Free-to-play mech FPS Hawken is making a fan-led comeback thanks to a new project called Hawakening. It's certainly not the first effort to bring Hawken back to life, but after the poorly received Hawken Reborn took the game in a completely different direction, this unofficial revival might be what the fandom really needs.
“Hawakening is a community effort to bring multiplayer back to life for the defunct CL142579 version of HAWKEN,” as explained on the project's website. “We've made this possible by reverse engineering in a clean room, injecting our own code into the client, and writing our own infrastructure from scratch. It's a labor of eternal love. Our servers are self-hosted. We will never monetize anything.”
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This may sound familiar to Hawken superfans; After all, Hawakening first launched in 2020. But that was a single-player renaissance aimed at allowing players to play with bots again. This new re-release is a completely custom server job that allows you to play PvP online. To be clear, this is a beta, and on Discord the developers warn that progress could be wiped in the 1.0 release, particularly since they're still deciding what progression will look like in a now microtransaction-free revival of a previously free-to-play game. . -play game.
The PC servers for Hawken were shut down in 2018, although the game has remained playable online with a dwindling player base on Xbox One and PS4. An official sequel called Hawken Reborn was released in 2023, but was almost immediately criticized for adding a pay-to-win cash store; Furthermore, it was a PvE game that was a departure from the PvP action that the original fandom loved. Steam reviews for the sequel remain “mostly negative”, but it received a new update on September 24. It reached a total of 25 concurrent players on Steam after that update.
The Hawakening developers eventually plan to bring the project open source, as it is “the key to making Hawken truly immortal.” But, they add, that “will require additional time, effort and considerations.” Meanwhile, it looks like Hawken fans really want to play again.
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