Halo Wars ViDoc: Halo Times Ten

Halo Times Ten was the first ViDoc produced during the development of Halo Wars. It was released on January 23, 2009, and covers the basic principles of bringing Halo to the real-time strategy genre.

Transcript

• Captain Cutter: Serina! Situation update please.
• Serina: Getting visuals now Captain.

The screen shows cutscene footage of Omega Team fighting, before switching to show Ensemble Studios employees talking.

• Graeme Devine: When we play the original Halo games you know, an explosion takes up the whole screen. So I'm gonna view a fast moving purple thing, and it will come at me and die. In Halo Wars it's going to be a view from forty feet up, so it's not going to be one explosion; it's going to be twenty.
• Dave Pottinger: One of the things we wanna do with Halo Wars was tell the Halo story. Show the Halo universe in a different way, and actually bring strategy game to the console.
• Jerome Jones: In Halo Wars you get to control... everything.
• Lance Hoke: All of the Grunts and Elites and Brutes and Choppers, and Ghosts, and Banshees, and all these really cool vehicles plus a lot of stuff we added.
• Jones: You control heroes, you get to control Spartans, you get to control small armies of Spartans. Everything is under your control in a real-time strategy.
• Pottinger: We wanted something the fans perceive the things that they know and love in a different perspective. Spartan jacking, uh, it is one of the best things in the game; they jump on top of the enemy tanks, they beat the crap out of the tank, they rip off the hatch, they toss out the driver, they hop inside and they take over that vehicle. Ppeople, uh, are used to seeing that from a first-person shooter standpoint, where everything's very large, but we have all that same detail in Halo Wars.
• Jones: Some of the battles in the game are small, and some of the battles in the game are really big. What's cool about that would be, least the campaign is... that's based on how you play. If you spend more time going to fight the Covenant, you may be dealing with a larger force than if you would've gotten there quicker.
• Pottinger: Using those choices which is the hallmark for a strategy game; "how do I want to build my army?" And by the end you've got you know, twelve or fifteen Scorpion tanks rolling across the landscape. Or you could have forty or fifty Marines, it's really kind of your choice.
• Pottinger:"So the game focuses more about combat which is pretty similar to what Halo fans will expect. Uh, people wanna blow stuff up, myself included. It's a console game, stuff blows up really really well in Halo Wars, but it is also a game where you have to think.
• Devine: The new part of this game is for a lot of people is actually playing an RTS. In the FPS game you could be using one weapon and then use one single tactic, while in our game you have to plan multiple strategies on the screen at the same time.
• Hoke: You're the general, training units and using them as essentials to complete your mission. Commanding your armies or commanding your resource gathering or economy.
• Devine: You manage resources, which you buy out of them and actually use those resources to upgrade and change your army to form a strategy to quickly win.
• Jones: There's a lot of different definitions for armies, right...There's a teched-out army, maybe not a bigger army but you spent more of your resources on technologies and things like that, so it's a powerful army.
• Pottinger: That actually maps out Halo Wars really well, because in our game, for the UNSC, they are the regimented army. Uh, but the Covenant are kind of religious zealots, they can bring a lot more units to the fight, but each of these units is a lot weaker.
• Pottinger: Halo Wars is a game about bases, it's a strategy game, I got to have a good base of operations, otherwise I can't field a very good army.
• Devine: You start with one unit for a base and by the end of the game you have 250 infantry or you know 5, uh, Scorpion tanks or choose to upgrade them and make your current Scorpions even better. It's a lot of fun to be able to do that.
• Pottinger: I am actually very happy with uh, the way the economy is represented in Halo Wars. They are faster, you know, not managing 75 villagers chopping down trees, but the depth is still there.
• Devine: We didn't want people to aim into it, we thought that was um, you know, not what a console player wanted to do, they want to focus on the combat.
• Pottinger: It's quick, it's easy to play and it's very simple. I bounce back to my base and hit the supply pad upgrade, I am back into the fight.
• Devine: It's just this long scale look of the actual war, it's not "one be many", it's "many be many".
• Pottinger: It's a fast paced game, it's an adrenaline rush wherever you go. But it has that strategy aspect to it, that people haven't seen in a Halo game before.