Tom Clancy's HAWX: Ubisoft Interview

Let's take a closer look at HAWX in our chat with lead designer, Ubisoft Romania's Thomas Simon.

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Having delved into the mechanics, he tells us a little about the campaign structure. "The game has two main parts - the first part acts like an introduction where you are still with the US forces and you help the Ghosts on the ground. Once you join the PMC you have all these missions around the world where you accept contracts for your company. And obviously the plot starts to be built, until you realise something terrible is going on - and then we switch to a high pace storyline, more like a political military thriller. And this is the second part of the game and we don't want to disclose much about it today.

"But in the first part of the game what I can tell you is that you'll have environments like South America, that you'll have environments like Afghanistan - where your private military company is contracted by NATO to support ground troops that are attacking caves where some insurgents are hiding. You'll have a mission in the Middle East, you'll have a mission in Africa to support the African Union. So there's really a lot of variety in the environments."

We press him for more info on the plot, and he concedes one further snippet. "You've seen Rio, which is a major city? You have a total of four major cities in the game."

The visuals are easily HAWX's most striking attributes: hazy blue volumetric clouds, intensely photorealistic urban terrain and stunningly rendered aircraft, scattered over maps up to 120 square kilometres in size. Simon walks us through some of the technical details. "The first thing is that we have a great collaboration with the best provider of satellite tech on the market, which is called GeoEye. They've given us some great, great data - very high quality... and we don't even use it entirely, because if we used [exactly] what they give us we would need one DVD per map. Literally."

"We worked a lot to make sure we can rebuild the environment exactly as it is, and so we can also meld the plane into that," he says. "For example, to make sure the light reflected on the ground - depending on the altitude because it gets bluer when you get high - is represented as the correct colour."

We express amazement at the game's three year incubation time, and suggest that the team must have given a lot of effort to keeping abreast of technical advances. Simon agrees. "Yeah! That's what we do. That's why we pushed for 60 frames per second, that's why we increased the resolution of the ground textures from satellite view, that's why we also have a digital innovation that calculates the exact elevation of the ground."

Above all else, Simon concludes, Ubisoft has tried to create something as close to reality as possible. "There's a feeling that it's a real environment." By so doing, the developer is being true to its heritage. "There are several things about Clancy and the universe, whatever you want to call it. Firstly I think it's the authenticity of the universe, the fact that it's really our world. That situation - that's our world the way we know it." But there are less intellectual considerations too, Simon admits. "It's also the elite aspect - for me, nothing is more elite than fighter pilots."

Tom Clancy's HAWX is due out for PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in Q1 2009.

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