THQ is giving the PC version of Homefront a lot of unique multiplayer tweaks, including first-person cockpit views, more sim-like controls in helicopters, squad-based VOIP, and yes, dedicated servers.
Homefront Creative Director Dave Votypka promised earlier this month that PC gamers would get some serious love from the game with a range of platform-specific features. “We know what they’re looking for – the clan players, the tournament players, and the PC developers,” he said. “We have a whole PC game catered to the PC community and we’ll be announcing more details pretty soon.”
That “pretty soon” has arrived and Votypka wasn’t kidding; Homefront multiplayer on the PC will definitely bring a lot of extra goodness to the party. Vehicles in the game will be controllable from both the first and third-person perspective. Helicopters will have three distinct control settings, Rookie, Veteran and Ace, each more difficult than the last but allowing for greater degrees of maneuverability. Joysticks will be fully supported and extra vehicle abilities for co-pilots have been added, like a recon function for the Scout chopper, and a practice mode will also be available so players can get a feel for the stick without getting a stick in the ear.
Beyond the vehicles, the PC edition will have a squad management system with squad-based VOIP, as well as clan support and more detailed post-match statistics. Multiplayer match recording is built it, as is LAN support, and a “dedicated server browser executable” will be released within two weeks of the game’s launch. Finally, as a Steamworks title, Homefront will keep hooliganism to a minimum with Valve’s Anti-Cheat software.
On the non-multi side of the coin, the PC interface has been tweaked to make it more mouse-friendly, SLI and Crossfire are both supported and so is Nvidia’s 3D Vision. Mod tools won’t be available at launch but could be released if there’s enough demand for it; a demo, however, is not going to happen. “We’d love to release a public demo, but this would detract efforts from the main game,” the studio explained in the Homefront PC FAQ.
Homefront comes out on March 8 for the PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
