The makers of Starhawk want you to try playing alone

Starhawk will feel familiar to anyone who's played Warhawk. It too is a third-person shooter with grungy vehicles and chunky graphics. Some key additions to that core experience include a revamped Warhawk, simply called the Hawk that can transform from a futuristic jet into a ground-pounding mech, and Sidewinder jet bikes that can hop short distances.

The biggest shift, outside of the futuristic setting and backstory, is the game's Build and Battle mechanic. Players fight for Rift energy, an in-game currency of sorts. They can then use that energy to call down structures like bunkers, turrets and walls, from an orbiting drop ship.

It sounds more complicated to perform than it is. A player can quickly pull up a selection wheel while running around, place a hologram of a building on the ground and then get back to the fight. A few seconds later the building drops to the dirt, crushing anyone beneath it, and then essentially finishes building itself.

While the game's multiplayer will likely be where players spend most of their time, the game will also come with a cooperative horde-mode and a single-player campaign.

While the game will bring the general feel of the Warhawk with it when it hits the PlayStation on May 8, it won't have the ability to support Warhawk's unusual four-player, split-screen gaming.

It's a bit of a disappointment for fans of Warhawk who enjoyed the opportunity to play with so many people on a single television, but Jobe said when they looked at how often that option was used, the investment in development wouldn't be equal to the enjoyment had by players.

"We saw that based on the usage pattern, there were a really small amount of players in the grand scheme of things who really used the four-player split screen and the four player split screen takes an enormous amount of processeing to do right," he said. "We already spent so much of our tech and real-time budget on being able to do everything dynamically in the game with build and battle, with AI, all of the lighting is dynamic. We opted to say that the common usage pattern is two-player split screen so we're going to go with two-player split screen."

And while some fans may be unhappy with the decision, split-screen wasn't one of the many things they heard people calling for during their open beta test. And the Starhawk developers were listening very closely to those early game players.