SOCOM "spiritual successor" takes to Kickstarter
One-time SOCOM creative lead David Sears wants to bring tactical squad-based shooting back with H-Hour: World’s Elite.
Sears was the creative director of the early and best-received SOCOM games, as well as serving the same role on Rainbow 6: Patriots before Ubisoft played switcheroo with the development team.
With H-Hour: World’s Elite, Sears wants to harken back to those PS2 classics, but with all the modern bells and whistles. He's taken to Kickstarter to fund the initial manifestation of this vision - a multiplayer PC title with at least six maps, four gameplay modes, and comprehensive community-building and clan management tools.
Sears acknowledged that what many players want is an HD remake of the second SOCOM, but he has greater ambitions for H-Hour.
"We’re not here to simply deliver the past in a prettier package. We’re building the spiritual successor to the early SOCOM games from the ground up. H-Hour: World’s Elite is immediate, realistic, multiplayer-oriented and team-based," he said.
"It is an experience directly inspired by the SOCOM series because those games were the starting point. H-Hour is several miles down the road that we traveled with SOCOM, the kind of shooter that SOCOM would have become if I had continued to helm the series beyond the second release."
Sears's new development team, Special Operations Forces Studios, boasts a number of former special forces operatives on staff, serving as consultants on the project. The company has attracted interest from fund managers, but Sears and his crew believe a successful Kickstarter for the first H-Hour game will prove to those holding the moneybags that the franchise is worth investing in.
The pitch is below; if you're keen, head on over to Kickstarter to check out the reward tiers; the team is asking for $200,000, most of which will be used to pay artists to turn the grey alpha demo into a real game.
Thanks, Polygon.