-up to the team's last game, and it once again lets gamers take to the skies or keep the battle on the ground. This time around, the new Build & Battle system allows players to drop in support structures and base defenses during the battle, introducing light RTS elements to the equation. We'll have a full preview in the next issue of our magazine, but you can check out the first details in our interview with Dylan Jobe right now.

The 1995 Warhawk was single-player only, while the 2007 Warhawk was multiplayer-only. Tell us what we can expect from Starhawk in terms of mode breakdown.

With any great shooter, you always end up logging way more hours with multiplayer than single-player. But just because you log way more hours on multiplayer doesn’t mean you should short-change single-player. We weren’t really happy with (2007’s) Warhawk’s single-player so we ended up cutting it, it just wasn’t coming together. With Starhawk, our single-player has come together really quite well. It’s got fresh new mechanics, a new cool world, and it’s one that I feel really good about keeping in the game.

Is it going to be comparable to other single-player campaigns in terms of length?

Yeah, you look at a lot of shooters out there and they can fluctuate. Some shooters are like five hours, and you can beat some in like eight. From my perspective, a marketing guy is always like “you gotta be at a minimum of whatever hours.” I think there’s some truth to that. If you release a game that’s too short, you’re kind of short-changing the players. But at the same time, quality trumps everything, right? So we’ve laid out a number of missions. Which ones actually stick in the game, we’re not sure yet. There’s a lot of editing that goes on. I think our single-player campaign will be comparable to Call of Duty or the other key shooters out there.

A lot of developers will split up their campaign and multiplayer teams. Is that the case with Starhawk, or is it all one team?

Splitting the team, from my experience, is not necessarily the best thing to do. There’s a couple reasons why. Sometimes studios have all of their network programmers in a separate department, and then their gameplay programmers throw stuff over the wall and then they just strap it to the network. That’s not really solid. That’s not necessarily a good way to go. Our approach that’s working out pretty well for us is all of the gameplay programmers are required to make all of their stuff online, right from the get-go. In our co-op mode, when you can fight against A.I., you’ve got a couple guys fighting together as Rifters against the Outcasts, all of the A.I. code and all of that stuff is already synced across the network. Our game is very, very network-integrated from day one, because everyone writes the network code. Even our game designers that write scripts for missions or multiplayer modes, they do all the synchronization themselves.

Starhawk will contain a four-player co-op mode. Will the entire campaign be playable this way?

Looking at it, this story is about Emmett Graves. Do we want to introduce another character to kind of mix things up? We actually said “no, we don’t.” We would much rather create a mode even though it costs more from a production standpoint, we’d rather create a new mode from the ground up that is really geared for co-op. For example, the demo you saw here, we were protecting that rift, and building our defenses and all that. Our co-op mode allows you to do that. You have four players, you all play together, you share rift energy, and you try to survive as long as you can.

Is this set in the same universe as Warhawk, or do you view this as a new IP?

Re-imagined. We call it Starhawk because it is a more futuristic take on the world as you saw. It’s the frontiers of space. But at the same time, the essence, the DNA of Warhawk is still there. But we’re bringing it over to single-player and all of the other elements of the game.

Many multiplayer games in this generation stress persistent perks and unlocks instead of the more old school weapon pick-up variety. Will Starhawk incorporate a level-up system that affects more than cosmetics, or will every player stand on equal ground at the beginning of each match?

There’s a skill system in the game. In Warhawk, when you leveled up, you pretty much just got these cosmetic add-ons. It’s cool and all but that’s not good enough. Given all of the different vehicles and buildings and complexity, really the depth of the game, it really fit perfectly for a skill system. As it’s designed right now, and it’s always fluctuating, there are 100 levels in the game. They don’t have names like Lieutenant or Super Drago or anything, it’s level 1, level 2, level 3. You get a skill point every level, and there are a ton of different skills in the game. Some skills have a minimum level requirement, some skills require five points to unlock, and they’re all over the place. We’re testing with a palette of about 20 skills right now which is just a small selection of what we’ll have. They’re anything from enhanced pilot, which allows you to fly faster in the hawk, or better weapons tactics that allow you to lock-on weapons faster, or allows you to heal vehicles. Or the architect skill where your buildings are built a little better than the other people’s. There’s all kinds of little permutators, and we let the players select one skill at a time. It’s not like you have a perk and a skill, you just get a skill.

Gamers could choose between a retail disc or a download for Warhawk. How do you plan on distributing Starhawk?

We loved supporting downloads on the Playstation Network for Warhawk, and it was actually really, really successful for us. But, the girth of the game...it just really wasn’t practical. So it’s a Blu-ray.

A huge part of what made Warhawk great was the maps, which accommodated combat via airships, ground vehicles, and on foot. Will Starhawk have a similar focus on varied combat, or will it be more constrained to the sky?

In this mission (from the demo), there was a lot of ground shooter stuff and then some air stuff, but then what it comes down to in Starhawk is that it’s up to the player. If you were to put someone else to play that demo that you just saw here at our unveiling, they would have played it a totally different way. They might never have gotten into a hawk. Or they might have built a launchpad right off the bat and built a hawk. During all those troop waves, they could fly around and do strafing runs. It really depends on how the player wants to play. Do we support all kinds of variation? Absolutely. We did in Warhawk and we do even moreso in Starhawk.

