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49 Comments
- Darkangel754, on 01/19/2009, -5/+27Why didn't they make this for PC? or atleast make it for PC alongside the Xbox.
- lcmatt, on 01/19/2009, -1/+22Problem is 99% of RTS games started out as a PC game then ported over to the given console while trying to get the keyboard controls onto a controller which always failed.
Hopefully as it's being developed for a console the controls might not suck as much. - spookyttws, on 01/19/2009, -0/+21Truefully, I really didn't know anything about Halo Wars besides the fact it was a RTS based on Halo. It looks really good. I was more or less expecting to see Warcraft 3 or Civilization with a Halo skin forced on it, but it really looks like they're (Ensemble Studios?) really putting a lot of thought and effort into it. I'm still not super excited simply because I've yet to see an RTS work really well on a console (because of the controller instead of keyboard) but I like what I see on the list.
All that said, wasn't 'Halo' originally conceived as an RTS (or at least a top down view game)? I remember seeing early shots of, what looked like Master Chief, running around from the top down view. - randypanda, on 01/19/2009, -4/+1511. RTS on a console doesn't always work out too well.
- Kanten, on 01/19/2009, -3/+14"The Covenant are really good at rushing (a quick attack before your opponent has defenses)."
Wow, no RTS has ever had a Zerg rush option before..........wait. - GregIsLegend, on 01/19/2009, -2/+12***** Websense, here ya go buddy...
...
Creating a strategy game based in the Halo universe gave Ensemble the chance to take a rich franchise and flesh it out in new ways. As huge Halo fans, this was awesome for us. And as designers, this was required. The Halo shooter games have put a lot of different units in the universe, but a strategy game has different needs: We have specific unit roles that need to be filled, and we have to have enough units of each type to ensure that even the basic strategies have multiple options.
When we originally spec'd out the Covenant, we gave them a ground-based, antiair unit called the Gorgon (above left) -- a bulbous, biped walker that used heavy Needlers to rip apart thin-skinned aircraft. Once it was in the game, though, we realized that we'd created a recognition problem: was the Gorgon a vehicle or infantry unit? We intended for it to be a vehicle, but the legs were causing problems, since we also said that "anything with two legs that walks is a dude." The final nail in the Gorgon coffin? The Covenant already had too many ground vehicles; we needed more air units.
Enter the Vampire (above right): a flying, antiair unit armed with heavy Needlers. Once we picked an appropriately "ethereal" name, its unique ability became obvious. The Vampire has the Stasis beam that can prevent enemy aircraft from moving; once upgraded, this beam can drain health from the target and heal the Vampire.
The Halo universe has a lot of ranged combat units. That makes sense; it's sci-fi, after all. Strategy gamers want more options, though. When we looked at the UNSC unit list, we quickly realized that the UNSC was severely lacking in hand-to-hand power. Spartans can do ranged and close combat, but we needed another type of fighter more clearly oriented around melee damage.
We bounced around for a while on what the actual unit would be. We tried the lore-accurate Mark1 armor suits -- a precursor to the more modern Spartan armor. In practice, they were just too close to the Spartans and not distinguishable enough in-game. We had to make our new melee unit stand out more, so we ended up with a lumbering mechanized suit that couldn't be confused with the Spartan at all: the Cyclops.
The Cyclops can beat the crap out of anything around him, though his mobility's limited by his speed. In Halo Wars, that's not enough; he has to have a unique ability. In fact, that's where his name comes from. We've got a lot of fond memories of Age of Mythology -- there's a lot of that game in Halo Wars, actually. One of our favorite units from AOM is the Cyclops. He's a big, hulking brute that can pick up enemies and hurl them for extra fun. Thus, the Halo Wars Cyclops takes his name and ability from his Age of Mythology ancestor. Beating your opponent's Scorpion tanks with the Cyclops is a lot of fun, but there's an extra "in your face" element if you can then throw those pieces of debris for extra damage.
Most developers work in a few nods to friends and family in their games. We're no different. A sample of the "inside references" within Halo Wars:
--We know there are a fixed number of Spartans in the Halo universe, but they're not all named. With Halo Wars introducing a few more Spartans to the lexicon, we had to come up with new, unique names. One's a nod to our lead campaign designer, Jerome Jones.
--One of our Skirmish maps called "Fort Deen" (above) is named after one of our senior designers, Tim Deen.
--My kids are named Andrew and Thomas. They're young boys and, as such, like pirates a lot. The achievement "Alas, Poor Andrew Thomas" is awarded once you get the first skull in the campaign. After all, what's more pirate-y than a skull? And it's a goofy Shakespeare joke, to boot.
