Your Starhawk Questions Answered

I can’t believe I’m posting on the PlayStation Blog again. It’s been forever! So what’s new you ask? Well, let’s see, not too much — oh yeah, we announced Starhawk! *cough* Finally. *cough*

The team and I have been wicked happy with the response from the media and the fans so far. Seeing you guys excited makes all the late nights worth it! But, we still have a lot of work ahead of us so thanks for all of the positive energy. We all know a good reveal is just the first step in making our fans happy and we’re looking forward to showing you guys even more tasty Starhawk content and get you more plugged into the Starhawk universe! So the other day I asked all of you on Twitter to send me Starhawk questions that you wanted to get answered, and while we’re still planning on doing a full FAQ post here on the PlayStation.Blog, I wanted to take a few of the questions that were popular and answer them straight away. Here goes:

Does Starhawk have two flight modes?

YES. Initially we wanted to have Starhawk use only a single flight mode so that all players were unified. We worked a lot on this but ultimately decided that the needs of a newbie player and the needs of a hardcore Warhawk fan were just too far apart and we weren’t willing to make the compromises needed to jam everyone into a single flight mode. So…Starhawk has two flight modes and both are great! The default mode is very simple and great for new to mid-level players (and yes, reverse aiming issues have been fixed). It’s a re-vamped version of our “arcade mode” (but much better), thanks in part to a lot of play testing on it. The advanced mode is for players that want even more control while flying around in the Hawk. It’s just like Warhawk’s “pro mode” flight mode.

Server list or matchmaking?

In Starhawk you have both. Matchmaking is good for casual players that just want to be put into a game quickly, or for when we need to enforce that players are not “cheating” or stat padding or whatever you want to call it. It lets the Starhawk servers control which players get put into which games. That said, our fans LOVE it so we let you browse the custom “non-official” games through a server list. This gives you the best of both worlds.

Is Starhawk’s character camera new?

YES. We got a lot of questions from people that noticed from the video that there was a tight over-the-shoulder (OTS) camera in some of the shots. We still have a normal camera that is further away from the character, although it is a bit closer than what we had in Warhawk. However, this new OTS aiming mode is enabled when you zoom in with your weapon. It gives you a combat choice—you can do your normal run-and-gun at some cost of accuracy or you can go OTS for more accuracy, although you’ll be a bit slower.

Does Starhawk still use weapon pickups?

Hell yes! I was actually surprised that people were worried about this. It was interesting to see the Tweets from people who were scared that we might be going to a class-based load out approach. No! We still have pickups. And getting a weapon is not limited by rank. That kind of thing just doesn’t work for our type of gameplay. In fact, weapon pickups are an important part of Build & Battle. For example, If you want your team to have “snipers,” you can build lookout towers which include the sniper rifle pickup. Or, if you want some heavy weapons, you can build a supply bunker to get a rocket launcher and a shotgun. Now of course we are still in the process of tuning the game so things are always bound to change, but this should give you a good idea of where we’re headed.

Are there space environments?

100% YES. The outer space environment set that the art team here at LightBox Interactive has put together is really awesome. Super fun to play on and looks great. Some of the elements are still being worked on and we don’t want to show it untill we’re 100% happy with it. But since sooo many of you guys asked, Sony was okay with me at least telling you that Starhawk was not just about terrain battles. :-)

There are a ton of other questions that you sent me and I will answer them as soon as I can, but for now, I wanted to get a little bit more info out to you all! Hopefully I’ll get to see some of you at E3 if you swing by to get your hands on Starhawk! Keep your eyes on the PlayStation.Blog and www.starhawkthegame.com for more updates, and if you’re interested in seeing behind the production curtain a bit, I often post behind the scenes pics of us making Starhawk on my Twitter account @dylanjobe, so check it out!

Okay, that’s really it for right now. Maybe I’ll include a puzzle with my next blog post—I promise it will be more challenging than the stuff I posted for Warhawk :-P