Interviews// Starhawk

SPOnG: So, what you’re trying to create is a game with elements of a Real Time Strategy game only within a third-person shooter.

Josh Sutpfin: That’s right. It was really important for us to keep everything feeling like a shooter, even as we added these strategy elements. So we did a lot of work to make sure that the Build and Battle interface, the way that you select and place buildings is very quick, very simple, like pulling a trigger on a gun. You’re not going through a bunch of menus; it’s not a complex difficult to navigate system.

SPOnG: Could you tell us what differs from the Warhawks from the original game to the Starhawks in this new title?

Josh Sutpfin: They are now just called ‘Hawks’ and they can transform into a ‘mech’ like war machine. In Warhawk that was the titular vehicle which had a flight mode and a hover mode.

We wanted to keep the combat flight possibilities that that two mode flight structure offered. But the hover mode in Warhawk was often used in an abusive way by spawn camping which was very difficult to deal with if you were on the receiving end of that.

So we wanted to fix that in Starhawk but still keeping the combat flexibility so we decided to change the hover mode into this mech mode, which is ground based and it becomes a little more balanced as the pilot of the Hawk is not moving around as fast.

The pilot when you’re in mech form is actually exposed, so a good sniper can snipe the guy out of the cockpit. So there’s a few different ways that troops on the ground, especially players who have just spawned in and haven’t had the chance to pick up their weapons, get more options. It’s also wicked cool to turn your hawk into a robot, screaming out of the sky and just stomping on people!


SPOnG: Warhawk was the poster-child of the ‘SixAxis’ controller, does Starhawk maintain that method of control for the Hawks?

Josh Sutpfin: We do not have the SixAxis flight control support in this game any more. It’s very focused on the core game experience. Warhawk was somewhat infamous for having a very steep learning curve and the single player campaign is one way of addressing that.

We also did a bit of refinement to the control scheme for that same reason. People are playing a lot of contemporary shooters right now that all have very similar control schemes, there’s really no reason to deviate from that, have all the same functions, put on the same buttons and people are going to feel at home.


SPOnG: Warhawk was very famous for the amount of support you gave it since its release. Are we right to assume the same kind of treatment for Starhawk?

Josh Sutpfin: We don’t have any specific plans to announce, but that is absolutely a core value. We have a really excellent fan community from Warhawk and I’m firmly committed to them. It’s a big reason why we still have people playing Warhawk avidly to this day and we have new community sites going up all the time!

Warhawk.center.net went up six weeks ago, a completely new community site for a game that is four years old. The fact that we have a community like that is in large part attributable all that post-launch support we did.

The free patches that added content, the great DLC packs and the continued presence on the PlayStation forums during that time while listening to fans talking about that game. It’s definitely a core value of the studio and something we are planning to do for Starhawk.


SPOnG: My final question is on method of delivery; is it going to be online and Blu-ray again?

Josh Sutpfin: We’re actually targeting for a blu-ray only release due to the amount of content we’re offering with the extensive single player campaign on top of the multiplayer game.

SPOnG: Thanks for your time.

Starhawk comes out on sometime during 2012 for PS3.