Mechanically, this was a "hero shooter" before the term was coined. I genuinely loved playing it, seeing what happened to it was one of my all time gaming oofs.
It was a class/team shooter. TF2 was already widespread back then. Still there never was anything like it especialy when it comes to the controls and their feel .
The moment I saw the OG footage I said I was gonna be onboard day one, and then they turned it into a rooty tooty point-n-shooty with paywalls and my enthusiasm died very quickly.
it was always an fast paced action game. and nearly every game need to be f2p to access a large audience and microtransactions to keep the game alive. what do you suggest they should have done?
@@KibatsuMusic Sure the game was always a fast paced game, but the difference in speed and "heft" between the trailers and the game proper was very noticable. The trailers implied that while the game was fast, the mechs were definitely heavy objects that had momentum when they moved. But actual gameplay felt more floaty in practice and less like multi-ton war machines lumbering at break-neck speeds. And I'd disagree that it HAD to be f2p, to this day there have been plenty of online games that have done well enough as single-purchase games and still carried a healthy multiplayer base. Besides, with how content was released there was precedent for being able to release as a single-purchase game and still make money by selling content bundles. Hawken's investors were too blinded aiming for short term profits rather than sustainable long-term profit.
i genuinely sat there a few minutes in pure silence, quietly paying respects to the original concept of Hawken and the gamers that stuck with it through all the painful years, watching it slowly become disfigured and eventually die
@@willlliorca7024Titanfall’s corpse still exists on life support. EA has all but guaranteed the franchise will never continue and we’re lucky Titanfall 2 is seeing official support being revived for it after years of the players bootstrapping it themselves.
@@willlliorca7024Why are you trying to make this a competition? HAWKEN occupied a completely different space, and was accessible to a lot more people a lot earlier. It also never had an Infantry component, a different aesthetic... the two just aren't comparable past the rough stuff. Are you one of those people who get offended by nostalgia you don't share? Or do you feel the survival of Titanfall somehow hinges on HAWKENs end? I just can't imagine what you're thinking here.
"Hm looks like people really want this PvP mech game that we have the rights to to make a comeback, you know what they'll really love? A cheap half-assed F2P copy of Titanfall Frontier Defense!" lmao
@@OneBiasedOpinionThe idea that the two are mutually exclusive is crap. The only reason Respawn didn't grow to accomodate both projects is the ol' "Shareholder Value Maximization" that bad CFOs and CEOs champion. Re-investment cuts into potential dividends, and we can't have that!
@@acceptablecasualty5319In terms of game development? Every game is mutually exclusive. Every employee assigned to one project is an employee not assigned at another, and every man-hour not spent on one game is a man hour that being used for another
it is the same with arena shooters. everyone wants to talk about it more than they actually want to move their asses and you know, actually do something to bring the thing back
The art style of Hawken was just incredible, it felt gritty and dystopian in a way that held a lot more character than so many other properties that have tried the same general look. The gameplay meshed with that so well. You go in, try to get a kill or two, run into safety and check that you weren't followed, get a moment of downtime to repair, then rush into the breach once again, systems blaring warnings at you with Missile Command-esque bleeps and bloops as you find yourself overrun and collapse with a metallic crash. That's vibe is irreplicable.
I miss Hawken. Was one of my favorites. Sound design, art style, and how well the movements felt made it special. Also fights often worked like a sparing match, when you needed to anticipate when your opponent will use their main weapon and counter it with dashing. Other times matches turned unfair as the team that got the upper hand steamrolled over the other team.
@@prophetzarquon1922 It was easier to keep the death ball rolling than to coordinate a good counter. Everyone needed to respawn at the same time and quickly regroup to have a chance. Game balance for TDM could have used some work. Objective based game modes were really good.
@@WornyTheHun Yeah. A stronghold map would have been really welcome; holding checkpoints was great fun. The weirdest thing to me about the death ball, was that it usually didn't get broken by sniping or rocket blasts; the damage ratios were low enough that people would just run _into the fray_ right after spawning. It was almost always possible to bait someone out into an exposed position; I frequently fell for it myself. I've never seen a game where the death ball had such persistency...
@@prophetzarquon1922 part of it was because how fun it was to fight. You got two different weapons and high speed and mobility and armour and most of all the ability to dodge enemy fire if you were able to predict it. Made you feel like you could take them on if you concentrate enough. But the main advantage of the death ball was something called armor rotation. Hawken had some really cool support classes. But in a game like this, where you rely on armor, having teammates not on the front line is a detriment. If you bring a sniper than you might be able to avoid getting shot at, but that means your front line mechs are taking fire instead of you. So the more assault mechs are on a team the better they can death ball.
