I was there for the beta test near the end of your long and awkward pregnancy, and I was there for your spectacular birth and release upon the world on August 28, 2007. I've been checking in with you regularly and still visit with you about once a week, and I want to wish you an early Happy Birthday on turning two years old! So Happy Birthday Warhawk!

Such a precocious child you were, with so many PS3 firsts! You were the first game that offered gamers the option to buy a blu-ray disc or a digital PSN version of the game, and you were first to offer the option for up to 4 couch-buddies to play splitscreen online in a 32 player game. You was also the first game that bravely said "screw the campaign... we know you want multiplayer" so you were 100% an online multiplayer game and you were even the first game that had the option of coming bundled with a bluetooth headset. You were innovative in being the only game that ever offered the option to have "disc sharing". Put the BD disc in one PS3, start the game, remove the disc, put it into another PS3- and both players could play online from different PS3 units - with the same disc! This capability was unfortunately removed by Mama-Sony in a later PS3 system update - but the functionality was a first for a PS3 blu-ray game. You were also the first PSN game to DRM the gamesharing with a 24 hour limit on the PSN version... you could only be played on one PS3 unless 24 hours passed before being available on a different PS3. Warhawk was also one of the first official competitive PS3 tournaments sponsored by Sony. Finally, you were the first game widely shown using the new motion sensing capabilities of the PS3 sixaxis controller, and were the first (and only game so far) to use the PS3 unit itself in a "rack system" as a dedicated server by the devs.



So you started out strong in the PS3 world of gaming with many firsts, but where are you now? Well, 2 years later, you're still popular. On any given day, anywhere from 15,000 to 20,000 people still log in to play ranked Warhawk games and about half that number again play unranked games (stats are from myhawk.org). So why have you been able to maintain your popularity for 2 years?
Warhawk for those that don't know the game is a PS3 exclusive. It's a third person shooter with ground, vehicle and air combat. It released with 5 game modes - deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture the flag, zones and dogfight.

What did you do right? What lessons can be learned?

Controls: Very simply, you are FUN! The planes and vehicles are easy to control (though difficult to master) and there is a sense of speed and scale in the game that is amazing. When you jump into a plane, lift up.... you can see the vista unfold before your eyes and there are very generous borders... you rarely go "out of bounds" in Warhawk (yeah, I'm giving you dirty looks Battlefield 1943!). The controls offer options (including switch sticks and invert view) and they are easy to use. Other devs should take you for a test drive to see how to do vehicle controls right!

Ranking system: All players are the same and have equal access to weapon pickups. The game is entirely based on skill and ranking up only unlocks cosmetic upgrades. The ranking system is also genius in that it requires both points as well as a skill related badge. It's simple and effective.

Servers: Warhawk offers the ability to use "official" servers or to create your own private server. Servers are nicely listed in a lobby format that offers game information and can be filtered. The official servers are ranked, but players also have the ability to create their own ranked or unranked servers. Players can even create unranked, private games that are passworded if they just want to play with their friends. The servers allow players to create and save full rotations of varying game modes and maps. So many options! More devs should look at the Warhawk lobbies to see how to do thing right!

Team play: The design of the game is brilliant in how it encourages team communication and team play. A team that coordinates will generally win a game and the players are very dependent on each other. Killing is not the main objective to winning... a player can actually accrue the highest points in a game without ever killing an enemy player, but simply by achieving objectives such as capturing zones or the flag. Again, devs can learn from this - assigning strong point values to objectives rather than just kills can create a more team oriented game (and it's too bad Killzone didn't look closer, because maybe taking a zone or picking up the speaker would mean points instead of instant death or a camping opportunity.)

Commitment to Community: Warhawk had excellent fan communication (largely thanks to Dylan Jobe, the face of Incognito). When problems occurred (and there were many) they were quick to post to the official forum and were constantly tweaking and patching the game and making adjustments to ensure that player concerns were met and problems were resolved. It's one of the few glitch-free games out there as most serious glitches were fairly quickly eradicated. It's also one of the few games where people are not currently crying for "fixes"... it has evolved into a game where the player base is happy with the final product and the development team has earned the loyalty of gamers.

DLC done right!: With the 3 expansion packs you offered not just a new map, but many variations of this map for small or large groups. Each map also introduced a new vehicle that in some cases substantially changed the gameplay making the game quite different in terms of strategies. The DLC was well priced considering the changes it made to the game design while still offering the ability to intermix core and DLC maps in a rotation. Free DLC was also introduced that added two new game modes (Collection and Hero) and that offered new variations on existing core maps. This helped maintain interest in the game and retain the player base over time.

... and bad mistakes, you made a few...

Trophies: To achieve the rank of General, players need 275,000 points. If you make 100 points in each 15 minute game... it would take approximately 687 hours of ranked play to achieve this rank. Very, very few people within the game (less than 1% of all players) have achieved the rank of General needed for the platinum trophy and this is usually regarded as the most difficult platinum trophy to acquire.

Balance: When a team is pushed back to their homebase they start to lose assets such as vehicles and weapon spawns... this can create what is commonly called "base-raping" in the game. It's part of the game, but very simply it's no fun to spawn with your knife and a pistol to find the enemy at your base with tanks, planes, mines, rocket launchers and TOW missiles. Hopefully they find a way to either increase assets when a team is pushed back to homebase (giving them vehicles to get out) or they offer some small safe zone so people can at least orient themselves on spawn before dying.


For me, Warhawk has many personal memories. It was the first game that I played online with and against my husband (and it convinced him to get his own PS3.) It was the first game where I played in a competitive tournament, and it was a game where I feel I made a lot of really good friends. It was also the first game where I felt comfortable just jumping into random ranked games. It was also the first game where I saw a lot of other women playing and where I played a "girls against the guys" game... and though the ladies lost, it was all in good fun.




Incognito Entertainment, the development team that created Warhawk was an internal studio owned by Sony. In 2009, the studio was dissolved and most of the development team (including Dylan Jobe, the former studio director) left to form a new company called Lightbox Interactive. Lightbox has announced a deal to produce exclusive games for Sony and hopes are high that this team will produce a successor to Warhawk. The name "Starhawk" was copyrighted by Sony and this is widely contemplated to be the next game... but only time will tell.
... but we hope that they take the lessons learned from Warhawk to create an even greater game!

So Warhawk... Happy 2nd Birthday! Tanks for the memories and it's been great getting to Tow you!