Halo Wars Central

This interview is simply a record of the original, available at Kikizo.

The real-time strategy genre seems perfectly suited to the overflowing options offered by computers and their oh-so-versatile keyboards. Controlling a battlefield is complicated business and all those keys come in handy. But why should PC players be the only ones to enjoy the spoils of this particular brand of virtual war? It's a question console developers are desperate to answer.

he last two years have seen a slow stream of RTS games for consoles and handhelds, most of them created for the Xbox 360. It was there that EA dipped its toe into the waters with Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle-Earth II before giving it a more concerted try in last year's Command & Conquer III: Tiberium Wars. While the Lord of the Rings game was mildly successful, Command & Conquer started to make inroads. Now Microsoft itself is giving the genre a try, and the company is throwing its biggest franchise into the mix.

Halo Wars is an Xbox 360-exclusive real-time strategy game set in the Halo universe. Though the game is starting to get more attention now, things were very touch-and-go in the beginning, as Harter Ryan of Ensemble Studios tells us.

As executive producer at the developer, Ryan is more familiar than most with what makes the RTS genre work. Ensemble has made its name with solid games over the past decade, including the popular Age Of Empires series on PC. But before it could even think of adding the Halo universe to the mix, the team first had to prove that an RTS would work on the Xbox 360. And to do that, Ensemble had to start right from the beginning again.

"We started this as an internal project, without permission," Ryan says. "We felt like the opportunity was there, but to prove the opportunity at all we needed to come up with a usable D-pad control scheme"

When the clandestine work began, around two and a half years ago, the team took its then most recent Age game, Age of Mythology, and ripped out the control scheme, to see if they could make the idea work on a console. For months they reworked the controls, rethinking every decision, tinkering here and there, discovering by trial and error what worked and what didn't.

"We gave them time, and they took the Age of Mythology game that we created on the PC, plugged the D-pad into it, and we gave them the resources and time to start iterating on completely replacing the interface on that game to play with the D-pad," Ryan explains."

Then came the day they had to come out of the shadows. The team approached the higher-ups at Microsoft about doing an RTS in the Halo universe, and it got the OK. The Microsoft deciders were particularly interested in doing something with a more futuristic bent, says Ryan, since the RTS games that had been tried in the past on the console were more historical or fantasy based.

"I think the fact that we had come with a very compelling control scheme is what sold them on us being the developer," says Ryan, who feels that it was the games that weren't forced into a particular mold that generally got it right in the past.

"We thought we could do a better job of creating a console RTS experience. We felt that some of the real-time strategy games that had been developed for the console had been less than they could have been, and we felt that the main obstacle to that was the control scheme."

For six months Ensemble experimented with different ways of controlling the action. Now, with Bungie and Microsoft pleased with the outcome, the next move was to come up with a story.

Though it carries the Halo brand, it's only through general association that fans will come into contact with things they already know about the series. Halo Wars is set in the year 2531, during the time preceding the events in the main Halo trilogy, so there will be similar technology, vehicles and structures, but not much overlap in the cast of characters.

"There's no father of Master Chief in this game, there's no programmer who wrote Cortana later. There's nothing like that," says Ryan.

Not having Master Chief in the game isn't something Ensemble is all that upset about. Not only does it mean there's (slightly) less pressure on the team, but it also allows them more freedom to contribute to the Halo canon. The relationship with Bungie flowed naturally from that.

"They got very busy on Halo 3 and gave us all the leeway to go make the game without lots of oversight, and we really appreciate that," Ryan says.

Part of Ensemble's contribution is the Spirit of Fire, a vessel in the vein of the Pillar of Autumn from the Halo trilogy, and the crew that comes along with it. Most important as far as players are concerned is Serena, the omnipresent AI character a la Cortana who will guide you through the game with voiced instructions.

Also new to the series in Halo Wars is a new composer. With Marty O'Donnell toiling away on the soundtrack for Halo 3, the decision was made to let him concentrate on that and let Ensemble go it their own way, using O'Donnell's earlier work on the Halo series as inspiration.

But don't worry, Halo fans. There's still plenty that connects Halo Wars with Master Chief's trilogy. You'll be controlling all sorts of recognizable vehicles, including the highly manoeuvrable Warthog, and characters ripped straight from the shooter games.