LITERALLYY! I was like "woahh, this is soo sick" and the artstyle and grungy maps were soo cool, but I didn't get into it bc I too was waiting for more. I didn't grow up with the franchise, but I got into HALO MCC when it got on Steam PC, and stuck with Infinite since the flights, so that's where my "Arena" type gameplay itch gets scratched on laptop mouse & keyboard. Last month, I tried Titanfall 2 now that the servers are operational, I can understand the hype but it hasn't clicked with me the way HALO did. I really wish we get proper HAWKEN though, ahhh!
@@EggBastion It's called Hawken Refugees, for me the first reddit result on google was correct. There is a client and launcher you can download, all instructions linked in posts there. Pretty weekly games in NA/EU.
It had a sick aethestic, short but catchy name, amazing gameplay, and most importantly... mechs. It sucks that the IP is unlikely to be sold because it'll likely be priced to high heavens, so the call on this being the game's final breath is spot on. Greed kills another good game... it's never enough to make a lot of money, it doesn't matter if it stays profitable without skyrocketing growth, it needs to make ALL of the money that has ever been made and it needed to be made yesterday.
@@masonreppeto882 the word you're looking for is capitalism, this is what capitalism does in the end. Shareholders becoming more important than anyone else to the detriment of everyone and everything
@@thomastailby7926 For once the anti-capitalists are right, this is end-stage capitalism, when the investors who know nothing about the project are more important than the consumers meant to pay for the product. Corporatism is when the corporation's internal politics are to blame for the problem.
We literally made Iron rebellion when they promised us Hawken in VR back in 2016 and never delivered. IR is no joke the love letter to the game we never got. I hope people from this video see this comment because we finally launch in September!
Considering how the AAA industry likes to harp on about how expensive making games are, no one in their right mind is going to invest in this genre purely for the love of it. IR wouldnt be doing this if they thought there was no money in it and didnt have a plan to monitize. Take a genuinely great concept, attempt to copy it 1:1 while either intentionally or unintentionally not understanding the fundamentals, aesthetic and art direction, then poop out some by the numbers clone. Similar to all the Wipeout 2097 copy cats.
Just found out about IR, might just buy it because I had been thinking of coming back to VR with stuff like Elite Dangerous, but a mech game in VR? Damn, that sounds amazing!
I remember being an absolute MENNACE back when the game first came out, to the point where people recognized my name and I got called a hacker A LOT, it was one of the few games I could brag about being good at. Then it just....died and I was heart broken lol.
While I never got called a hacker, I would sometimes hop into lobbies and people would recognize me as well. Same story here though… I took a break from gaming for around a year and suddenly it was just… gone. I sat there for a good hour or two hoping to get in a match and just nothing.
I used to be one of the few handful of pilots who mained Predator and I remember being an absolute goblin back in the day because it was such a niche mech that nobody really knew about, so barely anyone knew how to successfully counter it. To this day I still can't find another game that gives me the same feeling and vibe that I got from being a pilot of a niche mech in an already niche game
I think I remember playing against you a few times! I went by L1gerZeroJager! I recall there being sub-communities on the hawken forums for players with something like 3000+ mmr; were you active there?
I still have Fractured Space on Steam. I’ll never install it again, but it had such potential. Dreadnought looked similarly awesome, yet fell straight through the floor too. Why can’t such good games be made with integrity instead of greed?
I always will remember that slightly liminal-space feeling of the maps with their hard lighting, believable layouts, and amazing art direction. The scream of gunfire precluding a perfectly timed TOW detonation and seeing my sensors register a kill while flickering from new attacks coming from a different angle. Really loved the game and wish I could have played more.
I miss Hawken so much, old original pre-ickyindustry Hawken, pre Hawken Ds. Huge fan of Gun Griffon on the Saturn to give my background; mech games that nail my preferred balance of realism to everything else. Great vid. Sadge.
"That I likely won't play a game, quite like Hawken, ever again." I feel that. I feel that deeply Which reminds me of the feels that I felt with Blacklight : Retribution No other game afaik touch the depth of gun customization as BLR
I missed out on this and titanfall when they were popping, idk why younger me just wrote off random games like that to never check out but i regret it more than ever now that im obsessed with armored core. Btw exellent video essay!
