‘We’re not focused on revenue’: How Team Jade is making Delta Force: Hawk Ops a ‘player-first’ shooter

Delta Force: Hawk Ops finds itself stepping into an incredibly crowded market.

With a new Call of Duty later this year, Ubisoft‘s XDefiant recently released, the looming return of Battlefield, and the monolithic popularity of Fortnite, attempting to beat any of these games in terms of pure numbers is virtually impossible.

In a world where players have more choices than ever, and they’ve also never been less generous with their time, what, in the mind of publishing director Jessica Zhang, will mark Delta Force: Hawk Ops a success?

“Player satisfaction,” Zhang tells us. “The sentiment in our community. The whole team is always checking comments on social and on YouTube, to my huge dismay,” she laughs.

“We’re not super focused on revenue, it’s not a factor we take into consideration. We feel that if we establish a good rapport with our community, we feel the player will be the best judge of that.”

We’re told as we sat down to play the game that when the team explored the possibility of making a new game in the Delta Force series, almost everyone at the developer, and higher up the company ladder at Tencent, had fond memories of playing the game for hours in internet cafes.

While never a breakthrough hit in the West, Delta Force has a lot of cultural cache in Asia, and it’s hoped that by combining this with the Black Hawk Down movie license, something more familiar to Western audiences, the game can serve as a free-to-play hit here too.

The free-to-play market has never been more profitable, but for every Fortnite and Warzone, there are dozens of failures, even from the biggest names in the space. We asked Zhang what the team sees as challenges in the space in 2024, and what it’s learned in its time helming the global juggernaut Call of Duty mobile.

“For FPS players, they have very high standards,” she replied. “The PC and console scene is also getting livelier this year.

“This is both a challenge and an opportunity – as we worked on COD mobile, we noticed there were many players trying to use a mouse and keyboard or some kind of mobile controller add-on. This made us want to focus on console for this release.

“One of our strengths is how we want to approach the community. We want to tackle the problems the players are facing, and one of the ways we do that is that everyone who is working on the game has to play a lot of games. This is mandatory.”

We played two of the game’s multiplayer modes, and were shown a teaser video for the upcoming campaign. The campaign, which is being built on Unreal Engine 5, is a visual stunner, and blends from footage of the original film into gameplay and back again very smoothly. We’re told that the footage we were seeing was from a build from June.

The first multiplayer mode, Havok Warfare, sees two teams battle to capture points across a map. Each time a member of your team dies, a ticket is used and once the tickets are expired, or the whole map is captured, the game ends.

On the offensive side, this means trying not to burn too many tickets in the early game, as the further back the enemies are forced, they’re given more fortification in terms of their location on the map.

For example, the A point may be a mound of dirt with sight lines everywhere, making for an easy capture. As the game progresses, however, you’ll have to try to break through walls of enemies hiding in shipping containers and in high windows. The short time to kill also made every life feel precious.

The second mode, a more DMZ-like affair, was a much tougher challenge from our brief time in our session, but it gave the impression of something that would be immensely satisfying to finish with a group of friends. If you’ve played any interaction shooter you’re probably in familiar territory.

Juggling modes like this, as well as a campaign, made us ask how the team plans on balancing reacting to player feedback while also developing things that the team wants to work on.

“We have quite a lot of experience with live service, so we know how to look at the data and research to know what we need to be working on the game,” Zhang told us. “We’re also very transparent and want to know what they feel about every single aspect of the game. We’re a team that’s hungry for feedback.

“We are not the sole makers of our games, this is a two-way street, our players make our game as much as we make our game. You saw a good example of that with the little easter egg at the score screen,” she laughs.

She’s referring to a bug which saw an APC slowly driving into shot after a match while the score screen is displayed. This caused the player models to be run over and fly off-screen. Initially a bug, the community loved it so much it’s being kept in the game as a rare easter egg.

The market for this type of game is incredibly crowded, but it feels like no matter how many games there are in the space, if they are of a high enough quality, they are able to push through.

A free-to-play Battlefield-like on console is an interesting prospect, especially as the Battlefield franchise is in limbo, and young players are growing up expecting to be able to play the newest shooter for free.

The game’s campaign remains an unknown quantity, but with big-budget shooter campaigns very much taking a back seat in the race for the next Fortnite, it’s the part of the game that we’re most excited to get our hands on for ourselves.