"As long as we didn't do something stupid or break the fiction, we were able to be very creative," says Ryan. The peculiar demands of RTS games, which need a broader range of characters and vehicles, meant that the team had to come up with additions to the Halo universe. But it was careful to keep consistency too.

The team actually spent a lot of time on the Warthog, working on the physics and the unique handling to make it feel just right. You'll even be able to take out enemies using either the mounted guns or by running them over, just like in the other games.

At the heart of the game is a simplified control scheme that does away with most of the complexity inherent in PC real-time strategy games. One of the earliest and most important challenges for the team was to decide on the best way to mimic left- and right-mouse-clicks. It came up with three ways.

You can hover over your units with a reticle that selects your characters, press a face button to select them, and then press another one to move them. You can also double-press the button, to select all squads of the same type before doing other actions. Or, for finer control, you can draw a selection by pressing another face button, which allows you to choose only the units you're interested in before sending them in to action.

Moving around the game map is handled by the D-pad, which lets you quick jump from the front line to your base and back. Requesting troops and vehicles is done through another simple method, which involves pulling up what is called the circle menu by selecting depots and other creation facilities and quickly selecting items/units to be made using the analog stick.

What's most important to realize, though, is that throughout, the team has been concerned with one idea: simplicity. "The whole game can be played with just the left analog stick and the four buttons," explains Ryan. "All the other buttons on the controller are quick taps to do other things."

One way you won't be able to control the game is by using a mouse. Even though it's technically possible to use one on an Xbox 360, this is not an approach Ensemble has considered. The overarching idea was to make a game that works best using the D-pad, and opening up the option of using a mouse would detract from that laser-sharp focus.

Halo Wars has been conceived and developed as an Xbox 360 game and as it stands, Ensemble has no plans to do a PC port - even though Ryan wouldn't take the option off the table. What no one on the team wants to do is start thinking about a PC version before wrapping up work on the console game.

That singular focus has its own advantages. Consider graphics, for instance. Without having to take into account the countless hardware variations that exist in the PC world, Ensemble was able to concentrate on making Halo Wars look as good as possible.

"Because we're only going for one machine," Ryan explains, "we can spend a lot of the effort that normally we have to do supporting lots of different graphics cards and things like that on the PC, we can put a lot more effort on lighting, textures, that sort of thing, to make it a real next-gen looking game."

Anybody who's seen the game in action knows that it's a looker, and part of making the graphics part of the gameplay experience means locking down the frame rate. From the beginning of the development process Ensemble has been working to keep the frame rate at a steady 30 frames per second, giving the action a smooth appearance and without chugging in the middle of chaotic battles. "We found that very key to having a good experience," Ryan says.

Perhaps more important, in our networked age, is multiplayer support. Here Ensemble finds itself under pressure, because the Halo games have set the standard for how online multiplayer should work on the Xbox.

Much like Halo 3, which allows for people to play through the story mode in c-operative mode, in Halo Wars, Xbox 360 owners will be able to play the 15-scenario singleplayer campaign with a friend on Xbox Live. Ryan was reluctant to go into too many specifics of what's in store for the more competitive online modes.

"Bungie has obviously set the bar with their support for multiplayer in Halo. So we're going to have that and we're going to do as much as is humanly possible before the game ships," he says.

Players will be able to play together with and against each other but they won't be able to make their own content. The tools, as described by Ryan, are simply too complicated right now, and the game has not been built with this option in mind.

Leaving out user-created content, however, doesn't mean that the game won't have any longevity. Between the 15 campaigns that make up the story mode and the various multiplayer modes, Ensemble is aiming for an experience you won't be looking to flog a couple days later.

"Nothing's worse than putting 40 hours of content in the game and only 5 per cent of the people finishing it, and of course nothing's worse than putting 6 hours of content in the game and everybody finishing it and taking it to back to GameStop to sell it."

"We want people to finish it," Ryan adds.

Officially, Halo Wars has a release date pencilled in for some time during 2008. The game is obviously coming along well, with the core mechanics in place and both single- and multiplayer modes being finished off. With Bungie's shooter only days away now, Ryan is clearly reticent to announce a date and draw attention away from what Microsoft is hoping will be one of the biggest entertainment events ever.

"We need to give Halo 3 time to ship and sell," he says. '"You do the math."

Halo Wars will be out for the Xbox 360 in 2008. For more on the game, check out www.halowars.com

Interview added on 09/18/07