Dev Diary: Changing Horizons & PvE Plans
Hey, Renegades! Unbelievably, it’s been six months since we launched HAWKED globally on PC and consoles. In that time, so many of you have spent time on our wonderful submarine hub, the Riftwake, and the mysterious, treasure-filled world of X-Isle.
Your response and support has been wonderful. Getting to play alongside you, listen to, and act upon your feedback and requests has been our pleasure.
Admittedly, not all is well in HAWKED. After the initial surge of success and a large player count, Renegades have drifted in and out of the game. As a result, we haven’t managed to reach the minimum player base required to constantly fill 30-player sessions 24/7. You’re also probably well aware of the matchmaking issues I spoke about in the last Dev Diary.
But fear not: we have a plan! The future of HAWKED may look a little different from what we originally envisioned, but the horizon remains bright and full of loot.
MATCHMAKING CHALLENGES
The battle to achieve great matchmaking comes down to three factors, which are constantly being monitored and balanced by developers:
- Opposition Quality
- Ping
- Matchmaking Speed
We look at and adapt our matchmaking in three stages:
- Starting with an initial set of players, we allow them all to join matches together. This makes matchmaking fast, while the opposition quality and ping are poorly optimized. This is because we put everyone together, regardless of skill level or experience. If we merge different regions together, this increases ping and makes the game feel laggy.
- As we get more players, we can add skill-based matchmaking (SBMM) and ensure that regions are split. However, at this point, you might need to wait longer to get into a game to suit either of those requirements. In this case, players in different regions might be merged into the same queues more quickly in matchmaking.
- Finally, if we get so many players that we have enough variety in skill and experience across all supported matchmaking regions, this means we can have full 30-player matches with low ping and players on a similar skill level.
Unfortunately, we have not successfully reached the third level of matchmaking, and we have only reached the second level of matchmaking occasionally.
The impact of this is very clear: players who don’t get a satisfying matchmaking experience will not hang around for very long.
A NEW DIRECTION
And so, we had an interesting choice to make. It’s clear that HAWKED is an interesting and exciting game for many players, not least for the team working on it. We are still welcoming a lot of brand-new Renegades to X-Isle’s shores every day, and we can see from our data that we’re doing things right for the most part. Our new player surveys show high scores in the metrics we are hoping for. Overall, we are rated highly on PlayStation, easily above average on Xbox, and just above average on PC (with many of the more negative reviews stemming from technical issues at launch, which were solved soon after). The message from you has been clear: this game has potential.
We are now working on a new PVE mode for HAWKED. It will remain free to play like the core HAWKED experience, but we will look at adding some more monetization options for you to play around with too. PvP modes will, of course, stay in HAWKED. But our focus will be changed in the short term to delivering a PvE experience rather than adding much more to PvP.
Throughout the rest of the summer, we need all of our developers working on this. What this means for you as a player is that HAWKED will still be here in all its current glory. Weekly Bounties and prizes will still be up for grabs, new Shop rotations will come every Thursday, competitive Renegades can get stuck into Contracts and Ranked Mode, and we’ll bring Wonder Rush back. What you won’t see is our regular patch cycle (we will skip the next two at least). There will be no patch this week nor in two weeks. Instead, later in August, we’ll launch another Dev Diary that delves deep into the rollout plan for our PvE content.
We apologize in advance for this break in routine, but we wanted to keep you up to date with what is happening in the most transparent way possible. If you have any questions about this, check in with the PvE tag on our Feedback Forum on Discord, or just ask on your favorite social media platform. We are sure that you will want to know things we haven’t covered here, and at the very least, we’ll prepare answers in time for the next Dev Diary.
Thanks for your patience and your fierce support, Renegades! See you on X-Isle.
Andy Duthie, Executive Producer (HAWKED)
