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

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

Pottinger: There's an obvious third side with the Flood, and we're not doing that. Our focus was to take the two sides and differentiate them as much as we could, but still making it so you can play [either] and not be completely befuddled.

The UNSC has the MAC blast and carpet bomb ... which are these great big explosive things. But the Covenant are more visceral. They're more angry. They're more interactive, too. I can put the Arbiter into "Rage" and flip the right stick, and he jumps from target to target -- [it's] kind of Too Human-esque -- and he does super-huge fatalities. They are very angry. Our Arbiter is an evil mo-fo. He's Darth Vader times 10.

The UNSC has very different strategies than the Covenant. The Covenant can be in your town very quickly, quicker than the UNSC, but the UNSC has a few more things to counter. If you don't build a shield generator [for the Covenant base], it's like papier-mâché. The UNSC base is much more solid by itself.

Those things aren't necessarily first and foremost for civ differentiation, but if people want to focus on the big things, it's leader versus Spartans.

Devine: Going back to the Flood, if you think about making them playable as a civ -- the Flood in the Halo canon are the single scariest thing you'll ever see. If you see one Flood form, it's enough to destroy an entire galaxy. Although it would've been great to make the Flood playable, it also would've taken away a lot of their power. Having them be this evil, "Oh my god, if that infection takes hold here, we're going to have to lose the universe" -- that's actually a big part of the Flood. We thought long and hard about how to make them playable, but we couldn't come up with any way to match the canon exactly.

Pottinger: We had some plans for future games that had the Flood in them, but those don't really exist anymore. But they do show up in skirmish and in the campaign. It will be the first time humanity has encountered the Flood. The fans are all abuzz about how we can do it without ruining the canon with having the Flood come in 20 years earlier, but the way it's set up is pretty cool.

Crispy Gamer: One last question: Did you guys purposely make [Halo Wars holographic artificial-intelligence chick] Serina hotter than Cortana?

Devine: [Laughs] If you mean by her writing, then yeah. Serina, to me, is the character, not the model. Like I said, I want all my characters to be three-dimensional and believable. [Her personality] comes through in the cinematics in such a way ... that's what makes her attractive to me. It's not necessarily in rendering at all. It's all in the character. [Laughs]