there’s so many changes in the beta. the siege mode wasn’t even in the alpha, and the missile map had no textures.

the real thing that i think people didn’t get a shot at in beta, that changes your game a lot, is the upgrades. in the alpha you had all 30 points.

it really changes how your mech plays out. especially if you put 30 points into mobility on an assault mech.

a huge amount of feedback was given on the alpha forum about pretty much everything you’ve mentioned.

as for aussie servers. well, bloodline champions never got servers, dead game as far as we’re concerned.

I enjoyed it enough with a 230ms ping (US West) and found it playable. I did notice it would try to match folks with poor ping. I had one match where everyone was over 130ms ping.

Hopefully it’s only because it’s a Beta but the lack of maps was it’s biggest downfall IMHO. I only noticed the two, and their general flow was virtually identical.

You can turn and run quite fast. Just tap back and dodge at the same time to spin 180 then forward and hold dash to run away. I did plenty of that to get back to team territory after chasing down a runner for the kill.

It may be like a FPS but one with classes and hiding to bandage and pipe bombs and deployable turrets and …. Counterstrike it’s not!

I didn’t notice any texture pop but then I’m running off a SSD. It’s likely something that will get optimized before a release build anyway. I imagine there are options in the Unreal SDK for that sort of thing.

In short, it’s still worth a look. After all it’s free!

I’ve played a bit of MWO and its not really doing it for me. You can only get so much out of an online only game. I feel this is more suited to single player simulation based type gameplay. Immersion is not great either, It just doesn’t feel like you are in a 50 foot mech like the original games.

I’m with ElectroTyrian. But unfortunately we will probably never see it given both titles are F2P.

Smooth yes. But when you have to lead your target using lasers to the point where the lasers visually miss the target but do damage something is horribly wrong. Also genuinely fast mechs still rubber band.

From what I’ve seen of the model at least Hawken appears to have a good chance of local servers. Any chance GoN could contact them about it?

I remember playing CS on dial up with similar speeds and the hit detection was ‘okay’. It was playable. But this was just terrible and sadly ruined the experience.

Now hopefully they will release the server files as per a normal Unreal 3 dedicated server for local server farms. But till then, it really pulled from the experience.

The game experience minus the lag however is also a mixed bag for me. I was expecting more “FPS” feel? and whilst it was alot faster play than the MechWarrior kind. It really felt a little slow and cumbersome once you came under fire to turn around and either dash or take cover. Yes I know it’s a mech game, but from the original alpha footage 12months or more ago, it really felt slower than what we’d seen in the past.

This may have been made worse by the lag and already taking extreme damage by the time I knew I was under attack leave little to no time to make evasive action.

Motion blur was extremely overused… and turning it off seemed to make little difference. Graphically it looked very grainy… and no amount of changing settings made it better? Too much sand/effect/smoke? I don’t know, but I found it an eye strain to play.

I got a few rounds in before the lag issue really made me leave the game and not return for the remainder of the weekend. But I was a little dissapointed, but ever so hopeful that the feedback in the forums are listened too and acted on.

Ramjet

I didn’t have the Mech setup issues you had however I did have issues joining servers.
The texture loading annoyance is with the Unreal Engine itself and fortunately once the textures are loaded it’s all good!
I do have some concerns regarding the amount of grinding it’ll take to rake up some hawken points to buy the good stuff, but that’s just cuz I’m a cheap a$$ bostardo who won’t pay cash to earn them quicker.