Hardwar

"The Future is Greedy"

Hardwar (Also HardWar or  HardW[a]r  depending on how one takes the game's logo) is an obscure space planetary air-trading sim developed by The Software Refinery and released in 1998. Considered at the time a Spiritual Successor to Elite.

The game takes place in a city complex built among the craters of Titan. Misplaced Optimism is a dystopian slum, earning the label "Misplaced" following the abandonment of the formerly lucrative mining city by the company that ran it, leaving all the workers behind with no means of escape. MO is being fought over by two rival faction, Klamp-G and the Lazarus Family; with various smaller groups thriving in the cracks. The preferred mode of transportation around MO are Moths: solar-powered speeder/aircraft crossovers available in a variety of models. It's this dynamic that makes the game interesting: During the day, Moths generally have no problem staying aloft and engaging in combat, but once night ticks around, energy starts to drain rapidly from the Moths' cells, leaving them stranded in conveniently placed Lightwells while better equipped combatants tear them apart.

Like most games of the genre, Hardwar allowed players to focus on three areas: scavenging, combat or trade; in fact, each of the three original starter Moth setups was designed around one of the three. Traders would trade resources among the hangars of MO, pirates would try to hijack and steal the cargo from traders, while scavengers would either have to work fast to scoop up any dropped loot before the pirates could manage to collect, or by hoovering up the scraps left behind from battles. As expected, players could then use their new wealth to upgrade the equipment of their Moths or upgrade to a shiny new Moth model. A patch added more starting setups, mostly easier than the originals due to much better equipment being immediately available.

It's also possible to own hangars by visiting the local estate agent. Hangars could then be managed to be private (for storage of spare Moths, clones and various other resources) or even opened up as public hangars to act as repair shops or stores, all for a neat profit for the player. One could even install manufacturing equipment such as distilleries, so it was possible to buy materials for goods at a cut price, manufacture the goods and sell them directly.

As usual, the plot was nothing to write home about, but had its moments. Most information was passed to the player in emails, or delivered by full motion video.

Hardwar still has a fair amount of community support. It also turned out that the game's multiplayer allowed for persistent online games to function, so a few such servers exist.

Notably, after the developing company went out of business, the game's original dev team started making game mods for their own game, specifically the 'UIM' unofficial patch series, which sought to fix the issues they weren't able to before going under, and actually did a fairly good job of it.


