Last Days for Ensemble Studios: An Interview with Halo Wars' Creators

11/17/2008 9:27 PM | 5 Comments | Page 3 of 4

Crispy Gamer: As more and more RTSes come out, they tend to add more features, but it seems you guys are taking a step back and simplifying things.

Pottinger: Yeah, we got caught up like everybody does in an arms race of features. "Oh my god, we can't cut that feature because it's been in our previous game." One of the things that [reinvigorated] the team to do another RTS game was the change in platform. We simply couldn't carry over all the arcane gameplay. [Age of Empires III] was great ... but it crumbled under the weight of all its features. We had to rethink everything.

On the PC, I could put my buildings anywhere, and some people thought that was important to the strategy aspect. And you know what? It's not. The choice is to make the building, and I think a strategy game is better when all of a base is together. It's better for pacing. And the game ends when someone's base blows up. That's awesome. I don't have to track down that last damn villager or that barracks you built behind my town.

In the Age games, you would build up to this great crescendo, and then you have five minutes of "bleugh." In Halo Wars, when the base blows up, [finger snaps] done, next game. It's very climatic.

Crispy Gamer: The storyline in the Halo trilogy can get very confusing at times. Do you guys see that, and are you making a conscious effort to make the story in Halo Wars easier to follow?

Devine: We wanted to make sure the story was both easy to follow, and felt epic and involved. We tell the story with cut scenes in between the cinematics, and a lot of it is on the ground as well -- keeping clear objectives in front of the player as to "why am I moving forward?" and "what am I doing next?" and "how is this involved with what I've just seen?"

The task of the story is to make believable characters that feel three-dimensional and real. For [the characters] to make decisions that should take months to actually make, but to actually do it in 30 seconds -- "Hey, let's go blow this up" [laughs] -- there should be months of planning and charts everywhere. But because they're believable characters, they can go do it.

Pottinger: By the first or second mission, you've met all the main characters. You know who they are, you know a lot of their motivations, you see the tension between [them]. That ... makes the story inherently more followable.

Crispy Gamer: Most modern RTS games have three playable sides. With two playable teams, can Halo Wars compete with those games that offer more?

Devine: Are they offering more or are they diluting more? You want [the sides] to feel very different. I want to feel when I'm playing the UNSC that I'm playing a well-run military organization. But when I play the Covenant, they're crazy, need-someone-on-the-battlefield-to-control-them. You know, they really hate each other. Getting that diverse feeling between the two sides, so it's not just their tank and our tank and their airplane and our airplane ... was more of the goal, rather than having more units for the sake of having three sides.