Halo Wars Central

This is a record of the original interview, which can be found at gameplayer.com.au.

Super Mario Bros was originally intended to be a coin saving accountancy simulation. Guitar Hero was first pitched to RedOctane as a platforming game about a super hero who fought evil via riffs and pitch squeals. Halo was intended to be a real-time strategy game back when it was a mere sketch on the Bungie drawing boards.

Each of these statements sounds far too ridiculous to be true, knowing now how each of those three classic games turned out. And yet the latter isn’t made up. Halo really did begin life as an RTS. Originally dubbed ‘Solipsis’, Halo was envisioned as a sci-fi variation on Myth, Bungie’s own RTS that it had previously developed and self-published back when the studio was known mainly to a hardcore audience of Mac users in the late nineties.

Of course, the game’s development subsequently took a sharp right turn, and Halo became the Earth-conquering first-person shooter series that we all know and love. Building on the groundwork laid by its console FPS forebears, including the seminal GoldenEye 64, Halo ushered in a new era in console FPS domination. Prior to Halo, the FPS genre was largely the domain of PC gamers – but post Halo we’ve seen some of the greatest examples in the A Current Affair-worrying genre released on the Xbox and Xbox 360.

Now, with the Halo fight as we know it effectively finished (for now), Ensemble Studios is returning to the series’ roots in order to give fans a unique new perspective on the Halo universe. At the same time, the developer is also attempting to do for the RTS genre what the original Halo did for the FPS, by making it work without a mouse and keyboard.

Control Freak

“For a long time Ensemble has been doing RTS games for PC and a group of people here, myself included, felt that a console could do an RTS game really well, just control-wise,” explains Graeme Devine, lead designer on Halo Wars. “People have always presumed that it couldn’t be done without a mouse and keyboard, but I’ve always maintained that the 360 controller would do just fine.”

Thus Devine and the team at Ensemble spent six months working on a prototype control scheme for a console-based RTS. They used their own PC game, Age of Mythology: The Titans, in order to test and refine their control scheme until it felt simpler to use than a mouse and keyboard. After presenting it to Microsoft, the decision was made to take the bare bones of Ensemble’s game engine and build Halo Wars around it.

So far the result is the first strategy game that doesn’t set the confusion monkeys loose in your brain. Levels are built around the control limitations. The C&C ‘three buttons to do one thing’ system is out – now a single click of A selects a unit, a double click selects all units on screen, and a triple click selects every unit on the battlefield. And you won’t have to fiddle with camera angles: every level can be completed without rotating your viewpoint.

Building The Mythology

Halo Wars takes place 20 years before the first Halo game, a long time before Master Chief was the last surviving Spartan II, back during the emerging wars against the Covenant. The story goes that one hundred and fifty children were recruited into the Spartan programme, but only 33 were good enough to make the grade. These 33 will presumably come into play as unstoppable death-dealing monsters in Halo Wars’ campaign...

“I think overall the Halo games so far have been played from a very unique perspective; they’ve all been played from the perspective of the Master Chief [and Arbiter in Halo 2]. Says Devine. “So it’s always been about the player being über and being cool, and you’re absolutely the frontline and the one who makes the difference in the whole war.”

“But the idea of a real-time strategy game is not to be just one but to be many; taking that perspective on the war between the Covenant and the UNSC. You know, finding out what it’s like when the UNSC get there and don’t crash land their spaceship on a planet [laughs],” continues Devine. “[It’s about finding out] what it’s like when we sit down and you actually fight the frontlines as they’re meant to fight the frontlines, with LOTS of Scorpion tanks, with LOTS of Warthogs. You know, to offer that perspective on the war. And I think that’s what the fans want to see, just that different angle on the actual battle.”

Death From Above

Indeed, in our time in front of the game, every vehicle and unit from the Haloverse was represented, and battles resemble those from the games, as if the game’s camera were stationed high above the battlefield in the original Combat Evolved.

It feels authentic too. Halo creator Bungie has shared their entire work library with strategy specialists Ensemble as they work on Halo Wars, so Needlers sound right, Elites dodge as they should and Ghosts drift in a recognisable way. Best of all: Warthogs slip across the mud in a perfect recreation of its inspiration. Go, go, dirty powerslides and wheel-kills!

“We are working very closely with [Bungie] on the story elements, and the story that we’re telling,” explains Devine. “And we’ve taken the game up there [to Bungie] at various stages. But when they got real busy with Halo 3 we didn’t talk to them so much [laughs].”

“But early on we were up there every month, sometimes twice a month, to show them the game and talk about the story,” Devine continues. “They’re obviously very keen that we stick with the canon and we don’t go off on a tangent, like perhaps, ‘When the Flood storm the Earth in 2525 and they can suddenly make spaceships and guns, and that sort of thing’. They’re actually very concerned that we treat the canon with respect, and work with them to try and do something new with it. That’s in regards to the story, in terms of the game part, they were very keen to just let us make the game, they let Ensemble be very free with designing the actual game.”

Cribbing from PC strategy favourite Company of Heroes is a smart move too. Rather than managing hundreds of units, those same numbers are grouped into a handful of squads. Battles are still epic, but you direct tactical groups, rather than messy crowds of mixed ability infantry.

During our chat Devine also touched on user generated content.

”We actually talked quite a lot about that, we’ve got a very powerful map editor, so we’ve talked about whether we could release that with the game or via Xbox Live and allow people to make their own maps, and then work out a way for users to share the maps,” says Devine. “I would love for that to be in the final product. Because I think user created content is just fantastic. I think it’s absolutely the future, because people love to tell their own stories, people love to make up their own little war campaigns, and there are a lot of people out there who are incredibly talented.”

And many of them appear to be working at Ensemble. Halo Wars is set to throw a refreshing new spin on a well-established license; one that makes total sense within the context – this isn’t a kart racer or mini-game stuffed party game, after all – and one that both pays homage to the series’ roots and seeks to properly establish a genre on the 360 that has until now been the domain of PC gamers. All the action of Halo but on an epic new scale? We can hardly wait for the war to begin...

Extra Snippets
A View to a Kill: After playing with fellow RTS Supreme Commander’s “strategic zoom”, we were curious how the camera will work in Halo Wars. “It’s not fixed,” Devine told us. “You can sweep in and out, but you can’t zoom into space. Getting to see the combat on both the unit and ‘frontline’ level is something we want [people to do]. Look at the Spartan, then “Wow, that’s a lot of Scorpions.” You can do both of those things.”

Continue the Fight:
Halo Wars will most certainly be supported by downloadable content after the game’s release. “We have plans for extra units and extra maps, and then beyond that we’ll look at what else we can add further down the track, such as extra campaigns and so on,” explains Devine. “I think it’s definitely a good way of consistently breathing new life into the product via DLC.”

Interview added on 06/05/08