H-Hour: World’s Elite (PC/PS4) {The new SOCOM}

[6souls]

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Spoiler: show

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The Historic Significance of H-Hour

"H-hour" is a military term used to denote the specific hour that first assault elements are scheduled to reach a designated target. The letter "H" stands for the hour operations actually begin. There is but one H-hour for all units participating in a given operation. Figure combinations are used to indicate the length of time preceding or following the beginning of a specific operation. For example, H-3 means 3 hours before H-hour and H+75 means 1 hour and 15 minutes after H-hour.

The earliest recorded use of the term H-Hour is by the U.S. Army during World War I. In Field Order Number 9, First Army, American Expeditionary Forces, dated September 7, 1918 it states: "The First Army will attack at H hour on D day with the object of forcing the evacuation of the St. Mihiel Salient." Additional public archives can be found at the Center of Military history.

During World War 2, "H-hour" was the name given to the joint airborne assault in the Battle of Normandy. This operation included the American 101st Airborne Division and 82nd Airborne Division (Operation Neptune) and the British 6th Airborne Division (Operation Overlord). Consisting of over 50,000 men and 1,200 planes and gliders, this assault took place in the cover of night roughly three hours prior to the famous beach landings on Normandy (H+3). Through speed, the combined assault of these American and British Airborne and glider divisions would surprise German defenders and create enough havoc to prime the beaches for the infamous dawn landings.

Game Overview

H-Hour: World's Elite™ is a tactical, team-based, military shooter. Our first release is a core multiplayer experience for PC that includes no less than six maps, four new gameplay modes, and our comprehensive community-building/clan management tools.

A run and gun lone wolf approach quickly results in your death; only by cooperating with your team can you hope to achieve victory. But so many players who would love military shooters are discouraged by what they perceive as brutal competition from day one. Don't worry. We're including mechanisms that not only allow you to play with players at your skill level but teach and encourage you how to play tactically.

The design philosophy is simple: bullets are deadly, and any character not wearing body armor or staying out of the line of fire will not last long. There are no absolutes in lethality, but in H-Hour, you won't take a shot to the head and keep fighting while you miraculously regenerate health. If you are looking for a change of pace from reckless play and want a little more realism in your combat, you'll love the feeling of H-Hour and the game will monitor your performance, point out what you did right and wrong, and offer strategies for your improvement.

Reality is a theme of H-Hour. The game is inspired by real world events—the personal stories of Special Operations Forces—repurposed and staged in new and equally deadly locations for the purposes of preserving national security. Environments emphasize all the filth, chaos, and visual disruption common to many of the locales where savages plot and launch their insurgencies or terrorism campaigns.

All animations are sourced directly from Special Operations veterans who bring their expertise and decades of combat experience into the motion capture studio and their war stories into our offices. It's hard not to be inspired when you work with these heroes.

The Core Gameplay

We believe that players should be able to fine tune their shooter experience as much as possible. This is expressed in the design from the ground up.

H-Hour is a hybrid third person and first person shooter. The third person perspective allows you to view your character and provides increased situational awareness—an intelligence edge in combat situations. The first person view presents you with only a reticle and adjusts the field of view so that you have the feeling of being "in the shit" and a naturally enhanced "zoomed in" perspective that provides a twitch play edge.

The ballistics model is as complete and authentic as any weapons simulation available in a game needs to be, taking into account all the pertinent variables such as stance, weight, character speed, and the particular characteristics of each weapon. Any more realism would just get in the way of fun.

You can choose to carry more or less gear, heavier or lighter weapons, and more or less body armor among other options. Each of these choices bring benefits and tradeoffs in the form of increased firepower or protection but reduced speed, accelerated fatigue, or obstructed peripheral vision.

Command & Communication

Within the game and lobbies, players have access to headset chat with multiple channels so that they can speak directly to their teams. Team leaders can also use the TEAMCOM™ visual interface to send predefined and user-defined text commands to their entire team or individuals—including the AI-controlled civilians that appear on many maps. If you're not comfortable talking out loud in an online game that's okay—you can just choose from a menu of simplified visual commands and your character will do the talking for you.

Community & Clans

Multiplayer games live and die by virtue of their communities. In H-Hour, these communities are supported natively in the game itself through innovative community and clan management tools.

Players with leadership drive can create their own permanent clans with just a few clicks using preset options. However, these leaders have much more customization options at their disposal. These include sending invitations to join the clan, creation of unique clan badges and logos, a dedicated clan page, clan member performance data at a glance, the ability to issue and accept clan challenges, the creation of clan or training games with detailed after action reports, and the ability to tailor a clan constitution to match their philosophy.

Just as players are required to accept an agreement to play fairly and ethically when entering the world of H-Hour, clan members are required to embrace the ethos of their clan. The same technology that measures your performance to help you as an individual helps clan leaders build and better run their clans. Authorized clan leaders have access to the behavior of their members in any match and the ability to give guidance, warn, or censure any clan member. This means that a clan leader doesn't have to watch everything every team member does in a match—the game will create an "after action" report for them.

