Huge pre-E3 Halo Wars interview + prerelease demo confirmed

[Tieno]

More @ http://www.1up.com/do/previewPage?pager.offset=0&cId=3168633

1UP: Is it in the plan to have a prerelease demo?

DP: We'll definitely have a demo. I'm not sure when it'll be out. We'll do it, and it'll be done sometime. [Laughs]

1UP: From the reader's perspective, if they saw that roughly 10-minute video that you guys released a year ago, what would be different if you were to make that same video today? How has the game changed?

DP: I think it would look a hell of a lot better. The art's just gone tremendously through the roof in terms of quality. The things we can do technically in the engine from a programming standpoint, and physics and whatnot, are just light years better than they were last year. The gameplay is definitely more honed -- I think that would definitely come through in a gameplay video.

Last year, it was a lot of the PC RTS still in transition to the console. We've built it from the ground up to be a console RTS, and figuring out how to have the same fun in an RTS game has taken a lot of iteration, and we're actually really happy with the result now. It's more ability focused than it was last year -- you'd see a lot more special abilities, and the overall gameplay is slanted very much to combat while still retaining a lot of the core RTS balance between combat and economy. It's what Ensemble's known for so we brought that over, but it's done completely differently.

1UP: Can you elaborate on the exact economy model of the game? Is it a steady supply trickle from the Spirit of Fire, or do you mine things...how does the economy actually work in Halo Wars?

DP: It's an investment-based economy. We want that distinction between booming and rushing and turtling in the game -- that's from a classic strategy game. We can't talk about the economy without talking a little bit about the base model. The base model is, the Spirit of Fire has sent down these drop pods, and they form the nucleus of your base, and then you choose which add-ons to build. If you want a heavy economy, you build a lot of economic add-ons, and you invest in upgrading those.

Spirit of Fire

1UP: You mention making the console RTS work better -- what do you think specifically are the things that you guys are aiming to do better than what you've seen in other console RTSes?

DP: I would probably categorize it in two major buckets. We reconciled building the game for the console a long time ago. It's not a game about +10% technologies or 50,000 different types of units. It's a game where everything in the game is there for a reason, in a way that's huge. We actually have enjoyed embracing the limitations of the console controller, which just means you can't have as much in the game as you can on a PC. On a PC, it's hard to resist, "Well we've got hotkeys; what's one more hotkey?" On a console controller, you can't really invent more buttons. There's only so many ways you can push a button, and we've actually been recently trying to take out some of the alternate button configurations to pare the game down even more, and get it to be something that's fast, that's quick, that gets an adrenaline kind of punch-counterpunch thing -- which suits the console market too, so getting something that you can play in 15 minutes and have a lot of fun. It's high-paced, high action right from the start.

One of the concerns we have with bringing RTS games to the console is it's sort of a new genre on that platform, and there's a lot of people who aren't necessarily very good at it -- they've played Halo but they haven't played an RTS game before. How do we make those folks happy? One of the best things that Halo brings -- and one of the coolest things about this project -- is we can extend the Halo universe in the reverse direction because we're a prequel, which is kind of nice because the best superhero stories are always the prequels. We get to take an IP that people know and love, and they have a lot of good memories of, and they have an understanding, and we get to leverage it in a new way. You see a Grunt, and you just immediately think, "That guy's going to say something funny." So bringing that into an RTS game has been fun.


It's been not always the easiest challenge -- getting Warthog movement right was a huge element of the game. We dug in on that one for the better part of a year, tweaking it back and forth. At one point we had Warthogs kind of halfway into the tech tree, and there was sort of an epiphany moment where we decided to have you start with a Warthog. In Age terminology, the Warthog is your scout. Which is kind of interesting because he can't be a badass combat unit out of the gate, because -- even though we want fast combat where 10 seconds in I can take my starting unit and go kind of annoyingly plink away at your base -- that's not the gameplay we want. So we made a conscious choice to deemphasize the initial combat role of the Warthog in order to get this iconic kick-ass Halo unit out there. The first thing you do in the game is people grab the Warthog and they drive him around; how much more do you say "Halo" than that?

