In Hawkwood, players take control of the worldwide and infamous Hawkwood family. For generations the Hawkwoods have been mercenaries for hire all around the globe. In this game, family members are commissioned by various tribes, governments, and corporations to pull off deep covert missions on their behalf, for considerable fees. As the Hawkwoods progress forward in the game narrative, their risks become mortally dangerous, but the payoff offers the promise of financial freedom and a life without crime.
The major goals of the game are to:
Long-term goals include more exotic, high profile missions involving recognizable locales, as well as the honing of a handful of skills that allow one to become a master sniper or hand-to-hand combat expert. The goal is to allow the player to decide which path he or she will take through the game.
Each mission on the world map will tell the player:
(very basic world map example)
(mission selection mockup)
Customizing the in-game avatar, and picking the way to defeat missions allow the player to identify and connect with the game on their own terms. The player, having completed the game, would have that character saved and ready for use in online play or a sequel, should either prove to be a viable option.
Hawkwood is a first person shooter with an added focus on the skill of the in-game avatar. The game follows one member of the Hawkwood family on various mercenary missions around the globe.
We strive to create a synthesis of strategy and first-person shooter action game based on guerilla warfare tactics. Gameplay will take place over a number of various 3D terrains and environments.
Hawkwood Inc. is an independent startup company formulated to develop the game Hawkwood. The goal of the company is to put forth a new and exciting computer game that will draw in gamers interested in a unique first person shooter that possesses elements of pre-mission strategy, and in-game skill specific upgrades.
Hawkwood plans to have a tough guy/girl image created through use of various media including television commercials, endemic print advertisements, and online advertisements. Ads will stress the ability of players to customize their character, gain skill specific improvements, and slowly reveal more and more of the storyline up to the release date.
The storyline of Hawkwood is being developed to allow for narratvie expansion both into the past and future. Other potential titles could follow the family back to the Middle Ages or into the 24th century for example.
Ideally, the character a player creates in the game could be portable to other iterations of the franchise. In essense, each player will have their own personally branded avatar to nurture and grow within the franchise.
Hawkwood Inc. will further promote its brand through its website. On this website there will be a trial version that allows players the opportunity to experience first hand limited game play, including the beginning of a mission. The website will also include a picture gallery of the characters, screenshots, the previews shown on television, the storyline, a description of the features, reviews, and technical support.
Hawkwood Inc. will continue to promote its brand through the release of supportive products including a soundtrack CD, a graphic novel about the story of the Hawkwood family, t-shirts, and decals. The soundtrack and novel will be sold in game stores across the United States about one month after the release of the game. The t-shirts and decals will be available the day the website is launched.
The target audience for Hawkwood will be 17-35 year old males who play PC games an average of 5 hours per week. Hawkwood will be targeted towards gamers that enjoy first person shooter games with a strong, open storyline, excellent graphics, superior sound quality, and diverse game replayability.
However, Hawkwood is also planning to appeal to female gamers in the same age range by offering the ability to have the antagonist of the game be female.
The storyline of Hawkwood will be exciting for both male and female gamers. Further research is planned to study if female gamers would prefer their avatars to do certain tasks better an or worse than males, or if all avatars should have similar physical abilities.
Halo: Combat Evolved
Halo: Combat Evolved, developed by Bungie and Gearbox Software, is the new PC version of Halo, a first person shooter game, originally released for Xbox. Halo is a combat game similar to Hawkwood. Halo's story is that of alien attempt to exterminate humankind. The player takes on the role of Master Chief, a highly skilled soldier, which is trying to save humankind from this extermination. The limitation to one character is one difference between Halo and Hawkwood. Hawkwood allows players to choose their character from the family and customize the character to their tastes. The players of Hawkwood also have the option to focus on other skills outside of just combat skills. Players can choose to focus on strategic skills, health skills, military skill and more. These points of differntiation should allow for further immersion of the gamer into the storyline.
