[PC Game] Hawken (Now on Steam)
- Thread starter Ravenpoe
- Start date
Necronic
Staff member
Dude there's already a thread up for this
https://www.halforums.com/threads/hawken-closed-beta-signup.27140/
https://www.halforums.com/threads/hawken-closed-beta-signup.27140/
A thread from two years ago that's closed and cannot be posted in?
I know you're the thread necro, but you could have at least linked my original thread from only a year ago!
https://www.halforums.com/threads/hawken-free2play-mechs-open-beta-now.29101/
GasBandit
Staff member
Apparently it's not free to play yet (the $30 package gets you in early I guess), but in what way? Granted, MWO is terrible and if it wasn't for the Mechwarrior IP nobody would play it, but I'm worried that Hawken looks a little less Mechwarrior and a lot more... Quake 3.
Oh, sorry, I hadn't realized it was in early access on steam. Everyone that was in the beta automatically got a free steam copy.
It's really more that MWO is shit than anything else, really. Hawken is both faster paced and slowly marauding mechs. The mechs (especially the heavy C-classes) move at a relatively slow pace, but are able to perform quick bursts of speed and agility. It takes a lot of damage to put a mech down, so you aren't going to be one-hit sniping anyone, though you might be able to 3-hit a light mech (if they're dumb enough to stand still long enough to do that with a sniper railgun).
Mechwarrior crossed with Quake is a good way to put it.
GasBandit
Staff member
Do they worry about things like component damage? IE, can an arm or leg get shot off, or is the whole mech one big unified hit box pulling from the same HP pool?
Necronic
Staff member
As far as I can tell they don't, which is a real shame.
I still reall loved MWO up until the day I stopped playing it. I still really don't know what killed it. I guess it was the lack of maps etc, and I guess they started doing a golden bullet thing? I wasn't ever really sure what the final nail was, for me it was just that it got boring since they didn't add enough content.
edit: I don't think component damage could even work in Hawken. Hawken has a "self repair" ability which is a pretty integral part of the game. I don't know how it would work with component damage.
I still reall loved MWO up until the day I stopped playing it. I still really don't know what killed it. I guess it was the lack of maps etc, and I guess they started doing a golden bullet thing? I wasn't ever really sure what the final nail was, for me it was just that it got boring since they didn't add enough content.
edit: I don't think component damage could even work in Hawken. Hawken has a "self repair" ability which is a pretty integral part of the game. I don't know how it would work with component damage.
GasBandit
Staff member
If I didn't have RL friends playing it, I probably would stop. Heck, as it is right now, even despite that I'm giving them a little time to fix the bugs the introduced with this awful new "UI 2.0" patch.
That and I have a Love/Hate relationship with my whatever-the-MWO-name-for-guild-is.
GasBandit
Staff member
They inadvertently broke custom video settings, made the graphical presets actually load other presets than what they say they do (Low loads high, ultra high loads medium, etc), they redid the mech bay so that now it takes 9 times as long to figure out what modules you have in which mechs, they don't show ammo on the mech summaries (so I once spent 30 minutes hunting for a stray ton of AC/2 ammo I couldn't find in the mech that I had removed the AC/2 from... yes, that bad), overall the mechbay in general is now piss poor. They tweaked the social window but you still can't have it open while you do anything else, so no idea if your group is ready to drop or not without teamspeak, oh and they put in reflective cockpit glass that is scratched and pitted all to hell and headache-inducing for some (including me) that you can't turn off. Among other things.
Also, did you quit before they introduced ghost heat, and nerfed then buffed then nerfed then buffed LRMs? And the change to make you have to hold down the button to "charge" your gauss rifle and then release it withing 1 second of it finishing charging or abort the shot?
Also, did you quit before they introduced the Spider mech, which basically is immune to lasers?
GasBandit
Staff member
Frankly, by listening too much to the community instead of sticking to the initial vision. They instituted a role-based combat system. Brawlers brawl to keep the action away from the fire support, who depend on the scouts to find targets for them. The light scout signals they found a target, the LRM indirect fire support hiding in cover in back starts raining destruction, and suddenly people are spamming the forums about how overpowered LRMs are. So LRMs get nerfed into oblivion for both accuracy and damage. So the battlefield dynamic starts switching away from fire support and scouting to brawling and squirreling - and emphasis switches from "missile boats" (boats, for our audience, is MWO-speak for a mech that only loads 1 type of weapon for simplicity's sake and minmaxing) to laserboats, gauss snipers, and AC40s (a "boat" consisting of two AC/20s and little, if anything, else).
