Interview: The Making of Sony's Warhawk

In the week of its release, GamePro sat down with lead producer Dylan Jobe to talk all things Warhawk. Full transcript inside.

Don't forget to check out our review and see what staff member PapaFrog thought of the high flying Warhawk!

Warhawk (multiplayer only) for PS3

Warhawk (multiplayer only) for PS3

GamePro: Because Warhawk is an online only multiplayer game, there has been some criticism in the gaming community over Warhawk's selling point of $60 on blue-ray. How do you think this price point will effect gamers in the long run?

Dylan Jobe: At the end of the day people who have played the game have had a really good time with it. They have become evangelists for it, saying, "It's worth it, just play the game, you'll know." What's interesting is during the Beta we found a pretty large percentage of the people said, "You know what, I'm just going to go to the store and buy it," because they wanted the package, they wanted the manual, there's all that value that comes from the retail shopping experience that you don't get from buying from the online store. I think it's a really interesting data point for our industry to see how this plays out, how many people go to the online store, and how many buy it from a retailer.

Warhawk certainly seems to be taking Sony's online games in a new direction, as opposed to something like Calling all Cars. How do you see Warhawk being different from games like this?

DJ: Calling all Cars is a fantastic title, but I think it fits people's convention of downloadable content. I think, and this isn't me just trying to spin it because this is the way Warhawk is, look at the way things have been happening on the PC for quite sometime, look at how Steam.com has been going, and I think that what your going to see on game consoles is that the conventional model or paradigm of what a downloadable title is or was, I think is going to start to break down over the next couple of years. You're going to see more titles like Warhawk, or episodes like Half-Life or other titles that are "full games", and it's a terrible thing to say because it makes casual games sound lower but their not, but we're going to see more and more of these downloadable "full games". A lot of the dialogue happening now about downloadable content parallels with what was going on in the music industry eight years ago when the notion of downloading music was being discussed. It's like we're repeating history to some degree, so let it play out. The Playstation store is never going to replace retail; I think it's a supplement to retail quite honestly. Like I said before, some of our strongest fans want to get the retail version because they want that stuff. Players get the choice though. Some players may already have the headset, like the SOCOM one which we support, and they just want to go and download the game because they don't need the headset that comes with the retail copy. But then there are other people who want to pay a little bit extra to get the Jabra headset.

Can you talk a little about the server technology you're using on Warhawk, what the Integrated Server Technology is and how it helps Warhawk do what it does better?

DJ: For us Warhawk is a standout title because, among other things, it is launching with world wide connectivity. Players from any of our territories, and that is US, Canada, all the countries in Europe, Russia, China, Korea, Japan, and Australia, can all play together at the same time and all of their stats get posted to this huge crazy stat farm so you can see who's the best. In addition to that it put an interesting load on our system, and again it's not a revolutionary server model, it's a model that people have been using in the PC world for quite some time, we just took a different approach. So we said look, now the PS3 is fast enough where it can host a large number of players, it's got a very fast network connection built in, and it can be our server because it gives players the freedom to not be force into the mother ship at Sony. As a bit of trivia, for the first couple of days of our public beta, there was not a single Sony server running but it didn't matter because there were enough gamers out there that wanted to host their own games that we had 70 servers running and none of them were ours, players just started them. So it allows us to distribute out game load. Players can always play on Sony servers, and can see in the photos we have posted on our website that there are a lot, and what you see in the photos aren't even all of them, that's just row one of very fast dedicated servers running on specific rotations, but at the same you can always host your own game. If you have a clan, if you're in a dorm and want to set up your University of Michigan server for example you can set it up and let it run in the background it's like folding at home but it's not something that's socially advancing, it's just fun. That distributes server load all over the world, and with as fast as Warhawk is we needed to make sure servers were as close to players as possible.

What's the difference between players using their own server and using the Sony servers?