 * An Economy Is You: Nope, not really. Generally speaking, while NPC aviators are happy lugging cheap, low-return goods around Misplaced Optimism, you have to make all the big hauls in order to get anything good. And hope that no one else buys that Largest Pod that you've been influencing a manufacturer to make for you.
 * An Entrepreneur Is You: You could own hangars from the start, but only the later patches made it possible to turn a hangar into a capital-generating entity. Buy the proper equipment, install it, and you have a factory ready to make you rich.
 * Artificial Brilliance: The AI in this game is certainly nothing special in 2010, but when the game was released it was literally years ahead of its time. AI pilots are all unique individuals with their own objectives and goals, flying around trading or scavenging or pirating or bounty-hunting or engaging in gang/faction wars, stopping to rest and refuel, and all manner of other things. There's a fully functional (if somewhat broken in some versions) economy simulation running underneath the whole thing, and the end result is a fully-realized virtual world all being simulated in real time as the player explores it.
 * Artificial Stupidity: NPC behaviour can be effortlessly exploited for enormous combat advantages.
 * They can't negotiate obstacles easily; if a NPC is following and shooting you, and you pass close to a building, pipe, bridge or any other large object, their collision avoidance kicks in. This causes them to do wide maneuvers around the offending item during which their fighting ability drops to zero. By the time they recover you've left them so far behind that they can't hope to catch up.
 * In tunnels they can't do anything other than flying in a straight line, including returning your fire or reacting to attacks in any way. They'll also do more wide maneuvers before entering the tunnel, and need a few seconds to regain their bearings once they exit one. This enables easy NPC kills if you can lure them in, and makes tunnels an easy escape route from fights turned sour. Even better, if they're carrying cargo, you can exploit a physics glitch that prevents other AI pilots from going into the tunnels just to pick up that jettisoned cargo (see Wreaking Havok below).
 * Their choice of primary weapons is poor. They'll use laser turrets to whittle down your shields even as you blast huge chunks off theirs with the far more effective plasma cannon, while the few who have the plasma cannon can drop shields quickly but then don't have a hull-impacting weapon to actually destroy their target with. Averted with the Police, since they have the actual sense to not only use their laser turret, but also fire their plasma cannon as well as launching whatever missiles they've got to take down a moth; if they had the mental fortitude to actively seek out would-be offenders, that is.
 * They never use advanced countermeasures such as the afterburner or holograms.
 * They take ages to enter hangars, having to position themselves properly and then slowly advance until they're in. They're highly vulnerable during this time, and if you interrupt their docking sequence (by, say, bumping them) when they're already in the airlock they can get stuck inside and eventually get blasted apart by the hangar's guns.
 * Awesome but Impractical: The 'Arms Dealer' starting scenario, which gives you your own hangar to start with (in the very busy Downtown area, no less), your own private monorail station to move around the city, a stockpile of sellable goods, a hefty bank balance, and easy access to some Player Mooks to hire.....oh, and you're in a slow, poorly-maneuverable Moth with a weak power cell and no weapons or countermeasures, and there are several heavily-armed, well-equipped rival arms dealers out for your head and they know where your hangar is. Good luck!
 * BFG: The Devastator missile, which kills an enemy Moth in a single shot.
 * Big Bulky Bomb: At a certain point in the plot, it becomes necessary to blow up a thick tunnel-blocking wall. A nuclear missile is fitted to the player's moth, but it's so big it can't fit in the standard hardpoints so it just hangs off the side of the cockpit. When, an even bigger one is fitted.
 * Broken Bridge: All routes into the Port crater are blocked off early on in the storyline, and getting to Port is a plot point. Fortunately, there's no real reason to go there if you ignore the story.
 * City Guards: Police Moths fly around on patrol, and will pursue you relentlessly if you make the mistake of shooting them. Kill one, and an enforcer will be sent out.
 * Cloning Blues: A patch added the ability to buy a backup for the player in the form of a clone. Installed in a hangar, the clone will activate if the player dies, retaining all of the player's properties (minus the Moth in which they died). It's never really explained how the PC's mind gets transferred to the clone, though...
 * Cool Plane: The Swallow. Every other Moth in the game is strictly function-over-form: trading Moths are wide and heavy, armored police Moths are basically large square-ish crates of hurt, and even the more aerodynamic fast fighters still retain a definite boxy look. The Swallow instead has clean, streamlined lines that make it appear quite different than everything else.
 * Crippleware: The game's demo had the entire gameplay map in it, but restricted you to just one of eight craters by closing the exit tunnels. After a few years the game was officially made free via a patch that removed the barriers in the tunnels.
 * Curb Stomp Battle: Tends to happen often after a while, as the player can upgrade his craft quickly and the enemy pilots are hampered by the AI's reliance on weaker weapons and inability to rapidly negotiate fixed obstacles and tunnels. Given a modicum of competence from the player, it's perfectly possible to fight any one enemy in the game with the weakest moth in the game and win easily. Fighting only becomes difficult when the player is simultaneously targeted by more than one enemy (fairly easy to achieve), or by several missile-armed enemies in sequence.
 * Crapsack World: The city of Misplaced Optimism is aptly named. About 90% of the population live in massive, cramped, overcrowded arcology towers. If you're lucky enough to get into flight school, you can end up as one of the remaining ten percent - moth pilots, who never have a steady income, rarely have homes beyond their aircraft, and constantly have to worry about the police, the major factions, the smaller gangs, pirates, scavengers, or getting caught in the crossfire of a battle between the aforementioned groups. It's not a question of 'if' a moth pilot will die horrifically in battle, but 'when'.
