Last Days for Ensemble Studios: An Interview with Halo Wars' Creators
11/17/2008 9:27 PM | 5 Comments | Page 2 of 4
We'll have tournaments in
Halo Wars, tournaments in this game called
PitchCar, which is this little car-flicking game around a track ... things to do to keep the team together as much as we can. We kept everyone together at Ensemble over the years, and this would be a shitty time to ruin that. I mean, it got ruined for us; it's not by our choice. But we're trying to do the best we can.
Crispy Gamer: What's next for you guys personally, then?
Devine: I have no future right now! The news completely sucked for me. But I don't want to split my time between looking forward and finishing
Halo Wars, so I just decided to focus on finishing this and making it the best that it can be. In this industry, you're only as good as your last game, so ... this game is my focus.
Pottinger: Same for me. We wanted to make sure this is finished as an Ensemble game. But I'm on to the new studio. I'll be a designer for one of the games over there, but we haven't done much with it. We did enough to know we wanted to do something together, but beyond that, it's not something we want to get in the way of finishing
Halo Wars.
Crispy Gamer: So
Halo Wars will be fully supported post-release in terms of balance issues and downloadable content (DLC), like it was any other title?
Pottinger: Yeah, it's a completely new studio made up of about half the people from Ensemble. It's a new studio, so we can't really afford to take everyone. We don't have a name yet. [
Halo Wars] has got the contract to do title updates, whether that'd be balance or, god forbid, problems with the actual game. DLC will be coming. I don't know what Microsoft has planned for
Halo Wars 2, but in terms of ... making [
Halo Wars] a great experience, that's covered.
Devine: One thing about DLC, all Microsoft games have them ... the DLC plan is part of our green-light presentation. It's built into [development].
Crispy Gamer: Stripping away the Halo license for a moment, what does your game offer that we haven't seen in real-time-strategy games before?
Devine: We didn't start this game off as a Halo game. We started off wanting to make a console RTS experience. We spent the first 12 to 18 months just on that, with no [intellectual property] ... there was no concept of it being a Halo game. In fact, we started off with the
Age of Mythology engine. Microsoft saw what we were working on and asked if they could use it [for Halo], and of course we said yes.
That was always the drive for us: To make a console RTS game work. It was always made from the ground up for the 360.
Pottinger: Halo Wars is strategy boiled down to its core essentials. We wanted a shorter skirmish experience on the console. It's Halo, so it has to be more about combat than about tasking individual guys to gather berries or chop down trees. As fun as that is, that's an Age [of Empires] type of thing. That's a slower game. This is a game more about combat -- more military versus economy. We want to have a simplified economy, but where you still have high-level, epic choices to make.