--The achievement "Big Al's Scooter" (awarded for a quick Skirmish win) contains the nicknames of producer Chris Rippy's two kids.
For a long time, we had the mantra that Halo Wars was "playable with only the left stick and four face buttons." That was good. I really love simple statements like that. At that time, the mapping for the four face buttons was as follows:
A: Select (in various forms)
B: Cancel (cancel selection, menus, powers, etc.)
X: Move/Attack
Y: Leader Menu (for transporting, powers)
Unfortunately, we had a problem: We wanted to put in an ability system for the units. We knew that'd be fun, but we didn't have a good button for it. As such, when we tried it, the system just didn't go over well. No one used the abilities enough to justify the gameplay bandwidth we'd allocated for them. We tried a few things, but we ended up cutting unit abilities out of the game entirely.
Almost a year later, we kept circling around the abilities idea again, because the game really needed more to do in combat. But we knew we were out of buttons, and we didn't want something as cumbersome as remappable buttons or modifier buttons (e.g., right trigger + X). Abilities needed to be simple and fast.
The "big fix" came when we decided to undo one of our assumptions. We moved the Leader Menu to the D-pad and put unit abilities on the Y button. Now we had something close to a primary and secondary attack with X and Y. Shooter fans "got" that. Awesome. Plus, it tested through the roof. The game instantly got more fun, and everyone was using abilities.
We did lose the "left stick plus button" thing. In hindsight, it would've been nice to save that, but players just don't use the Leader Menu as much as they use abilities. It made more logical sense to put the unit abilities on the Y button, even if that meant sacrificing one of our mantras. Plus, it was just a lot more fun.
Any hardcore Halo fan will know that the Mgalekgolo are worm colonies that "bind" together to form what humans call Hunters. The Hunter lore is rich with details. The worm colonies originally begin as a single collected entity. When it grows too large, that colony divides into a pair of colonies. These colonies are deeply tied together as mates, or "bond brothers."
Halo Wars plays off of that lore with the Hunter upgrades. The most obvious upgrade would be to start with a single Hunter and then upgrade it so it splits into two Hunters. That wouldn't work in a strategy game, though, because it'd be too hard to tell what upgrade level an individual Hunter was when you encountered it. Is that single Hunter a low-level Hunter or a high-level Hunter whose mate's been killed? So, rather than go literal with the fiction, we tried to embody the spirit of the Hunter relationship. For example, one of the Hunter upgrades that you can research is called "Spirit Bond." When researched, this upgrade gives a huge combat bonus to your Hunters, but only if both Hunters are alive. When one Hunter falls, it becomes markedly easier to kill the remaining Hunter. This correlates very well with what players expect from the Halo shooters.
If you've ever played Halo, you probably remember the Grunts -- they say some pretty funny things. As the series has evolved, players have realized how much chatter and conversation exists with any of the units or squads in the game. When we did some internal and external research, the sense of life and reality created by that chatter came back as one of the most important things in the Halo universe.
We wanted to knock that out of the park for Halo Wars. With our unit menagerie, we have tons of opportunities to dash off funny one-line quips or comments on the state of the battles. When the battle chatter system went in, our "Halo" feel really started to come together. A nice side effect was that it really improved the quality of the gameplay, too. The battle chatter is great for setting the mood or commenting on the environment, but it also notifies you about important things that are happening in the game.
A few examples of battle chatter in Halo Wars:
--"Aww, I've got Grunt bits all in the grill," usually said after you run over a few Grunts with Warthogs.
--"Grunt! Antifreeze, chair, now," might be heard by the Prophet leader if you're fighting over the Harvest polar regions.
--"Has anyone seen John?" and "That's Mjolnir Armor!" are good clues that Spartans have just entered the battle.
Skeptics wonder whether real-time strategy games can be fun on consoles. Obviously, Halo Wars is our response to that. The concern's still a fair one, though. People need to see the game work; they need to understand that we built the game for consoles. They need to have fun playing Halo Wars.
"Solving" the scrolling screen issue is a huge part of convincing people that they don't need a mouse to play a strategy game. Halo Wars has long had a feature called "Base Jumping." Press left on the D-pad, and we cycle you to your first base -- press left again, and it'll take you to your next base, and so on. This feature worked pretty well, but it was never something that the casual players used enough, which was a problem. We built the game expecting people to jump around the map rather than scrolling. Yeah, you can still scroll around if you want, but the game really is built for jumping around the map.
