Behind The Curtain: The Warhawk Servers

As I mentioned in my last post, I wanted to give you guys a bit of a “peek-behind-the-curtain,” to show you our sweet Warhawk server setup.

Those of you familiar with Warhawk already know that the game features a very unique server method that we call “Integrated Game Server” or IGS for short — the industry needs more acronyms don’t you think :-)

The Warhawk IGS method means that instead of us forcing players to be connected to the SONY “mothership” for any and all games, we instead let players host their own servers on their own PS3s. This is fairly unique and it enables a couple of really nice benefits.

First, since Warhawk is a global online game, our IGS method scatters game servers quite literally into player’s homes all over the planet — the US, China, Europe, Australia, and Japan! No matter where you live, what time you want to play, or what language you speak, you’ll always be able to get your game on.

Secondly, this helps with latency. If you haven’t heard, Warhawk is a fast game, a very fast game, so we wanted to ensure you had the best chance of finding servers with good ping times. We also wanted to make sure people could host *and* play on their own servers. After all, why should you have to connect to a server a gazillion hops away when you know that there are Warhawk servers running in your state or city? Possibly on your same ISP? Maybe even friends in your neighborhood or buddies in your dorm?

Hence our desire to develop an IGS system for Warhawk.

All that said, we still want to make sure that there are always an abundance of wicked-fast Ranked Dedicated servers available for players. The images that accompany this post were taken by our very talented IT team here at SCEA. And yes, what you’re looking at is an enormous server cluster for Warhawk…of rack-mounted PS3s!

During the public beta, many of you wanted *way more* Ranked-Dedicated servers to play on so you could level-up and earn awards, rank upgrades, etc….

Well…ask and ye shall receive!

In addition to players being able to host their own servers, 32-player “dedicated” servers for your clan practices or 24-player “player” servers, SONY has made a great commitment to all of our Warhawk players by staging Warhawk Server clusters similar to this one all over the world.

The system that our IT team engineered for Warhawk is truly killer and we couldn’t be happier with the setup — and hopefully players will be stoked too once the game launches. Just for the record…I am fairly confident that our IT team is not comprised of Autobots.

For those of you who participated in the beta, you may remember toward the end that some players started to “spoof” the official SONY server names — shame on you. I will find you all online and shank you repeatedly or snipe you in the crotch!

So…in the beta forums you all asked for a way to identify official SONY servers from player servers…Again, your wish is granted.

When Warhawk launches, all official servers are displayed with an eye-pleasing blue color in the server list. This gives players a really quick way of picking which server they want to connect to.

Alright, this post is getting pretty damn long so I gotta wrap it up.

The last thing I want to mention, and those of you who participated in the beta already know this, is that we don’t force game match-making on to our players with Warhawk. When you log-in to Warhawk, you get a server list…a *global* server list (with customizable filters of course), just like many of us have come to love from years of PC gaming. *You*, the player, get to choose the server you want to play on. If you don’t see a server out there that has exactly what you want…then launch your own.

And yes, you can play on your own server too…even in 4-way split screen.

Well…hope this gives you a bit more info on Warhawk’s server system and setup. If you have any questions please post them in the comments and I’ll try to answer as many as I can.

Rock on!