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 [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]! *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 [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] universe! So the other day I asked all of you on [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
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:
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
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 [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
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.
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]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 [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].
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.
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
Are there space environments?


100% YES. The outer space environment set that the art team here at [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
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 [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
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 [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], 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