News Hawken creators get $10 million investment

Meteor Entertainment, parent company of Adhesive Games and publisher of Hawken, has just been handed $10 million.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2012/02/28/hawken-creator-investment/1

 

With Mechwarrior Online stomping onto the horizon I'm surprised they are still bothering with this.

 

Screw Mechwarrior! This looks much better! $10m is a ridiculous amount to give what is basically an indie dev. I hope they spend $9m of it adding awesome physics and destructible environments.

 

They should just spend it all on paying off reviews, like what Bethesda did with Skyrim.

 

Silly billy...

 

Full credit to them. It looked like it would be great as an indie game, they now have noticeable backing so here's hoping that they release as they want to rather than going down the "Well, we have the money so why not tweak this, and that, and that too while we're at it" route.

 

The only silly thing is that it got 10/10 all over the place. I call shenanigans.

 

I'd really like to find somebody, somewhere, with a good knowledge of games who didn't think it was a 10/10 or as close to it as made no odds. I mean people talk about the UI and other minor flaws, but it's nitpicking. I mean sure it might not be everybody's cup of tea, but of course you're going to have an RPG fan review an RPG.

I mean I've played a hell of a lot of games over the last twenty five years or so, from Dragon 32 on up, and I've never, ever, seen anything like Skyrim. And frankly I would say anybody who says they have is a liar. Because if there was an RPG even nearly as good as Skyrim I'd know about it and I'd have played it.

So bribes or not has nothing to do with it, there's no RPG ever been made can compare to Skyrim, hence the near universal 10/10 scores. If a better RPG exists then let it speak now or forever STFU.

And anybody who says Morrowind is a clown.

 

At best I thought it was a 6/10. Nowhere near a 10.

edit*

I just read the rest of your post. You're just insane so I'm not sure why I even bothered commenting.

ON TOPIC

As for Hawken I'm interested to see how the free2play model will play out for them. The game looks like a blast.

About mechwarrior online, have they released any gameplay footage?

 

This chap is clearly trying to flame. I thought originally that there was too much hype and hyperbole surrounding Skyrim when I first bought it, but after playing it for several weeks I have to say that it ranks as joint second on my favourite RPG's of all time (with Witcher 2), and only behind Baldur's Gate 2 due to the excellence of the latter's storyline.

Skyrim is a very accomplished game, and whilst I accept that there are some points thta other games have done better, sheer breadth of available gameplay easily justifies at least 8.5 to 9 out of 10 personally.

I understand however, that you may not like this game - that does not however mean that it shouldn't score a high mark from someone who does like it. I don't like Dear Esther, and said as much, but that didn't mean I thought it didnt deserve a high score from a reviewer who appreciated that game.

Or are you the type who thinks we're *all* wrong?

 

Yeah. Obvious troll was obvious in retrospect.

 

I sincerely hope this means the game will be awesome. If there's all this tension and build-up only for it to be awful; it's going to be firebombed to death hard. Very hard. Still, It all looks good so far. So long as I can use my G13 and it doesn't spaz out the controls; It should play very well.

 

what the hell are you talking about? I just thought skyrim was average is all :/

 

Wow, $10 million for a studio which has never released a game? Ballsy. Can't want to get my hands on the game and make their investment pay off!

Had a good laugh at this one. They sure didn't spend their money on voice acting. Or bug testing for that matter!

I believe (or hope) that it's meant in jest. It's a way for people to try to make sense of the confusing and frankly ridiculous world of video game reviews. It's much easier to believe that the fine people at all of the big name review sites were paid off to give those scores than it is to believe that they actually think every single big name title deserves a 9 or more.

 

There's loads, noob.

 

Denied. If there were such a game I'd have played it.

 

Well it depends what you consider good doesn't it Skyrim has a really nice world but the combat is bloody pathetic, the story and dialogue isn't up to much, and there's not much depth when it comes to character building. You also only have one character... Baldur's Gate 2 however, the world isn't too nice, it's all 2d / semi-3d, all quite brown etc.. but you can make an entire party, and you can build each class however you want them, and you can have them all work together and complement each other. There is bags of depth to the combat and the character building, the story and dialogue is great, etc...etc.. There are countless old games to choose from, the Might & Magic series, the Wizardry series, etc..

One man's junk is another man's treasure.