Again, the forums rise up in cacophany about how this that or another "boat" is ruining the game with its no-strategy imbalanced builds. Everybody should be forced to have 5 weapons groups of various range and type, right? So PGI introduces "ghost heat," that is, bonus heat that comes out of NOWHERE when two or more (depending on weight, the limit was 5 MLasers or 2 LLasers or gauss rifles, and ONE AC/20 at a time) of the same weapon are fired simultaneously. IE, you fire one AC/20, you get a 15% heat bloom. You fire both, you get a 70% heat bloom. You fire one Medium laser, you get a bump of 7% heat. You fire 6, you get 70% or thereabouts. I have a buddy who had 6 large lasers and nothing else on his Atlas AS7-BH (Boar's Head hero variant). And one alpha strike immediately shut him down if he was at min heat to start... and an alpha at any level higher than minimum would cause him to explode. Also, people constantly complained about how Gauss Rifles were unfair because of their damage and range with no drawbacks (other than their weight of course) so their nerf was a charge up time... to fire the gauss rifle, you now have to hold the fire button down until the light turns green, then let go. If you keep it held down too long, the shot aborts and you have to start over.
Right now, it's been my experience that most matches are won by wolfpacks of light mechs, particularly jenners and spiders, because they're so small and quick that ballistics almost always miss them due to lag, and lasers all divide their damage over the 1 second duration of their beam being on, so the crazing beams of light zigzag across them doing very little of their max damage to any one appendage or torso section. Say you've got 4 medium lasers and shoot them at a jenner running 140kph, and half the duration misses entirely, and the other half is spread across an arm, a torso section and a leg? That's about 3 damage per armor group, And most shots are worse than that. I generally run a CDA-3m Cicada with ECM, which is technically a 40 ton medium but really behaves more like a light - a jenner that ate too much and got too fat for jump jets. It runs at 142.6 kph and only has a 20 point alpha (1 large pulse laser, 2 medium lasers) but I routinely do 10 times my weight in damage just because nobody can really hit me when I'm running and dodging, and when they do, it's usually a laser shot dragged across me which divides the damage between 3 or 4 armor groups. And forget about the spider... it's so small and limbs so spindly, you might as well be shining a flashlight at it for all the damage your lasers will do.
Boy, did that end up being a rant, or what.
GasBandit
Staff member
As I've said several times before, the only, only thing this game has going for it is the Battletech IP recognition and the basic mechwarrior game paradigm. If this exact same game was built based around a new IP with no iconic mechs/names/lore, it would have died a long time ago because nobody would play such a poorly made mess.
I'm just waiting for my RL friends to realize that. Unfortunately the suckers have each dropped well over $200 in real life money into buying stuff in the game, so that has probably locked them in.
Which reminds me, want to preorder a Timberwolf ("Mad Cat" to you freebirth inner sphere scum)? Only $55, to be delivered in 6 months*!
*these people have never, ever met a deadline ever
Necronic
Staff member
There;s an interesting article that goes into more details about all the screwups. I am astounded that a company would fuck up this bad.
http://www.gamefront.com/mechwarrior-online-forum-ragesplosion/
Anywho, can we talk about Hawken now? Hawken is pretty neat guys.
http://www.gamefront.com/mechwarrior-online-forum-ragesplosion/
Anywho, can we talk about Hawken now? Hawken is pretty neat guys.
The shut down mechanic is a lot of fun, and also makes you prone to pursuing enemies because if they get away they're going to be able to repair, but of course this can be used to bait enemies into chasing you towards your teammates.
Spotting enemies is also important. Enemy mechs usually only show up on your radar if they're boosting, firing, or landing on the ground, and only within a certain proximity of you. If you have line of sight on an enemy mech though, you can press the spot button (no idea what the default is, I have it rebound to a mouse button) to mark them on your team's radar for as long as you see them. The scanner deploy-able equipment will also do this automatically when an enemy comes in range of it.
Spotting enemies is also important. Enemy mechs usually only show up on your radar if they're boosting, firing, or landing on the ground, and only within a certain proximity of you. If you have line of sight on an enemy mech though, you can press the spot button (no idea what the default is, I have it rebound to a mouse button) to mark them on your team's radar for as long as you see them. The scanner deploy-able equipment will also do this automatically when an enemy comes in range of it.
GasBandit
Staff member
Exactly. In Mechwarrior, once you blow off a Jagermech's arms or turn an atlas into a pencil, you can safely ignore it for the rest of the match. Not so in this game... if you get somebody down to 5% and he gets away, he'll be back 15 seconds later at full health.