That's one of the better examples, I think, of how we've brought Halo gameplay to an RTS, and I think that's been an important part of this project that does enforce pace changes compared to an Age game. In Age, it's sort of leisurely. Bruce Shelly's been saying since day one that, "The first decision in Age -- you can't screw it up." And in reality, in an Age game, it's like the first 10 decisions you can't really screw up. In Halo Wars, we give you the first decision. There's pretty much one right thing to do off the start. You do it in two seconds, you're done, and then all bets are off. We want that kind of easy, "I do something," and then it gives you a chance to take a look at the lay of the land, take a look at where you ended up on the map, where your allies are, where your enemies are, what are the cool spots to fight over going to be...and you want that early first five, 10, 15 seconds -- depending how good you are -- where you really aren't pressured to make perfect decisions. Past that point, though, it's all about how you task your units in combat.

Running a guy over with a Warthog has plusses and minuses; it's one of the coolest things in the game, that even some of our more jaded console guys, they giggle and cackle with glee when they're running over enemy guys with the Warthog -- it's just fun to do. But doing that takes a certain amount of your bandwidth and means you're not doing something else in combat with positioning your infantry guys or tossing grenades and whatnot. The pace of the game I think has the same overall arc as an Age game -- about half, or less than half as long. An average Halo Wars game, two on two, whether it's two humans or two AIs, it's about 15, maybe 18 minutes long give or take. And that's gone up and down as we balance it and whatnot, but our goal is 15-20 minutes for a game like that, which is a little bit less than half the goal we had for Age. But it's the same arc. We want you to be able to not have to fight right away if you want a strategy where you're going to go invest in the high dollar expensive kick-ass units, and you want fewer better units -- we want that choice in the game. So we still have to let you be able to do that.

1UP: When you were talking about the Warthog, that reminded me. Can you talk about what you guys are doing with the Spartan unit at this point? Is he the rifleman to skirmishers and crossbowmen?

DP: Actually, the Warthog was probably the technically hardest unit to get working -- with our camera angle, having the tires steer, and stuff like that, getting the physics just so -- but game design-wise the toughest unit bar none has been the Spartan. Everybody thinks of Master Chief and the Spartan as the same thing. We don't expect anybody to have gone and read all the Halo books and whatnot, but Spartans actually can die. We need that for an RTS game. Our Spartans tend to be more the true cannon Spartans as opposed to Master Chief.

Master Chief is special; the rest of the Halo lore does a great job clearly separating him out from the pack of Spartan-IIs and making it clear why he's special. And still making you feel like he's at risk of losing his life all the time, but you know he's never going to die. Our Spartans do die. They are the best individual combat unit that the UNSC can bring to the party. One thing that we've kind of played up with our twist on the lore is Spartan-IIs are limited -- they're a limited production run -- so you can't have just a massive endless army of Spartan-IIs. There's a limit to how many of them you can have, but they're sort of the kingmaker unit. They can take over enemy vehicles and commandeer your vehicles, so you can use them three different ways -- that's the really fun component. You can steal the enemy guys, which obviously has the two-for-one swing; you can take your Scorpion tank and put them inside of it, and make that even more badass; or you can upgrade them individually as Spartans and make them the true uber combat unit. So they don't really fit into -- I mean, we certainly have a classic RPS [rock/paper/scissors] gameplay, and they sort of sit happily on top of that. They kind of slot in and play any of those roles, but the cool thing with the Spartan is that they're very flexible.

1UP: How much story will we see through the single-player game? Is it going to be through traditional action game-style cut-scenes?

DP: I can't exactly talk about the way we do it, but I can promise pretty great things there. I would say, apart from the success of bringing RTS games to the console, I think the way that we've lived up to, and this is a little bit egotistical of me, but I'd say surpassed the story expectations of Halo is very, very cool. Graeme Devine, who's our lead writer, has been working most of the game on just this huge epic Halo save-the-galaxy story that I also can't talk about specifics [about], but it plays out over the course of the campaign and it's a huge epic. It will make every Halo fan very, very happ

[Cravis]

Wishful thinking but it would rock so hard if they gave us a demo as part of Bringing It Home for E3.

[CHOW CHOW]

Sounds absolutely incredible.  I seriously can't wait... I'm also wondering if this is releasing sooner than most are expecting.  We're getting all this info trickling in recently suggesting that maybe it's out this year or 1Q 2009? Why would they be dropping info on a game not due out till middle or late '09? I think March 2009 would be a good date.  Thanks for quoting everything, btw.  That was a great interview.

[AdmiralViscen]

Isn't this still supposed to be 2008?