The shake in cockpit PoV is just a good immersion of making you think you are really inside a damn battle mech, in kinda nauseating at some point, but it still good as it's own immersion charm
Wandering Gun #70, Saphyr here. I remember this was a rare instance where I involved myself as more of a community member. I become a contributor and monitor to a wiki page for the “clan” I was a part of, the Wandering Guns. We narratively styled ourselves less as a teamy together group like others, but instead as a mercenary-type group that might even find itsef pointing guns at each other on the battlefield with no hard feelings, so we made a neat option for a substitute pool if there were no-shows at competitions. We had numbers on the basis of when we joined into the group’s dedicated thread in the Hawken forums (yes, they had official forums set up for us). I went on standby for a community tournament match one time for precisely that kind of case, though I ultimately wasn’t called on to play. I also learned my first screen capture software to upload footage to RU-vid for gameplay from Hawken. That’s the kind of above and beyond passion I started to feel as this game was first starting out. There was such potential for a community culture to evolve in a unique kind of way with this game, and then it all just fizzled out. It was such a sad thing.
Other games I usually felt like "Early Access" was just unpaid testing work, but in Hawken I wore the alpha skins with pride. I don't know when I've ever enjoyed getting every achievement on a starting model (CRT) more
I don't know why it read so hard for them to see it just needed community-submitted maps. It was an Unreal game FFS; more community map makers than any other engine, just ready & waiting
As a hawken vetren I miss this game so much. For those of you who see this, I was formerly OmegaNull and heavily involved on the forums. Scootin' and Shootin', Ragin' and Raiden, Brawlin' and Ballin'. Long live the scout, Raider and brawler.
What really bothered me with the HAWKEN reboot was they changed the combat up. The mech doesn't feel right, it doesn't move like the old ones and its guns don't feel right. The progression isn't very clear and I really miss my Recruit mech. The original HAWKEN was the first online shooter (outside of some VERY outdated games) that I actually got good at. Its movement felt great, the different mechs were awesome, and it felt like most people forgot you could go up so it was always funny to jump into the air and watch them do the little freak out to find you again.
Exactly how I felt. It lacked a certain weight and directed intensity of motion that the original game had in spades. In O.G. Hawken, when you boosted your mech, it felt like you were forcing this big piece of metal into a direction it doesn't exactly want to go. When you jumped and boost, you were legitimately pushing against gravity. This new bastard of a game feels too forgiving. Not quite "floaty" exactly, but lacking that necessary force that really translated into you shoving a walking weapons platform into motion. It shows a lack of attention, experience and interpretation - and maybe a lack of talent.
I remember playing Hawken back in 2015 when I was still in middle school. It was one of the only games I could play on the laptop I had secretly bought for myself. It blew my mind. Now it just sits in my Steam library, "last played Oct 10, 2015."
When Hawken launched I bought the cool supporter bundle with the skull cosmetics and their system wouldn't let me redeem my code and customer support just told me I was out of luck. I dropped the game immediately and I've literally hated the developers since day 1. It's weird seeing a retrospective on a ship wreck that wouldn't let me board.
Man, to this day I still play this game every once in a while on Playstation... I push through the tears, seeing the abandonment, and get into the game and play coop with some regular randoms. Some other studio has to do this immersive mech combat in a new game. This game-feel cannot die, I tell you! It would be a tragedy.
I remember when the original reveal trailer released and I was thinking “if this gets popular this could be a COD killer.” Needless to say that didn’t happen.
the objective design was so good it felt like u were fighting for something tangible like a sam site that will help you not just a random circle on the map
Oof what a hit in the feels; I miss Hawken so much. I spent literally thousands of hours playing; its the game I pushed myself to get better at more than any other game I've played, and I still think about the silly strats I'd play around with: using the repair drone to peak over walls, loading an infil with huge fuel tanks for long lasting stealth and pairing the heavy detonator with the mine launcher to try to alpha strike enemies, putting a sharpshooter body on the dual-gat mech so people would charge me thinking I was only fit for long range... Good times...
Hawken and Tribes: Ascend are two great examples of FPS games that went far beyond the bounds of their respective genres and did it in a way that was fun and engaging. Yet both died out for very little reason and nobody has bothered trying to pick up where they left off outside of Titanfall (thanks for ensuring we’ll never have that back, EA), and the recent revival of Tribes 3 by a new studio. I wish games like these got more traction. Deep Rock Galactic and Helldivers 2 have pretty much singlehandedly revived the immense fun of horde shooters that got left in the past with L4D2, so I hope that others like Hawken will see a similar renaissance in the near future. We need games to be _fun_ and _creative_ again.
