Continuing my apparently unfashionable dalliance with the PEE ESS THREE, I’ve spent the last week or so fiddling about with and enjoying WARHAWK.
It’s good for a few reasons:
- It’s (as far as I know), the first online-only, team based combat game on a console. And to their credit, Insomniac did a lot of stuff right; you have a proper server browser that tells you what your actual PING is, and you can see the game rules that are running, you can host a dedicated server of your own if you want. You can play of official ranked servers. It’s like a PC game, and it shows XBL up a little bit (though XBL is better in other ways).
- It can be played just like Crimson Skies, but with actual people to play against. I could never find anyone online with CS after the initial launch period, and this was sad. But in Warhawk, there’s a dog-fight game mode, which ignores the land based vehicles and on foot soldiering, and makes everyone spawn in a plane. This makes it Crimson Skies, and turns the game into something completely different to the BF mode.
- The planes are very satisfying to fly. You can do all sorts of flippery and rolling around in the sky. It’s very pleasing. It also switches into a hover mode so you can camp outside bases and gun down the little men.
- You can download it for half the price of the retail version! This is the future! You can hide game purchases from your other half, cos there’s no physical evidence!
Unfortunately, it does highlight a bunch of things that are wrong with PSN:
- You can’t mute 12 year olds who are shouting abuse at everyone.
- Not everyone has a headset. You can use any bluetooth headset, but giving one away in the PS3 box would have made sense.
- You can’t add people you’re playing with as PSN mates if you’re enjoying their company and would like to play them again
- You can’t jump into a game that your friend is playing.
This is the first proper online game for PS3 though, so I think things will improve on the service side over time. Sony really need to catch up with XBL quickly for the consumers sake; xbox is just much easier to use, and makes sense for the gamer.
From the server side of things, I think Insomniac are insane. They have racks upon racks of PS3s in a number of data centers around the world. This is silly for a number of reasons:
- They should have allowed GSPs to host games, and allowed them to sell dedicated servers to gamers. It wouldn’t have cost Sony anything aside from administration costs, demonstrates the openness of the platform, and opens the GSP market up to any other online PS3 games
- They should have hosted the games on SERVERS, not PS3s. Assuming they’re not utilizing the SPUs (and why would they?), you could get way more instances on a single multicore CPU box that would consume less power than a 380W PS3. And I am assuming that the PS3s had to be paid for; they are apparently still more expensive to build than to buy in the shops
- PS3s in racks is a waste of PS3s. They’re for playing games on.
I do like the open approach Sony have taken with PSN though. If they can marry the unified XBL user experience with the inherent open-ness of PSN (ie allowing the developer to decide how the server side works for their own game, rather than making everyone use the same limited tools), they could be on to a winner. Catching up is a bit of a job though; MS have been doing this for 5 years now, and have done very well.