DJ: There's no difference. Code wise we made no differentiation at all. We wanted players to be able to host a first class server on their own. For moderation purposes all Sony servers are listed in a blue font on the server list and they'll say something like SCEA_doc.fight and it'll sure up in blue; aside from the coloring though, their identical. All the admin options that Sony admins have, like they can set up a rotation like, I want to do this dog fight level two times, and then I want to do a capture the flag level with this boundary and then I want to make sure no split screen is allowed, or maybe your clan wants to level up, you know -rank up. So you just set up a machine as a rank dedicated server. You can even setup Warhawk to just run in the background with no graphics what-so-ever, and again like folding at home, set up a server rotation, give it a clan message, or maybe you run an ISP for 'Joe's ISP' or whatever, give it a name, give it a server message and let it run in the background and it'll just draw a simple little status update window where you can see all the players, what their pings are, how many points the have and that's it. But again it's new to the console world, so that's cool that Warhawk's doing it, but some of that technology and that approach is stuff that PC gamers have been enjoying for years.

How will downloadable content fit into the future of Warhawk?

DJ: That's a very common and a very good question because I think that if someone's going to commit to buying a multi-player title, especially when it's online certainly they can play it offline in split-screen mode if they want to, but the meat and potatoes comes from online combat, they want to know that there's a team there to support and expand it. And that's absolutely the case here. Sony's been fantastic with allowing us to dedicate a team to do ongoing balance, we have issues come up from our community, and we have service patches of new content. On the point of downloadable content, it's not content that we cut to hold back and later jam down the throats of players. What we do with our downloadable content is to look at the feedback from players and develop content that supplements their experience, not just rehashes stuff that we perhaps descoped previously. We were able to collect a lot of feedback from the beta. There were a lot of really great ideas that it was to late to incorporate, but we ear marked to perhaps come back to it and put it in future. We also have a team that will scour all of the forums for Warhawk feedback on Warhawk.com so that we can make sure that our first outing of downloadable content matches what players want.

What feed back did you get during the beta that surprised you?

DJ: There were two things that were especially interesting, one which is funnier and the other a little more serious. On the serious side we had players who really enjoyed hosting their own games, so people were hosting a lot of games. What we did not anticipate was people hosting games way beyond their bandwidth limits of what their line at home could use. So we got some negative feed back about that. Some people would say things like, "I was playing on this one guy's server and it was lagy, and as more people connected it got worse." And it ended up being because some poor guy in his house was running on a not very good DSL line and hosting 20 players on his machine. At that time our bandwidth limiter was not well calibrated, we didn't know how important of an issue monitoring bandwidth was going to be. As a result we know it's wicked important because while we don't want to limit that individual's game experience, it's not good for the community for him to host a game that supports more players than his data connection can support. So that guy can join in on a 32 player game, he's certainly not going to be hosting that many players on his server. That guy can safely host 8-16 players on a DSL line, while if you have a fast cable line you're easily able to host 20-24 players, and if you're on a good network connection then you can host 32 no problem. So that was a bit of information that we did not expect.

The other part that was interesting was that there was an enormous amount of feed back about wanting a horn on the 4x4, because people wanted to be able to honk the horn to signal to other players to jump in. And that made sense because the 4x4 is important for getting a bunch of people into and out of zones, racing a flag back, or whatever and you want to be able to go 'honk, honk' to signal people to get in. What was interesting was that when we put the horn in and were testing internally at Sony, more than using it for communication, it was used to piss people off after they ran them over. So they would get in a jeep and run a guy down and after he ran them down they would be honking the horn, so you'd see this jeep run over a dead body going 'honk, honk' and just drive away. So that was an example of responding to player feedback. We had no plans to put a horn in. All the players wanted it so we put it in. But there was lot of useful feedback in general: game balance, pick up placement, turrets and vehicles. There were numerous pieces we were able to get from the user base and then respond back to. I didn't anticipate players being as excited about giving feed back as they were. People really liked it. We had a forum running where players would post their feedback. All of the dev guys were watching the forums, then I would go in and post and say "You're all right, here's what were changing." We did that several times over the course of a few weeks. I think that people were actually surprised that developers cared what the gamers thought. The Warhawk beta wasn't a demo. I think it's very 'in' now to release a demo and call it a beta, but our beta was really a beta.

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