 * Cyberpunk Is Techno: Well the game's not that Cyberpunk but the soundtrack consists of electronic acts from the Warp Records label, which ranges from techno to ambient to even drum n' bass. As an added bonus, the moon's only radio station is called Hardwarp FM and even has the label's logo.
 * Death of a Thousand Cuts: The AI really likes to use the laser turret, and will often do so even when it has better guns available. But the turret really sucks at disabling shields, so duels between NPC moths become convoluted air ballets with a lot of weak laser fire being exchanged.
 * Debug Room: The God Hangar, which also allows you to cheat yourself money and equipment. Oh, and to instantly vanish from the game world at will... yeah, online use isn't liked very much.
 * Deflector Shields: Before you can start hurting a Moth's hull you need to take down its shields. Some weapons are better at depleting shields and others at killing what's underneath them - and the best shield-depleter has no effect on hull at all, forcing you to vary your tactics.
 * Determinator: The police enforcers. Once one is sent to catch you, it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you're dead. Kill it, and another will take its place. This can go on for a while, since after a few upgrades the player is able to win against any one enemy in the game, but sooner or later an enforcer is bound to catch you right after fighting someone else has depleted your shields...
 * Dronejam: This can happen very easily, especially if you make a hangar very popular among the NPC population. They'll just queue at it, while the first in line just gets stuck trying to enter the hangar, then failing, then returning to the front of the queue, then failing... this is particularly evident in one of the latest patches, which screwed up the game economy and caused many traders to line up to buy wares that didn't exist.
 * Dummied Out: there was to be an additional tunnel linking Downtown to Reservoir, which got removed before the final release. The tunnel still existed in the game world, but all AI pathing through it had been disabled and the openings blocked, so it was completely unreachable until one of the latest fan-made patches reopened it.
 * Earthshattering Kaboom:
 * Easter Egg: Due to one of the developers having a very bad experience on a The Lord of the Rings chat room, attempting to name the player character 'Gandalf' will result in the game mocking you and refusing to let you start the game until you pick a new name.
 * Easy Logistics: Oh so averted. Everything must be built, or stocks run out. In order to build something, a suitable hangar must have the resources, which in turn must be delivered by hand from the hangar that produces them, which in turn... Basically, the game's stock of Largest (Cargo) Pods will run out within minutes of starting the game, and more have to be manufactured. And aside from stumbling across an unowned Swallow Moth in a hangar, the only way to get one is to feed a Moth manufacturing plant with just the right combination of materials.
 * Everything Trying to Kill You: Near the end of the game,
 * Frickin' Laser Beams: All primary weapons in the game fire bolts of energy.
 * Game Breaker: Several - and ironically, all made available through patches.
 * The Swallow moth is faster, tougher and more maneuvrable than any other moth; fly one and it'd take a small army of enemy moths to bring you down. As the AI players never organize quite that well, fights tend to be a tad one-sided, and getting shot down in a Swallow is practically unheard of - even Police moths don't represent a significant threat.
 * The "Corrupt cop" starter set. It gives you a Police L-2000 (the second-heaviest moth in the game) equipped with an unlimited energy cell. Later in the game said cells become available to everyone, but it takes a while; in the meantime, you're the only player in the world not to have any power problems whatsoever.
 * The Downtown 05 hangar with a Distillery factory kit. Its position makes it ideal for selling to the whole world, and the Distillery machinery is heavily unbalanced - making large amounts of expensive alcohol from small amounts of cheap-as-chips water and chemicals. Result: practically unlimited money.
 * Game Breaking Bug: If you decide to wage war against the police and start killing enforcers en masse, the game will eventually run out of pilots for them (after about 80 have died) and crash.
 * Game Mod: Several, virtually all of them unofficial patches that add features or change various aspects. At least one, the UIM series, was actually made by the game's original dev team after the company went out of business.
 * Hex-editing a savegame allows you to add the Death Ray to your moth's weapons. The weapon is normally present in the game as the one the hangar airlocks use to get rid of ships that stay in them for too long, but isn't normally available to purchase.
 * Good Bad Bugs: in later versions a console was added that allowed you to give orders to your mooks. The command to take cash would obviously not work when they were in a non-owned hangar, but the command to give money would. There was nothing preventing a player from "giving" a negative amount of cash to a store, though, effectively allowing one to steal money from NPC hangars.
 * Hello, Insert Name Here
 * Human Resources:
 * Interface Screw: The first thing that happens when your Moth starts running low on energy is that your HUD starts to fade. Better find a Lightwell quick.
 * In Vehicle Invulnerability: Your Moth can get shot, missiled, sucked into the ground by an inverse-gravity-generating rocket, careened against tunnel walls, smashed against buildings and rammed by other Moths, without the player suffering any ill effects.
 * It's Up to You: Played straight in the story missions but averted in the main game - if you have your own building and install manufacturing equipment, it's possible to offer to buy the raw materials, which will result in NPCs supplying you with goods entirely without your intervention, at which point they're automatically processed and the finished items are offered for sale.
 * Lead the Target: Subverted, you don't have to lead at all - all primary weapons have limited auto-lead capacity (occasionally bordering on Homing Boulders), only requiring you to aim in the general direction of the target. The laser turret doesn't even require that, as it can rotate fully.
 * Loads and Loads of Loading: Not a problem with modern computers, but on the machines Hardwar was originally intended to run, it took a while for it to generate the world at game start. The producers lampshaded this: if you press CTRL while the game is loading, the message changes from "Initialising world" to "Testing patience".