I remember the day hawken dropped on console i was so pumped due to being a mechwarrior nerd but it lost steam for me very quickly once lack of support was evident
OptimusLime [from all the way back to the beta] here. I really loved this game. i was just getting into the PC gaming world as around that time most of my exposure to that culture was the near weekly lan parties my friends held. The moment i saw this in action I set about to save up enough to get a gaming laptop [I have seen too many tower accidents at the lan parties to even consider a full build at my experience level at the time] JUST for this game. I have seen core mechanics change over time [which then later bugged the mech to have a lot more power over that same mech used by newer players after the mechanics change], the massive expansion to the cash shop, the insane rivalry between groups of players that outright made the usual moba drama look like a school yard scrap. It was beautifully chaotic. It always hits a bit hard remembering the downfall of the game as without it, i definitely would not be in the space i am in now.
Idea: Hawken IP SPAC - the Hawken original player base itself founds a limited liability corporation and pools their resources to purchase the Hawken IP for themselves and dump it straight into the public domain so anyone who wants to can develop it.
Why waste money on the pointless IP? Use that money to pay developers to make a perfect clone. Names don't matter; gameplay does. Bring on the spiritual successor, bring on Cawken! 😂
@@howmuchmorecanItake Doing research on IP purchasing myself (for designs from a dead model kit/anime line) and the prices can be very...mixed. Sometimes they can cost 6+ figures and come with stipulations and sometimes it's just $100 and a handshake. It really depends on what the possible potentials the current owners see in the product. Some companies will not allow for it in an effort to prevent others from having an actual success because the original owners didn't see the potential or utilized it correctly (Hasbro and Activision are notorious for this).
Man, I LOVED Hawken! It was so gritty, brutal and...just different. Pretty hard-core gameplay. I was so sad to see watch it die slowly. I played it right until the end on PS4. It really should've been a full-priced title with very little in the way of in-game purchases.
Hawken literally made my PC "gaming childhood", I miss those days so much even though I wasn't good at the game at all and my desktop barely made it run at 40 fps lol It was fun, it was fast paced, the skill cieling was so high and so satisfying I played it so much that I literally had 7x of every possible mech because I had no other way to waste all the stockpiled money I had We got Zawken and Pax Hawken.. I don't even play those because it just doesn't feel the same to me..
I still remember how it fell. The devs catered to a specific audience that favored a particular form of gameplay. Primarily in that of extremely "stamina" (or fuel) efficient mechs which made it absurdly easy to attack as an airborne individual, rendering a lot of the ground-specialized mechs nearly obsolete overnight. There was also the medic mech that was released, which skewed the course of victory so much you could already tell who was going to lose if one team just didn't have one. (Yes it was that bad). Repair in the game was a risk as you basically had to enter a form of "standby" phase with startup and shutdown animations. This meant that you _had_ to be safe before you did anything. Medic mech said "come here C-class, we're gonna bully the front line." Combined with the above, it literally created certain flying C-class builds that, when supported by a medic, could remain airborne indefinitely and kill the fun thrice over for anyone else. And then, of course the devs just peppered in a MESS of other issues...
I never had a problem with the airbornes, it was the teams running heavies with two medics that knew how to bait & swap, that seemed to dominate every match; if I ended up paired with a team containing two adept medic players, I could basically sit back & watch my team win. If we had one & they had two, I could scarcely hold the chokepoints. Oh, & not enough map variety was why I quit playing. It was an _Unreal_ engine game. They could have let in any number of community made maps & just ... didn't
I still remember having the dev brawl nights being a nightmare with the starter mech I loving called the CRT doom tube and being a menace with the chain gun
The original concept tests had fully destructible buildings. That didn't survive to Beta but the game was awesome nonetheless They even added dual vulcans as a prestige layout, after I posted a screenshot from a fan-made mech designer app. I _loved_ that game. Mostly, it needed community-submitted maps. Lack of maps made it stale after a while
Man, this game and BLUR are the two games out of my 3 decades of gaming that I wish more than anything would make a triumphant return. Such a shame for the gaming industry that neither survived =(
I really liked playing Hawken in 2013/14. Never liked free to play games where you have to unlock everything with an endless grind. Now in 2024 I found a VR mech game that was inspired by Hawken. #IronRebellion
I played Hawken up to the very last minute that the pc servers were live. I was in a lobby with people from north and south America playing and talking right up until the connection was officially cut. I cried as my favorite pc game died in my hands.
i had a huge amount of fun when it came to PAX East - they had a great set up and the gameplay was super fun with your teams around you. I played several rounds. Glad I got a taste of it.
i played hawken when it was basically just a tech demo; it was my first VR experience as well. it was at PAX in seattle for the oculus rift before they were bought by facebook. got to run around in an empty arena for exactly 2 minutes before my turn was up. wow what a story
Oh wow, that's a throwback! I generally never play FPS games without any over-arching narrative that would make the player feel that his accomplishments on the battlefield meant something (as in Conquest in BF1 for example). When I booted up Hawken for the first time just to try it out I immediately spent a whole day glued to the screen. The gameplay was just that gritty and fun. RIP HAWKEN.
