Interviews// Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X. 2

H.A.W.X. 2's narrative and creative director, Edward Douglas, is a man that wants to make the air combat genre as close to the real thing as possible. Having been brought on to the project quite late in its development cycle, it's surprising to see how much his influence has managed to shape the style of the game.

When I sat down (or stood up rather, next to a great hulking H.A.W.X. jeep) to speak with him about the game, his past experiences and influences with car-related projects was an interesting talking point. Read on for more about that, plus the genesis of H.A.W.X. 2's new elements.


SPOnG: Are you able to elaborate on the story in H.A.W.X. 2 at all?

Edward Douglas: H.A.W.X 2 takes you on a global war from many different factions. There's a Russian faction, British faction and an American, and you get to see the war from all three sides.

You play as pilots leading elite squadrons, and whereas in H.A.W.X. 1 there was a lot of air combat, manoeuvring and dogfighting, you get to play all aspects of modern warfare in H.A.W.X. 2, and the game's feature set has so much more variety based on that. We're not really talking about story details yet, but that's a bit of an outline. Russians, British, insurgents in Middle East, Southern Russia... there's a lot of stuff that's in the news.


SPOnG: You mentioned a lot of improvements made to this title – what was the thinking behind the introduction of these new elements? Did you pick through H.A.W.X. 1 and find bits you didn't like, or was it a feedback thing?

Edward Douglas: When the team started development on H.A.W.X. 2 they looked really closely at all the features in H.A.W.X. 1 – what worked, what they liked and didn't like, what the fans liked.

One of the big things that came out was that dogfighting ended up not being the close fun visceral combat that you would want in a video game. It might have been quite realistic sometimes, where you have a target, lock-on then fire and forget. That's modern authentic simulation, but it's not that fun. One thing we're still working on is making those air-to-air dogfights really fun, exciting and close, where you have a large variety of weapons and you can use and choose how you approach various situations.

The other side of it was much more in variety of gameplay, so that means expanding the kind of ways that war is done from the air. We have the AC-130 Gunship for example, which is a very different experience than flying a plane. We have ground attack planes in the style of the Tom Clancy espionage stuff, which involves spying from the air.

The 'Seek and Destroy' mission is a two-parter actually, where you start off trying to obtain intelligence on a weapons network, and you work with an agent on the ground that the Russians have sent to help you. You're spying on all these cars in different locations, where there are cellphone conversations going on, and you have to track where these calls are coming from. They lead to different members of this network, and from there you start laying strobes and marking these targets. You come back in the next mission in a stealth plane under cover of night and bomb them.

So with this new kind of gameplay and added variety, we can expands the palette of how we can tell the story and how the player plays the game.