WarHawk Interview: Dylan Jobe

Detailed, hands-on update and interview with Dylan Jobe, who has had a haircut since last year's E3.

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By Kikizo Staff

Just over a year ago, Dylan Jobe came on stage at Sony's press conference at the Electronic Entertainment Expo and started gyrating. Some people laughed, some rolled their eyes, but most were intrigued. Was this man really flying a plane just by tilting the controller?

WarHawk has come a long way since last May, when Sony used it to demonstrate its only-then-announced Sixaxis controller for the PlayStation 3. What E3 attendees didn't see was the work that was going on behind the scenes, and the decisions that would radically change what they knew about the game.

While E3 was going on and players were coming to grips with using the Sixaxis to control the aircraft using only the tilt controls, Incognito and Sony were in a meeting room, discussing the fate of the game. It was here that the seed of the plan to make the game a download-only title was planted. Over the next few months, Jobe, producer of the game at Incognito, explains, the team decided that WarHawk would bypass retailers and go straight into the living rooms of gamers, making the game available only through the PlayStation Store.

Part of the process included debriding the singleplayer content, which Incognito had already shown off at previous trade shows. "We really weren't happy with the way the singleplayer stuff was going, and at the time we weren't sure how we were going to distribute the game," Jobe told Kikizo.

"It felt like, since we had opted to focus on multiplayer and really drive WarHawk as the premiere PlayStation Network game, it really made sense to make it downloadable."

Keeping people happy online increasingly means giving them more ways to do what they want to do, and Incognito is certainly not holding back. In addition to supporting 32 players - and up to four players on one machine - there's a wealth of options for players to configure how they want to play the game.

There are five different worlds, each with five layouts, and four game types to choose from. Players will be able to fully explore all the available options by setting up rotations of match types and maps, all of which can be stored on the hard drive, so you don't have to set it up every time.

Another neat touch is the ability to set up one PS3 as a dedicated server. As Jobe explains, this machine will not run any graphics. Rather, it runs your game rotation in the background and everyone in your group connects to that one system. Of course, you don't have to play this way. You can also just start up your PS3 as a player server, allowing people from across the world to join you for a game.

Keeping track of your friends is handled through a buddy list, which can also be used to find games. There are markers next to people's names on the list, showing which games they're in. Once you've found the people you want to play with, it's simply a matter of jumping into their games.

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