Thanks for this. It brought back fond memories of merry rage on a hairpin trigger, and half a decade of competitive brotherhood. For what it was, it's legendary status as a mech shooter is absolute, as is the shame in it's discontinuation on PC. A worthy eulogy.
Loved it, the intensity, the team play , the flow. Was ready to move from other free-to-play titles such as WoT and MWO. However you hit the nail on the head. It was monetised badly. There was no real progression without hard cash, something that even Wargaming knows is a killer. You need a persistent casual playerbase of free-only players. Give them the ability to succeed over a grind but also pay to shortcut that in specific ways that do not disadvantage your other free-only players. I will still play if it is rebooted again. It'd be amazing if the original game turned up at a big lan event, even in basic form, so modern fps players can get a dose of intense mech action.
Remembered playing this way back on both Xbox and PC. It sucks what's become of it, but I still got a grain of hope that something might still come out from it all. Designs and art style alone got me invested, like a first person Phantom Crash
I loved this game, balancing the Heavies was rough in TDMs, but the objective modes made the Heavies SO much fun. I think the predator & flamethrower mechs was the beginning of the end, but can't remember entirely.
I didn't have a good enough computer to play this game during its better years, but I did play it a ton once I got my hands on a PS4 (and when the console playerbase still wasn't extinct). Damn, was this a good game. The mech aesthetic with animations, graphics and sounds was nailed perfectly. The soundtrack was so good the main theme still lives rent free in my head, and it will probably stay there for years to come. The mechs all felt unique, but still allowed for lots of customization to experiment with different playstyles and strategies. It took a very interesting middle ground between mech games, movement-heavy arenas, and arcade shooters like CoD - and that's selling it extremely short. It was an amazing, unique game, and I'm glad I had a chance to experience it before it ended. It was great, but unfortunately that's all we can say now. Hawken was.
man, I was so young when I first got steam and was checking out so many great f2p. Such good times. I really wanted to like hawken but I was a broke kid and couldnt get upgrades.
I remember this game... Even though I played it towards the end of its life cycle I still had fun with it. I forgot how good the live action trailer looked. That was 11 years ago as well!
I remember this game fondly, I played when it released on PC and it actually ran well on my crappy Acer at the time. I later played it again on PS4 and its where my best memories were of me playing one day when home sick, everyone was super chill and wholesome. The console community for HAWKEN was one of the most friendly in gaming, beaten only by console Elite Dangerous players and Firefall players.
Thanks for the video man, now I know what game I had in mind all those years but I couldn't recall it's name 😅 I've always thought it was a MechWarrior title and could not find it. Sad to see such a great game concept go to waste
HAWKEN was the first game I donated to for the pre release and got my name in the list in the credits. I hearts my heart thinking about how fun it was.
I remember my favourite mech was the one with missiles & jump + dash. Jumping out of covers, then quick aim missiles then dash to the side mid air to the covers.. what a nostalgia, wish theres another game that use Hawken movement & feels formula.
The line at the end that we will never play a game like Hawken ever again is borderline heartbreaking, because its true.. that was the first game I was completely obsessed with, still like 10 years on I check out what's happening... so much fun and glad I got to experience it in my teenage years.
I remember playing this game when I was in middle school. I never new about the other media that they were cooking up. They should have focused on the game first then branched out.
The artistic design and look of this game is absolutely timeless. I had an amazing time playing this game during its early PVP era. It could have been a legendary work of art with a huge lifespan. Everything in the aesthetic and the initial core gameplay was there. What a tragic shitshow. I typically enjoy PVE games, but doing this to Hawken of all things... it's just not the same. Bruiser, my beloved. You will be missed.
I miss the game, and I miss the dumb callsigns my buddies and I had, My mechs were all religiously themed, Deacon, Prophet, Bishop, Cardinal. The moment I unlocked the stealth mech I was so excited
I started playing it a little in highschool, because somehow I managed to get it to run on my school laptop and it was free. It was so cool, and a really great idea. But when I realized I would practically have to pay exorbinant prices to make progress in a reaosnable time, I kinda hopped off. Tried it again when it was ported to consoles, fell in love again for a few days, and then remembered why I stopped in the first place and saw nothing changed. Really such a shame.