Base Jumping just wasn't cutting it, unfortunately... until we polished it. Sometimes, a little bit of polish makes all the difference. When you're Base Jumping, we flash the base's number in the middle of the crosshair. It's a little thing, but when you see the "1," you know you're at your first base. "2" means you're on your second base. You get the idea.
We don't just jump straight to the actual base. We jump in a little off to the side, and slide the camera over the base very quickly. The offset move's aligned so that the camera's "sliding in" from the spot on the map where you used to be looking. It's like a "fade in" for jumping. This really helped to orient players spatially on the map.
A huge goal for this game was to have the UNSC and Covenant civilizations play very differently. The UNSC are the good guys, while the Covenant are definitely very, very evil. We could list out all the differences in how they play, but there's one feature that hasn't gotten a lot of attention: Covenant Hot Dropping.
Unlike the UNSC, the Covenant have their Leader (Prophet, Arbiter, etc.) on the battlefield. The three Covenant Leaders are actually the strongest individual units in the game -- it takes multiple Spartans to counter a Covenant Leader. Hot Dropping allows Covenant players to send any units directly to their Leader's location. Each Covenant base has a Gravity Lift right outside. Imagine there's a Covenant Spirit (the "tuning fork" equivalents of the UNSC Pelicans) parked just out of camera range: send a Grunt squad to that pad, and the Grunt gets that familiar blue glow as he's lifted up to the Spirit, and then instantly flown over to be dropped in next to your Covenant Leader.
Strategy fans can see the gameplay that comes out of this feature. The Covenant are really good at rushing (a quick attack before your opponent has defenses). The Leader can be maneuvered close to the enemy while the rest of the units are training back at the base. When the battle begins, you can start Hot-Dropping in your whole army. An additional twist is that the Covenant Leaders can be "recalled" back to a base via the Gravity Lift. The Covenant Leaders are very valuable, so the best players will rescue their Leaders right before death.
If Hot Dropping seems like a screw tactic, perfect -- it's supposed to feel that way. It's balan - Morkon2112, on 01/19/2009, -0/+9#12: Ensemble has been owned by Microsoft since 2001, long before the production of Halo Wars was ever started.
- Klisk, on 01/19/2009, -1/+9Halo wasn't originally a PC game.
It was originally a Mac game. - Chebsi, on 01/20/2009, -0/+7Macs are PCs.
- twinklyJesus, on 01/19/2009, -0/+7Do you still think you are witty, too?
- gametavern, on 01/19/2009, -0/+6guess what, master chief isn't in this.
- guinpen, on 01/19/2009, -0/+5"Originally developed as a real-time strategy game for the Apple Macintosh platform, Halo: Combat Evolved went through several iterations before arriving at the console first person shooter for which it is recognized."
wikipedia. originally for mac? oooo - adiyo011, on 01/20/2009, -0/+4You shouldn't be terribly surprised. Ensemble Studios was (RIP) one of the best RTS makers for the PC.
- kinseyincanada, on 01/20/2009, -0/+4yea cause you know Windows havent corned the market in terms of gaming.
- bcos, on 01/19/2009, -0/+31up still writes articles after the layoff...?
- Mistuke, on 01/20/2009, -0/+2I'm interested to see on how the voice commands will work out, if it'll make it more fun/engaging or if it'll be just a gimmick.
- falkonv7l, on 01/19/2009, -2/+4Blocked by Websense,
is it short enough for someone to copy/paste - LogicBomB, on 01/20/2009, -0/+2Thanks for the ***** "console RTS's don't work" and "Halo sucks" comments from the naysayers. Very helpful.
Moving on...
I'm really excited about this game. I've seen console RTS's work really well, the ONLY downside I've been bothered by is lag/slowdown issues. Battle for Middle Earth 2 and C&C3 both were awesome on the console as far as unit/battlefield control went. No hotkeys or speed-demon type input like a KB/M gives you but it's a level playing field in MP so it's no big deal to me.
Looks like they are actually testing their game and making changes based on that testing (a new concept I hear...) - I'll give anything a shot when they talk about it as seriously as this article does. - Octanus, on 01/21/2009, -0/+2Give it time, I'm sure we'll see a PC version.
- wraiyne, on 01/19/2009, -0/+2i complement you on this wonderfully crafted analogy, sir
- uberduger, on 01/20/2009, -0/+2I don't care, I still want a Dungeon Keeper Gold XBLA. Damnit, I want Bullfrog back!
- Ericdigital, on 01/19/2009, -0/+2It's really cool what they have done to make it work for consoles, they way you select units and move around the map has been completely rethinked to work with a controller, I believe IGN has some videos of it in action, but It looks like they did a great job.
