Halo Wars is an Xbox 360-exclusive real-time strategy title - a game style usually best suited to PCs.
Instead of the usual blast-fest that made the Halo series so popular - Halo 3 made $US300 ($NZ600) million in its first week - the new game lets players manage armies and assets of two opposing sides, the human UNSC and the alien Covenant.
It is set 20 years before power character Master Chief made his first appearance in the original Halo.
nzherald.co.nz spoke to Jason Pace, Microsoft Game Studio's lead producer for Halo Wars, about what it takes to turn a massive FPS franchise into an RTS success.
Herald: Building a PC-style strategy game for Xbox 360 while retaining a console feel must have been difficult. How did the design approach change to fit the format?
JP: The answer is actually hidden in the question, and it's something we believe has held strategy games back from succeeding on the console: you can't effectively bring a PC-style strategy game to the console because the fundamental game mechanic is tied to the mouse and keyboard input devices.
It's not a question of just changing the control scheme to be gamepad friendly - you need to adapt the underlying strategy mechanic to make sense with the new input device.
Ensemble had the freedom to evolve and rethink some long-standing strategy conventions throughout the game design phase, and the result is a brand new strategy experience on the Xbox that feels completely natural because it was built from the ground up for that platform.
Halo Wars is not a PC-style strategy game, it's an Xbox-style action-strategy game uniquely tuned for a console experience.
Herald: What were the greatest challenges turning a well-established first-person shooter into an effective strategy game - how did you make Halo players feel at home?
JP: Fans of the FPS series have very strong expectations for how a Halo game looks, feels and plays.
Halo is all about heroic action to save humanity, mega-battles across the galaxy, visceral, highly tuned combat and heart-pounding tension - these are themes we consider to be fundamental to a Halo experience and we need to make sure they're clearly conveyed to players of Halo Wars.
The biggest challenge in creating a Halo strategy game is that the camera moves from first person to third person, 12m above the action - it's critical that we find ways to connect players to the battles on the ground as intensely as they feel connected to battles when they're looking through the eyes of Master Chief.
We did have a few things going for us: instead of taking on the role of a single character you're now controlling an entire army, so everything is magnified from the number of different weapons firing simultaneously to the size of potential targets (entire base structures).
We also needed to exactly replicate how each of the Halo Wars units "feels" to players - warthogs must control, sound and feel like warthogs, Covenant grunts must move and act like grunts, etc.
Bungie was a great resource throughout the development cycle to help make sure we captured the essence of each individual unit, and we discovered that when we nailed how units and characters felt in the game it really contributed to the overall sense of being in a Halo experience.
The massive battles and epic scope of Graeme Devin's script, the great input from Bungie on how to best represent Halo units and Ensemble's groundbreaking innovations to the RTS mechanic and controls - this all gives us confidence that we've not only made a Halo game delivering fans a first-class Halo experience but also a game that will set a new standard for strategy games on the console.
Herald: You've reportedly hinted that there will be extra downloadable content made available through Xbox Live - are the reports true, and if so, what type of content will be made available?
JP: We're currently investigating the best ways to support Halo Wars moving forward - we don't yet have anything to announce, but certainly downloadable content is always very high on our list.
Herald: How does Halo Wars fit into the Halo storyline?
JP: Twenty years before the events of Halo 1, Halo Wars chronicles humanity's first deadly encounter with the Covenant - a ruthless species at the height of their power and bent on the destruction of the human race.
Humans have mostly retaken the planet Harvest from the Covenant after five long years of war, but the Covenant have found something buried deep in the planet's ice fields that could change everything . . .
Herald: Were any tech innovations used in the production of Halo Wars?
JP: Halo Wars is built on a new engine developed by Ensemble to take advantage of the Xbox architecture.
As one example, we have an adaptable difficulty setting for skirmish mode that allows the AI to scale up and down based on an individual player's particular skill level.
We also need to support a huge amount of simultaneous particle effects - you can get into some truly crazy situations even in the campaign - so it was important that our tech didn't come to a halt when 40 things blow up at once.
Using a game-style controller over a mouse can make life difficult for strategy gaming on consoles.
Herald: How did you get around this?
JP: Just as one example, many traditional PC RTS games focus on the need for a variety of resources as requirements for building and advancing - currency, wood, ore, grain, etc.
All must be gathered/earned/produced in order to succeed, and it's possible to use a variety of keyboard shortcuts coupled with the mouse to quickly and efficiently manage a large number of remote locations.
In Halo Wars we've streamlined resources to a single type that can be produced on a player's base, so the need to manage a large number of remote locations is greatly reduced and game play can focus on the combat and action Halo fans love.
Removing the need to micro-manage many areas of the map also solves one of the biggest hurdles with RTS controls on the console.
However, in order to create diverse units and/or units with powerful upgrades in Halo Wars, you'll likely need to manage multiple base locations to produce sufficient resources to fund your choices (bases have a fixed number of possible build slots, and resource production utilises those slots).
In this way Halo Wars requires the same kind of careful logistics planning across multiple sites as a traditional RTS, but the centralised base build-out plan makes it easy to navigate through and manage remote locations quickly with the controller's D-pad.
There are similar innovations to the traditional PC RTS mechanic throughout game play, and it's this ground-up approach to game design that we feel enabled Ensemble to make Halo Wars a breakthrough title on the console.
Herald: Given the choice, would you play Halo 3 or Wars?
JP: I'd hate to be forced to choose! Both games are first-class Halo stories and chronicle critical events in the timeline of the universe.
Both games also give fans the kind of Halo experience we're looking for: intense action across vast reaches of space and an epic, heroic journey to save the human race.
Halo 3 continues to explore the relationship between Cortana and Master Chief, while Halo Wars introduces a brand new cast of characters with their own motivations and on-screen "chemistry".
Halo 3 utilises and extends Bungie's groundbreaking FPS console controls, while Halo Wars utilises the groundbreaking controls and mechanic that Ensemble developed to create a brand new action-strategy experience on the console.
I'm not sure I could choose one game over the other.
Herald: How did the pending closure of Ensemble Games affect the production of Halo Wars?
JP: First and foremost, I want to say that it was an amazing experience working with the Ensemble team - they are an awesome, incredibly talented and highly professional group and it was an honour to be part of the Halo Wars process with them.
I believe it's a testament to the passion everyone at Ensemble has for their work that the pending closure had no measurable effect on the production of Halo Wars.
The level of drive, commitment and focus through the end of the project was everything you'd expect from an Ensemble effort and it shows in the polish and quality of the final product.
I'm very much looking forward to seeing what the new studio formed by many of the Ensemble folks - Robot Entertainment - has planned for the future. - By Matt Greenop