Personally I find that true RPG's died some time around 1999, and splintered off in to a new genre - the MMORPG. There are probably a hundred of these, if not more, and it's sad that most people only ever think of WoW when they hear the name MMORPG. WoW is one of my least favourites. My favourite being Vanguard, which imo, is at least 10 times better than Skyrim, in EVERY way. It has 10 times better graphics, a 10 times bigger world, 10 times more variety to the locations, 10 times more quests (probably 100 times more actually), it has 100000 times better combat and character building, you can make a ship and sail the seas, there are probably over 50 dungeons, many of which would totally blow your mind and the mind of most modern gamers who have never actually seen anything like it.

Basically......
http://systemicbabble.com/videogames/level-design-then-and-now/

http://media.giantbomb.com/uploads/5/59069/1732714-1299754913574_super.jpg

etc..


p.s. What makes you think if there is a better RPG you would have played it? How many indie RPG's have you played? Ever played Eschalon? Avernum? How about old games like Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale or Planescape or Stonekeep or Vampire the Masquerade/bloodlines? How many specialist websites do you visit? I'm guessing all your gaming knowledge comes from mainstream websites like this, and if it's not the next big hyped blockbuster, then you probably have never heard of it.

I gotta wonder if you have even played all of the big well known ones. How many of these have you played: Two Worlds 2, Witcher 2, Gothic 3, Risen, Drakensang dark eye, Drakensang river of time, Dragon Age 1, dragon age 2.

 

I've played most of the RPGs that have come along going back to the likes of Bard's Tale, Bloodwych, Faery Tale Adventure and Dungeon Master. So when you talk about Baldur's Gate being old I would beg to differ. Games back then were so hardcore if you went AFK for twenty minutes your whole party starved to death.

But then down to brass tacks. Yeah the pioneering isometric RPGs like BG2 and Planescape are good, indeed I recall at the time considering BG2 to be the best game yet made, because it was awesomesauce.

However party-based games however have always been lacking in depth because unfortunately you're bound into the template for what would late become the tank/dps/healer dynamic of the MMO. There's also no depth to character building in the Baldur's Gate games whatsoever because it's Dungeons & Dragons, which means you pile points on the one or two stats your character uses and call it a day. The party system is built around specialisation. Six min-maxed feebs each as weak as a kitten on their own. The Drakensang games did feel a lot less narrow in that regard, but that could just be because I don't know the game system that was based around as well.

If we're talking about something like Vampire: Bloodlines as a rival to Skyrim for depth then you'd have a point but for the fact that the story is not good enough. Why isn't it good enough? Because it's too combat heavy. Most of the skills in the game won't see use, whereas your capacity to shoot people is vital to success in the story, which is a big disappointment. Also Vampire Bloodlines was broken on release and needed to be modded. You bring mods into the conversation though and Skyrim's adaptability really stands out above pretty much any other game.

In regards to the story offering options Fallout New Vegas does a brilliant job as it is perhaps unique in the extent to which you can succeed without combat in so much of the game. But again, this is just as well as the combat isn't up to much in that game.

There are games that have great elements to them, and there are flaws to Skyrim, but it's very much a sum of it's parts deal. What makes it such a damn good RPG though in my opinion is the freedom of it. People complain about the main quest, I would point out you never have to do it, people complain about the characters, I would point out you never have to speak to them. I mean it's no Mount and Blade or X3 in regard to how much freedom you actually have (hey spaceship games can be RPGs too) but it goes a long way for a game of it's type. Contrast that to say The Witcher or Mass Effect where you're essentially on a rail with a few junctions along the way and it's a breath of fresh air. I mean I love both Mass Effect and The Witcher, don't get me wrong, but the constraint of playing Gerelt or Shepard can be very binding.

There's plenty of good RPGs out there, some indy, some mainstream, but I would take Skyrim over any of them as a pure RPG. As a game where you create a character and have them go out into a game world and do whatever you want to, which is the essence of roleplaying games, it's the best there is. And then you can mod it. So it's even better. But what I'm driving at is that it has the essential quality of an RPG in spades, freedom, the ability to just take a turn off the questing path and go native. Skyrim does that so elegantly you can literally forget there is a main quest.

I think you could make a case for Neverwinter Nights, courtesy of its unparalleled multiplayer system, perhaps being unassailable as the greatest true RPG in video gaming history, in the sense of being the game that most closely reflected tabletop gaming, even down to having a Dungeon Master, but the dragons didn't look as cool.

 

10 million seems a little...excessive. But good luck to them. I hope they make a game worth playing. One to keep an eye on.