Halo Wars ViDoc: Strategy on Xbox

Expanding the Arsenal is the third ViDoc created during the production of Halo Wars. It was released on February 12, 2009 and covers the controls as well as the game being set in the Halo universe.

Transcript

IN THE BEGINNING...

• Dave Pottinger: One of the hardest genres to sort of crack has been strategy games.

• Graeme Devine: People were making games that both ran on the PC and ran on the console. They weren't taking advantage of the controller. They weren't taking advantage of the screen, the television.

• Justin Rouse: Alright, we're going to rework this and we're not going to build a game that can work on both. We're not going to do that. We're building a game for the console, and we said "Let's start from the beginning."

• Dave Pottinger: It took up to Microsoft and talked with them, and really came to the mutual conclusion that the right thing for this game was to marry our gameplay with a universe that people understood already.

• Graeme Devine: When we were told Halo was available, we had to learn a lot more about the Halo universe.

• Dave Pottinger: Who doesn't want to work with the Halo franchise, and taking that... those characters, that world, and putting our gameplay with it... was sort of the perfect marriage.

• Graeme Devine: During that time, we found out that Halo itself started out as an RTS game, which of course was kind of interesting.

• Dave Pottinger: I want to feel in every game like I can invest myself in that world somehow.

CONTROLS

• Graeme Devine: We realized very early on that one thing we had to get right was the controls.

• Dave Pottinger: One of the biggest concerns I know out there on the internet is, you know, how can a strategy game exist without a mouse and keyboard?

• Jerome Jones: You're going to have to figure out a way to get the same gampelay on a console controller, and I think we've done that in Halo Wars.

• Dave Pottinger: One common thread is each time we went back, and sort of re-thought about the controls, they got simpler.

• Justin Rouse: What are the basic fundamentals that are fun about RTS? How do we have to control them? How do we use our controller to control them?

• Dave Pottinger: I wanted one button to do one thing, whereas before, you look at a console strategy game, it's... "Well, if you press this button here with a trigger pulled, pull the other trigger at the same time, and press these two buttons..." It's just too much.

• Graeme Devine: A lot of things came out of that. The circle menu came out of that.

• Justin Rouse: The circle menu that we used in Halo Wars is one of those things that I think really stands out in the game. It uses what we call the rule of eight.

• Dave Pottinger: If you click on a building, you see the circle menu pop up, and there's eight choices there that you can pick from.

• Justin Rouse: You know, being the 12 o'clock versus the 3 o'clock, and sort of in between the one and two... like, and all the way around.

• Dave Pottinger: It was really simple to press A. Push the left stick and press A again. You could do things just as fast as you could on the PC.

• Jerome Jones: After you start to play, you'll realize that your thumbs just do the right thing. They- they kind of go where you would expect them to go.

EXPECTATIONS

• Graeme Devine: I think when you have the previous Halo games out there and you've got such a huge fan base of Halo fans, anxious to see what you do next, it sets a huge bar for you to have to leap, you know... their expectations, and exceed their expectations.

• Dave Pottinger: We have to live up to the Halo franchise and the expectations people have. So you know, they expect to get a great story out of Halo, and I'm certainly a little biased, but I think that we told our Halo story is going to help set a bar back on Halo itself. to tell their stories even better next time. The way that strategy gamers, you know, who know enough about the origins of the genre, you know, they go back and talk about Dune II and the early Warcraft games. I hope in 10 years people are talking about Halo Wars in the same way.

Demo available Now
xbox.com/halo