H-Hour also gives players the tools they need to build a robust community populated by gamers that want to play, not gamers that want to spout grief and irritate. This attitude is reflected in a subset of voting tools available in any multiplayer game that allows players to report cheating or bad behavior.

Offering dedicated servers allows SOF Studios to not only offer you the most reliable gameplay but to maintain a vast database of player metrics that can be used to improve the existing gameplay experience. Just like the "big boys" of the industry, we'll be watching closely to identify issues as they arise. Unlike the big boys though, we can release fixes right away without long lead times.

Ladders have always provided players with an easy way to compare their progress and abilities against other players. In H-Hour ladders perform the same function but in addition to the common focci of most matches won, most headshots and achievements of that sort, the games ladders include more abstract and until now, difficult to track performance. For example, H-Hour offers ladders for "best team player," "good Samaritans" who protect innocent civilians or save teammates, and "best tactical player" for those who apply real world tactics, among others.

Playing as a Team

Whether you are working together as a lethal SOF team or taking the role of the savages, you're encouraged and rewarded to play as a team. This means following orders from team leaders, sticking to a battle plan, achieving objectives that require coordination with one or more teammates, and watching the backs of your comrades. There is no "I" in H-Hour where the line between death and victory is crossed by selfish play. Rewards come not only in the form of a match win, but in increased experience points and combat perks available only to teams that coordinate and execute together.

Our Unique Resources

Members of America's retired warfighter community aren't our consultants—they're our colleagues. We don't email them with a question about firearms, they take us to the range and train us. We don't ask if they have photos from a dangerous part of the world, they take us there. We don't ask them what extreme rappelling is like, they throw us over a cliff so we know firsthand (which is far more awesome than it might sound). And one of our key teammates is a professional weapons engineer who knows as much about firearms and ballistics as just about anyone on the planet. The game development team blends all these insights and experiences into a shooter that is as realistic as the overarching principles of fun allow.

With long standing friendships throughout the defense industry—friendships with people that support the warfighter with the best in design and innovation—we have a direct line on what's "now" and what's next in terms of military gear and combat wear. Our advisory network represents companies that focus on weapons and optics manufacturing, clothing, and soldier survival equipment.

Production Values

We're going to push the PC to the limits of its rendering possibility (don't worry if you don't have a bleeding edge machine—H-Hour is scalable) and we have the artists and animators committed to doing this. H-Hour will be visually stunning.

Our goal is to unify AAA game design, art direction, and music to deliver you an outstanding game. It's a tall order but we've been doing this for years and with our no nonsense philosophy, we can dispense with the politics and get down to making the game you want to play.

Official site: https://www.sofstudios.com/index.php?/page/h-hour.html
Release date: Early 2015

[6souls]

[Sepukku]

I keep an eye on this game's development regularly, BB has like a 5 page thread on this. As someone who grew up on the early iterations of the Socom series this game has huge meaning for me and is the most anticipated game for myself between now and everything in the future, be it 6 months, 1 year, 2 year, or beyond. I care about this more than the next Battlefield, the next Final Fantasy, the EA Sports series port to Xbox-1/PS4. I can't wait.

[jmc]

They should really just remake socom 2 lol

However I'm still highly interested in checking this up, if it's anything like the original socom or socom 2 I'll love it.

[Cyprias]

Suppper stoked for this. I was a very active Socom II player. Really hoping it stays true to itself and not pull some S4 crap.

[6souls]

Being developed with UE4

H-Hour: World’s Elite is indeed being developed with Epic’s Unreal Engine 4, SOF Studios has confirmed.

The news comes via a livestream, as reported by MP1st, with SOF Studios lead David Sears confirming the team’s use of the tech.

The proof of concept footage the team has shown so far was created in Unreal Engine 3, Sears added, which explains why it’s not as lovely as you might expect. Proof of concept builds are created to give potential investors a big picture idea of how the game will work, and isn’t intended to reflect final quality.

This build is currently in beta, and is being shown when necessary, but Sears said SOF won’t allow public access; only the real, Unreal Engine 4 build will be made available for testing, “months and months” into the future.

http://www.vg247.com/2014/04/10/h-ho...real-engine-4/
http://mp1st.com/2014/04/10/h-hour-u.../#.U0cTf-aSzxY

[Cyprias]

Some recent talk from Monday mentioned this is now 99% complete.

From that same podcast, the video showed 20min of gameplay or so and it really does resemble the good ol' Socom II gameplay. Consider me hyped.

[6souls]

[Sepukku]

https://www.sofstudios.com/index.php...ec-8-2014-r199

So far so good, still looking at March-ish for Steam PC Access, games looking better and better every time I visit their website.

[Teknique]

Definitely looks interesting, i never did get into socom, but i do love me some rainbow six if its anything like that. tactical shooter is a tactical shooter right?

[6souls]

[Cyprias]

The beta is reported to have streaming allowed. Let the mechanic pin-pointing commence!

H-Hour April 06 Weekly Update

Quite personally, I'm already not a fan of customizing the guns. But it's something towards the genre at least.

[6souls]

[Sepukku]

Still very excited for this, can't justify dropping money on a modern gaming PC for the limited game they've put out so far. Would love to see the PS4 version in the works the second it comes out. Im gonna be all over that.