 * Money Spider: Killing a pirate moth (i.e. any moth equipped with the conspicuous medium pod) usually rewards you a bounty of 500 credits. These bounties add up whenever a pirate kills a specific moth (i.e. any moth from the major factions), or repeatedly kills innocent traders and/or scavengers (mainly for their valuable cargo on board).
 * Most Annoying Sound: When you dock into a hangar, there's an incredibly annoying wavy-electronic noise playing, presumably intended to portray some sort of scanner or tool used on your moth. It didn't take long for a patch to come out that disabled it.
 * Ninja Looting: When a Moth blows, any cargo it was carrying is dropped. Now, it might have been the attacker's intention to collect the cargo for themselves, but try and tell that to any scavengers that may be combing the crater floor. This can be exploited by the player: wait for a fight to end (invariably with the explosion of at least one moth), and you can nab the cargo yourself. You can even exploit the rudimentary physics engine and grab it before it falls to the ground.
 * Obvious Beta: One of the later patches - unofficial, but created from official content - had a lot of experimental content that Software Refinery were working on before they folded. This included a complete overhaul of the economy, intended to make it more realistic and dynamic. Sadly, the bugs hadn't yet been worked out, so applying this patch creates an economy that freezes solid after a few days of game time. Oh, and savegames are corrupted at random.
 * The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: Obviously averted, as pirates can be seen attacking innocent traders and/or scavengers for their valuable cargo, as well as having the fortitude to attack transport moths from the major factions for the same reasons. You, too, can fall victim to pirate attacks for whatever cargo you have in your hold even if you only carry as much as about 10 bits of scrap metal. Then again, you also can be a pirate, though you will suffer the same consequences as they have doing so (i.e. being wanted by the police, the factions, etc.). Eventually, someone's going to have to tip the balance of life in Titan...
 * Player Mooks: Later versions allowed you to hire them, assign them aircraft and equipment, and have them do stuff for you, like flying escort missions, killing specific targets, transporting cargo between your hangars, selling goods to other hangars, or keeping your manufacturing operations supplied with raw materials.
 * Point Defenseless: The faction buildings have laser turrets that should, presumably, protect them, but they are of no threat at all to even the lightest Moth in the game.
 * Police Are Useless: Played with. They can actually handle petty crooks like pirates and smugglers rather well, but are so horribly outmatched by the big factions that they pretty much just stand idly by and let them do whatever they want.
 * Ramming Always Works: The game doesn't register kills if they do not happen via direct weapon hits, so wise management of one's shields can allow for consequence-free killings by simply ramming the target until they blow up.
 * Recursive Ammo: The Swarm missiles split up in four smaller missiles which robotech on the target, minimizing the effect of anti-missile flares.
 * Scrappy Weapon: The pulse laser does the same damage-per-second to shields as the plasma cannon, as well as the same damage to hull (that is, none at all), but uses more energy and is harder to aim. It does, however, damage the moth's weapons systems to the point where they can no longer attack you so that you can land the killing blow and laugh sadistically as your enemy turns to scrap metal.
 * Actually, the pulse laser does do damage to a moth's hull; it just takes a very long time to destroy it, however, and you'd be better off finishing it with your [regular] laser.
 * Skybox: Subverted in that the game has no real visible sky. Apparently Titan has a very dense atmosphere, so everything beyond a few hundred meters is hidden in a sort of pinkish mist. Looking up merely lets you see a few low-hanging clouds, then more mist.
 * Subsystem Damage: Every Moth's hull integrity indicator is its main health meter (the zeroing of which will result in Critical Existence Failure), but there are several indicators for subsystems - engines, weapons, electronics and such. Some weapons damage one particular subsystem leaving the others alone, which is relatively useless to the player but very annoying when you're hit by one and (say) your Moth slows to a crawl because your hull is still strong but your engines are shot.
 * The Taxi: Misplaced Optimism has such a service for your ferrying needs. However, it's generally treated as a novelty among many players unless they're using multiplayer.
 * Trick Missile: The Leech missile does no damage whatsoever, but it'll attach to the target moth and drain its power cell, forcing it to drastically slow down and flee to a lightwell to recharge.
 * Vader Breath: You actually do this during the cutscenes with Xavier Lazarus.
 * Weapons That Suck: The Groundbase missile creates a cone of gravitational inversion that sucks the target moth to the ground, giving impact damage proportional to the distance of the dive and trapping it in place for a few seconds, plus impairing the AI's ability to fight for another few seconds after the effect ends as it regains its bearing.
 * Wide Open Sandbox: As with most others commercial/fighting games, there's so very, very much to do outside of the plot that the programmers included an option to start a game entirely without it, just so you can play for the hell of it.
 * Wreaking Havok: The physics engine can be exploited for considerable profit. For instance: catching dropped cargo is made a lot harder by the presence of other scavengers in the game world, getting their drones to precious jettisoned cargo boxes before you. However, when a drone is ejected its speed gets added to that of the originating moth - even if it's flying in the opposite direction. This makes it possible to fly at breakneck speed at cargo boxes, deploy the drone right when you're above them, and nab them before they even reach the ground - often stealing them right under the nose of NPC drones, who are ejected by their ships with zero additional speed.
 * If you manage to lure your enemy into a tunnel while it still has cargo, you can exploit the physics engine by taking the cargo after killing him/her. For some reason, once the cargo is dropped in the tunnels, no scavenger or pirate would even bother to go there to pry it out of your hands, presumably because they don't want to risk collisions with other moths in the tunnels. Which leaves the lion's share all for you. This can be a ridiculously easy way to get rich in the game without using the God Hangar, especially if that cargo is highly valuable like alcohol, narcotics, etc.