The game design and game play of Halo and Hawkwood have several similarities:
After much review of Halo, Hawkwood Inc. decided to focus on improving the standard for PC graphics. While Halo has decent graphics and surpassed most first person shooter PC games of its time, a common criticism of the game was its frame per second rate and its ability to run smoothly. In order to get Halo to run at 30 fps, players have to adjust down the resolution. The graphics will be an important part of the Hawkwood experience, so close attention will be paid to making graphics run smoothly on the largest percentage of PCs at the launch date.
Another common criticism of Halo is the lack of variety in the indoor graphics and layout, but it does provide excellent outdoor graphics. Hawkwood Inc. plans to set itself apart from Halo with more realistic indoor environments, and creating outdoor environments that closely mimic reality.
Hawkwood Inc. has discovered some advantages to reviewing Halo, including developing on its weaknesses as already discussed and to learn from their successes. Halo has had great success in luring gamers to purchase the game on both the XBOX and PC. Players of the original Xbox version are buying the new PC version to check out the two new weapons and six new maps that are PC exclusive. Since Hawkwood also plans to crossover into other platforms in the future, there are plans to encourage repeat business by offering exclusive new features such as maps and weapons.
Rainbow Six 3
Rainbow Six 3, developed by Ubisoft, is a first person shooter game based on a Tom Clancy novel. Rainbow Six 3 is a combat/strategy game similar to what is planned for Hawkwood.
The setting for the game is 2007 and Rainbow Six is the codename for the counterterrorism group that the gamer is leading through missions. What is most notable in regards to the development of our product, Hawkwood, is the Rainbow Six franchise that exists. Ubisoft has successfully been able to release numerous versions of this game, whether it be for a different platform or just an updated version, it has been successful.
The ultimate goal of Hawkwood Inc. is to build a successful franchise by studying Ubisoft's decision process and release windows regarding Rainbow Six will be beneficial to future growth of Hawkwood Inc.
The storyline featuring the Hawkwood family will lend itself well to exploring both the history and the future of family members, creating great opportunities for future games, book, movies, etc.
The concept of Hawkwood is to allow the player to engage in a series of first-person combat missions taking place in jungle and urban environments, while at the same time allowing them to progressively improve and change their in-game avatar and, thus, their playing experience. By offering multiple paths which the player may devotes him- or herself to wholly or in part, Hawkwood aims to provide extended long-term playability.
A wide range of environments, obstensibly set in various locales across the globe, will be made available to the player, each of them with a mission that may be solved in a number of different ways, involving assault, subterfuge, sabotage, or some combination of these and other tactics. In concert with this will be a character editing engine (graphically nothing more than a series of menus) which will offer the player the chance to increase or decrease their character's abilities within a particular skillset. This will be the player's way of choosing their path in the long-term sense of the word. You may take any approach to any mission at any given time, but what you choose to invest your skills in affects which kinds of strategies will prove successful more often than not, and which won't.
As the game progresses, the player's avatar will become highly skilled in a number of different areas. This will make the player eligible for more high-profile, high-stakes missions in more urban, recognizable environments. The player will be able to repeat missions using very different methods. The end result is that these varied tactics will result in fundamentally different gaming experiences, centering around hand-to-hand combat, vehicles, stealth, or intense planning.
The structure of Hawkwood is both linear and circular. Each level has a number of different ways to achieve the mission goals and completing missions in different forms gives the Hawkwood family different experience points to be applied in later levels.
A player may return to a previous level at any point to defeat it in a different way to gain different experience to be used in later missions. A player can choose to rush through the play of one narrative thread of the game, or may decide to explore all potential outcomes of every mission.
The player will begin by:
The game begins with the deployment of the player to a random combat location on the world map. Initially, the player has only low amounts of experience and money. The former means that the player is eligible for only a small number of jobs available on the world map, while the latter means that the player has a very limited ability to travel, restock weapons, purchase vehicles, pay other mercenaries for their assistance, etc. Therefore, the player's choice of missions will initially be limited, amounting to little more than navigating an environment with a small group of armed forces - essentially what is offering by most first-person shooters on the market today.
