Halo Wars ViDoc: Expanding The Arsenal

Expanding the Arsenal is the second ViDoc created during the production of Halo Wars. It was released on February 3, 2009 and covers the units available in the game including Heroes and leader powers, alongside showing new gameplay and Blur cinematic footage.

Transcript

The ViDoc opens with cinematic footage from the Five Long Years cutscene, depicting UNSC Marines and Covenant forces fighting on Harvest.

• Jerome Jones: Always our biggest concern was was making sure that we had the Halo vibe down.
• Dave Pottinger: The lore is really deep and rich has a lot of units that we can play with which is great for a strategy game.
• Graeme Devine: We found the Covenant to be pretty full, they generally had a good array of vehicles that you could already fight. We looked at the UNSC, they had Master Chief.
• Pottinger: If people have played the Halo shooter games they're familiar with Master Chief, but in a strategy game it's about multiple units.
• Devine: So we actually had to fill in quite a little bit for the UNSC in order to make them feel like a complete army.
• Pottinger: Halo Wars is the next Halo game but it's a prequel, so from a game design standpoint it was challenging to go back and create units that felt technologically in the milieu of what somebody would have had twenty years earlier. So one of the best examples we have is the Cyclops.
• Jones: The Cyclops is this new unit that we added; he's almost like a big giant robot. It's a cool unit because he can repair other stuff and he he throw things on the battlefield, he can pick up stuff and throw it. It's very clunky.
• Pottinger: Twenty years before Halo 1 this thing was awesome, it was very cool, I could rip chunks off of vehicles and all that but it was too bulky, too unwieldy, and so eventually it was abandoned in favor of the Spartan army.

Footage plays of Red Team's fight with several Stealth Sangheili from the cutscene at the end of the level Beachhead.

• Jerome-092 (in-cutscene): Let's go!
• Jones: There's a definite feeling when the Spartans show up for the first time in the campaign we're like "Wow! This is when Spartans were Spartans and not just Master Chief!"
• Pottinger: If you're familiar with the lore you know that back twenty years before the start of Halo one there were lots of Spartans running around.
• Jones: You hear stories about why Spartans are cool and how there used to be more, but he's really like this relic of awesomeness. It'd be like if Batman was here now and you heard stories about there used to be twenty Batmans and that was when they could really kick ass!
• Pottinger: So we get a chance to finally let you play with multiple Spartans. They're great in combat, they can steal enemy vehicles, they can get inside my vehicles and make my vehicles better... we call them the kingmaker unit
• Jones: Most of the units in Halo Wars have a special ability. It works the same for everybody; you just select them, you hit Y. I'm pretty sure everybody's going to be real excited about the Warthog Y-ability, which is ramming into piles of Grunts with a Warthog. It's about as good as it gets.
• Lance Hoke: The new unit we've added that I think is pretty kick-ass is the Locust on the on the Covenant side. It's basically a building killer, it's almost like a smaller version of a Scarab, you know that comes and then there's four of them on your base, you kind of freak out because you know they can take buildings down pretty quick.
• Devine: Probably my favorite unit in Halo Wars is the Scarab. I mean it's just such an evil device that the Covenant used i mean it's got a big laser beam that fires out and as it destroys infantry they scream and burn to death and it truly feels evil to use it.
• Jones: They're hard to get to but once you get them they're really unbelievably strong, they can take out entire armies and stuff like that.
• Devine: There is nothing better than shooting a large laser beam at your infantry and hearing them scream and die. If you're going to be evil, you're going to make a Scarab, and it's going to be awesome. Those things are just made for killing.
• Jones: From the UNSC aspect you have these god powers that appear to come from the Spirit of Fire which is hovering above the whole time and you can call on its help whenever you have the resources to do it.
• Devine: Like a carpet bombing run or use the MAC cannon to actually blast an area from space. The cryobomb is another UNSC option that actually freezes units for just a little bit and, you know, it perhaps gives you a chance to take out something very big like a Scarab.
• Pottinger: Gameplay-wise that's really cool because the carpet bomb is kind of like a big old grenade; it does damage to everything. The MAC blast is kind of like a little sniper shot.
• Devine: Both sides actually use different ways of turning the tide of a battle; the humans can call upon Spirit of Fire, the Covenant, though, actually have their hero units on the ground. They're actually the individually the best units in the game. The Covenant are led by these charismatic guys, these religious zealots.
• Prophet of Regret (in-cutscene): Blasphemy!
• Devine: They have the Prophet of Regret, uh, the Brute Chieftain or the Arbiter.
• Pottinger: The Prophet of Regret can call down this cleansing beam which is actually what the Covenant army is used to glass planets into oblivion; you can chase that pesky little Spartan around the map with this, this beam of destruction.
• Devine: The fully upgraded Arbiter has a power called rage. He can take out an entire UNSC army just by himself.
• Devine: If you talk to anyone technical about an RTS game they will tell you all about rock paper scissors.
• Pottinger: Vehicles beat infantry, infantry beat aircraft, and aircraft beat vehicles.
• Devine: But as soon as you start seeing rock paper scissors all you're seeing in the game is the matrix; you might as well just have numbers on the screen. One of the things we worked incredibly hard on was making the units in Halo Wars just super cool.
• Pottinger: We want it to be something that we love. Make a robust strategy game which we know how to do, but we also have to make something that feels very much like it's in the fiction of what Halo fans would expect.

Demo available February 5th