There are plenty of different play styles that you can beat it with, but is there typically a preferred way to go about each mission?

Truth be told, anytime that you talk to a guy, a designer, or whatever, and he tells you “there is no optimal path”...boring. I mean, it’s mathematically impossible. So yeah, there are optimal paths. What we try to do when we design our maps, we call that the thru-line. This map requires you to know the pod beacon and the garage. We really make sure you’re going to use those, but we have this other cool thing where there are non-critical path Build & Battle parts, and they’re called salvage. A player who’s just flying around or driving around can pick up salvage. In the demo that you guys saw, the wall and the bunker were not critical path. You grab that salvage and then Cutter says “oh, I’ve got that salvage. I can help you out with that.” Then you can play the mission a different way. All missions have a thru-line, but there are different ways to play each mission. Each mission has different ways you can play that pay out with an XP bonus.

Will we be seeing more than two factions this time around?

The rifters and the outcasts. Two factions, and in fact, early on we looked at doing some asymmetry. It was with all of our troop modes, ground vehicles, air vehicles, buildings, and the speed of our combat, it was gonna be really really tricky to get that down straight. I don’t know if we’d be able to get it perfectly balanced. In a multiplayer game, if you don’t have it balanced you get ragged on. I would get so many tweets it would be ridiculous.

While the 2007 Warhawk was met with a favorable reception by many gamers, its initial months were plagued with server errors and stat resets. Are there additional safeguards in place to ensure Starhawk won’t face similar issues?

Absolutely. You’re totally right. When we launched Warhawk, there were a number of server issues due to player load and all of this stuff. Sony systems are more mature now, and quite frankly we learned a lot from Warhawk. When we started Starhawk, we actually looked at the network infrastructure that we had from Incognito. We said "Okay, do we want to move forward with it?" No. We gutted it, completely. From the ground up, we re-wrote all the network infrastructure for Starhawk. That accommodates a couple things. It accommodates better data mining so we can see what players are doing for balance. It allows us to do hot-fixes. Here’s a common thing that was just ****ty in Warhawk...there would be a hole in the map. Our maps were so big, it was hard to bulletproof every nook and cranny. There’d be a hole in the map, and then a YouTube video would go up about it, and people would exploit it. An optimal path. That whole system was so hard and laborious to fix that it’s not fair to the players. Now, for mode balance, weapon balance, stats, filling in collision holes, fixing little glitches, all of that stuff...we can react really, really quickly. We’ve been quite inspired by how Naughty Dog has been able to rapid-fire respond on Uncharted, and they’re already ridiculously great anyways. But the way they handle their quick response fix, they kind of really set the bar.

What’s the maximum player count?

32. Honestly, I have always wondered if we should support less because of Build & Battle, and it’s so intense and frenetic. I don’t know, maybe it’s a prejudice or something. I really want to support 32 players. If you’re playing on a Warhawk server that was running really well with 32 players, it was pretty awesome. That was another thing that we changed. In Warhawk, we really had one of the first PS3 clusters on the planet, if you remember those images of racks and racks of Playstation 3s. It gave us great horsepower, but the fact of the matter was that it was really a problem. It wasn’t really a standardized set of network blades that an IT department and network operation center could really rock and interact with. That was one of the big things we changed. Also, you had players out there who would host their own servers for Warhawk. They wouldn’t have enough bandwidth to host a lot of players, and that’s ****ty. We said “Okay, you can host your own game. Sony will eat the bandwidth for it, we’ll host it. If you wanna have a 24-32 player game even though you really don’t have the bandwidth...so be it."

Will you be incorporating split-screen support again?

Yeah, absolutely. We’re not doing 4-way split-screen. That’s something important to note. Four-way split-screen in Warhawk, really when it came down to it, there was so much development cost that went into doing it. When we really looked at the number of players from our data that used it, it was really hard to justify. Especially with Build & Battle and all of our other core systems, we thought it was better to just focus on two screens, which is more common. There’s other great stuff like storing controller configurations and customizations up on the network, so you can go to your buddy’s house and log in and get your stats and control map and all of that stuff.

With the open-endedness of this game, is it fair to call this somewhat of a sandbox shooter?

Yes, but I think we should caveat it. We don’t want to represent it, because a lot of times when people hear sandbox they think of Red Dead or Grand Theft Auto and these amazingly gargantuan sandbox games. For us, we think of them as combat sandboxes. It’s not like you’re traveling 400 miles and all of that stuff. You still progress from what amounts to mission to mission to mission, and movies help blur the lines. Once you’re in that mission, it plays exactly like you said. It’s like a little combat sandbox. Here’s the combat challenge, that challenge, and here’s the toys that you’ve got, and here’s the enemies that are going to attack. Go. It’s really like a high-budget, high-def, almost like a Plants vs. Zombies kind of thing. You’ve got some stuff to defend, you’ve got some stuff to attack, you’ve got units that you gotta use.