As the player completes a handful of missions, however, he or she will gain additional money and experience points. Whereas money can be used to, among other things, buy the player passage to other places on the world map, additional experience points will get them started on the skill tree. The skill tree will offer a handful of basic skills, such as "stealth," "hand-to-hand combat," and "medical training." The player, gaining experience points from every mission they play, soon has the ability to invest those points in whatever skills they want. The more points they invest in a skill, the more adept they become in that particular skill. Further, as the game progresses, the skill tree itself will become more specific, more applicable to special missions, offering skills such as "piloting an aircraft" or "wall scaling."
(crude skill / item purchase screen)
Eventually, the player will, by virtue of their increased experience points, be eligible for more exotic, high-stakes missions. By way of their increased funds, they will be able to afford large teams and high-tech weaponry. Since each skill tree takes much of the run of the game to increase to capacity, the player, having beaten the game, may wish to restart the game with a new avatar and play the game through differently - as a demolitions expert rather than a sniper, say.
Hawkwood contains a significant strategic element, therefore the system does not force a player to defeat any level a specific way. For example, if the mission is to eliminate incriminating documents in a building there might be a box of grenades next to the structure that the player can shoot to blow it up, or pick them up to manually toss at the building. With the required skill-set, a user could break into the building by picking a lock and shred the documents by hand. The goal of the system is to offer numerous endings to each mission, and the players decision effect the way in which success is achieved.
Most missions well contain no over-arching element of the "ticking clock" to force players to rush through a mission when they may need a little time to develop a plan. This is not to say there will be no time limitations on specific missions. How effect is a bomb diffusing mission if the bomb will never go off? The idea is to not force the game to rely solely on the ticking clock cliche.
Another design feature will be how the game handles different types of player. Explorers can traverse the entire map in a leisurely fashion, stealthily taking out enemies and buildings. Achievers can attack guns ablaze in an attempt to get through as quick as possible. It does not matter if most of your men die - only the player's character is needed to advance. Depending on the way a specific level was defeated the player's character gains skill points in that specific area.
Hawkwood will feature a set of controls that are simple and dynamic, giving the player the ability to free up their brain to strategize. Menus are accessed quickly and become almost transparent to the game play. If there is a section where a player needs to lure bad guys into a trap, they can break off a member of the team, and send him as bait to bring the enemy into an ambush. Enhancements such as this should elevate Hawkwood from a typical first person shooter - a difficult task to achieve.
The system of signs in many popular games say that characters going into water means death, or the system simply does not allow them to get wet. Hawkwood will open up all of the terrain inside the entire map to explore, and develop strategies inside of. For example, the ability to wade in the water will be a feature of the game. There will not be an element of swimming, but a potential to wade chest high in murky swamp water.
For centuries, the Hawkwood's have been mercenaries for hire, but now they are looking to get out. You are the family's last hope to breakaway from this lifestyle, but the only way out is to make an unprecedented run of covert tactics. Do you have what it takes to help the Hawkwood family get out from under the cloud of crime? Only you determine the fate of the Hawkwood mercenaries.
A new form of playing experience, allowing full character customization including in-game skill specific upgrades.
Create your own mercenary utilizing a wide range physical traits and intellectual abilities.
Travel around the world to various locals and terrains ranging from forest, to desert, to dark urban environments.
Decide your own path - defeat missions using a number of strategies and tactics.
The goal of Hawkwood is to create an experience that puts the gamer in control of their avatar. This allows for them to have a small personal investment in their character, thus creating a more immersive gaming experience.
Defeating each mission in a specific style helps players gain skills and experience, which make more missions available. Ultimately, the player will have a choice in how they defeat a specific mission, and how they will utilize their skills and which upgrades they will purchase.
While Hawkwood is similar to games that have preceded it, it significantly sets itself apart from the pack of first person shooters with new, appealing personalization features, a diverse and open in-game experience, and a compelling storyline.