- CamrynEG, on 01/19/2009, -1/+3Wow, the vampire unit and the cyclops... The thought that must have gone into such imaginative names!
- Fustigations, on 01/19/2009, -0/+2I LIKE chunky peanut butter! (I like RTS on the pc better than console though...)
- Chunken, on 01/19/2009, -2/+3Halo was cool and all, and I like RTS games, but for some reason I have no interest in this game.
- randypanda, on 01/19/2009, -3/+4playing a RTS on a console is like chunky peanut butter, even though it may look smooth it has chunks of hard peanuts hidden within its deceiving beautiful layers of velvety peanutey goodness. The only game which had a light chunk to it was the LOTR rts.
- Terasiel, on 04/21/2009, -0/+1Well if you're going to rip off someone else, might as well rip off one of the best. Unfortunately, that still doesn't mean there's another RTS released that has three completely unique sides other than StarCraft.
- GregIsLegend, on 01/19/2009, -4/+5I really enjoy Halo's plot, so I think I'm going to pretend that this game isn't canon. Ensemble has given stupid names to every one of the units they've made up. Vampire? Really? A magic beam that heals the vehicle ? I'm sorry, but that really sounds stupid too.
Same thing with the main ship. "Spirit of Fire"? That doesn't sound nearly as cool as "The Pillar of Autumn" Or "In Amber Clad" or "Forward Unto Dawn". In fact, it sounds really dumb. Also, I love console gaming, but no matter how intuitive the controls are, It's still always going to be better on a keyboard.
That is unless of course you dumb down the entire game enough so that you only need a game pad....
I really like Halo, but i'm just not feeling this game... - ELCad, on 01/20/2009, -0/+1FPS and RTS games are better on PC. But there are some fun FPSs for consoles, so I don't see why a RTS couldn't be done as well.
- zapass, on 01/19/2009, -3/+4yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaawwwwwwwnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn
rrrrrrrrrrrrrrr....zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz......
rrrrrrrrrrrrrrr....zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz......
rrrrrrrrrrrrrrr....zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz......
rrrrrrrrrrrrrrr....zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...... - Fustigations, on 01/19/2009, -0/+1If only they had named the main ship "hatredcopter"
I may have bought it just for that... - Klisk, on 01/19/2009, -1/+1I'm not super excited if only because I've yet to play an RTS game that I actually liked, or could put more than 10 minutes of attention into without being bored.
- bboy1122, on 01/21/2009, -0/+0I liked it ill buy halo wars when its out here lol
- ed1bleTal2get, on 01/20/2009, -1/+0I'm just wondering how many people are gonna see this game in the store, think OMG HALO, buy it, and then be completely thrown off that it isnt like the other Halo games they played.
Doesn't seem like a bad game, I just have yet to see a RTS work well with a controller, and doubt I ever will - Porky2k5, on 01/19/2009, -3/+2duplicate...you just added xbox 360 to the title...probably a power user on another account wins again
the original
http://digg.com/xbox/10_Things_you_didn_t_know_abo ... - iMrAi, on 01/19/2009, -1/+0It was posted 2 days ago, it had no comments and with 1 Digg!
I see this as helping that person getting the story on the front page. :) - Lockhart1, on 01/20/2009, -2/+0Buried for presuming to tell me what I don't know.
- wraiyne, on 01/19/2009, -2/+0lemme guess.
you just hate the 360, right? - TSK05, on 01/19/2009, -5/+2It's long as hell.
- inactive, on 01/19/2009, -9/+6an rts based on a mediocre fps! man im excited,
- aednichols, on 01/19/2009, -10/+5Master Chief does not belong in an RTS.
- AshsToAshs, on 01/19/2009, -8/+3...also known as 10 things i dont care about
- appleseed1234, on 01/19/2009, -7/+2#11: Microsoft has purchased Ensemble, the makers of the excellent Age of Empires franchise, to milk their Halo cash cow, and will be shutting them down once they've finished.
- ShiftyBizniss, on 01/20/2009, -8/+2Digg should not allow comments this long
- Lockhart1, on 01/20/2009, -9/+1Because it's 2009 and nobody want's to game with a mouse anymore.
- Infowarsdotcom, on 01/19/2009, -13/+3Halo + RTS on a console = Worse than having a badger rip out your eyes while having splintered tooth picks shoved up your dick hole.
What else do you need to know? - Junkey, on 01/18/2009, -18/+7you are right I didn't want to know that.
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