My interview with Ensemble Studios director of technology Dave Pottinger and lead designer Graeme Devine wasn't all depressing. We did eventually cover the finer details of Halo Wars, their upcoming RTS designed from the ground up for the Xbox 360.

During our extended conversation, Pottinger and Devine described the challenging process of crafting an RTS for a new audience, and talked about the feedback they've received from their casual focus groups. They also touched on what hardcore RTS fans will like about the game, and explained key development choices--including the reason for why the Flood aren't a playable faction.

Shack: It seems that within the strategy genre in general, there is a sense of urgency in appealing to new audiences. Is this a daunting task to accomplish without sacrificing the deep strategy that you guys are obviously fans of?

Graeme Devine: Well, one of the problems, but cool things about Halo Wars, is we have to make a strategy game that will introduce them to Halo, and then we have to make a Halo game that will introduce them to strategy. It's an inverse pyramid of complexity.

Perhaps the most genius game like that is Sim City. Sim City, you put that one thing down to begin with, and then it's 4 AM, you've got this bigger place, but you know where things are at. Perhaps the simplest one is The Sims, which sells billions. So obviously it's possible to make an inverse pyramid that works and drives complexity, so that people follow it and are learning and moving along.

We've seen that done in games, but I think a lot of real-time strategy games, they want to show you the big band right away. Let's jump into the skirmish, let's get them going with tanks, infantry, a couple of Warthogs there, and if you don't get the upgrade you're going to get pushed back.

And I think that's where RTS games lose people. "This is work. I'm not coming home from this job to command an army and think about it all." They want to just play a game. I think Halo Wars is really good at that inverse pyramid, making sure that people are having fun as they go along, so they're not thinking, "Oh my god, this is work."

Dave Pottinger: For the first time we really took the campaign needs and made them equal to skirmish. Age has always been more of a PVP game. Campaign was always there, but it's never really been the thing that we designed around. We designed around the campaign first this time.

And the idea that the first mission, you start with a unit, and the idea that you don't start building a base is, "Oh my god, how can you have an RTS game without building a base?" But we wanted to teach you selection, movement, simple attacking. If you're advanced enough to do Warthog ramming great, but you don't have to. The second mission is a light base-building mission. The third mission we're back at, "Here's tank, which gets countered by the thing you fight most." Now let's focus on special abilities. Then we're back on the fourth mission, where we pull it all back together a little bit.

Shack: So the progression is such that, as you play through the campaign, it becomes more and more of a skirmish?

Dave Pottinger: Yeah, you can definitely see that inverse pyramid. In terms of the units we have in the game and their abilities, we've actually molded that around how we could roll them out in the campaign. Whereas before we would come up with a great skirmish game and figure out how we could make a campaign after that. This was much more simultaneous and parallel, which presented a whole new set of challenges.

Graeme Devine: The other genius thing that we have in Halo Wars--okay, that's too proud. [laughs] Is that the tutorial is just a tutorial. It's not afraid to say, "Hey, I'm a game." Which I think a lot of games try to jump you into that fiction.

Shack: Right, Mission One.

Graeme Devine: Mission one, you're a commander on a secret mission. It's like, I don't even know what the X button is. So our tutorial is like, "You have a controller in your hand, look at the X button, right there!" When a game admits to being a game, it's always a good start. So that's the area that takes advantage of that.

Shack: What is it about RTS games that repels new users? Is there one primary thing you can point to?

Dave Pottinger: Everyone has different answers. I think it's complexity and the obstruction. The idea of--

Shack: Just not having control of that one character?

Dave Pottinger: Yeah, the idea of not being a specific guy, and having to select and then order. That's where we've spent a lot on our controls and our teaching, and our tutorial focuses pretty heavily on that. That's where a lot of people get tripped up. They're running around the map, and they say, "I want to attack this," and they don't have anything selected, and they're pressing X like a madman.

Shack: Do you guys feel like you've been successful in fully bridging the gap, between hardcore and casual RTS fans?

Dave Pottinger: Yeah, I think the overall thing is it's been great. It gave us a chance to re-energize the team.

The RTS games that we've been making over the last several years have gotten some cruft. You get in that arms-race of features, and you have to keep all the features we had before. "What's new?" So we'd come up with three or thirty more new features, and do that again.

Halo Wars really forced us to boil it down to the essentials of strategy gaming, and in that sense I think it's a huge success. Probably the single biggest, best, coolest thing about the game is that all the interesting strategy gaming decisions that we've loved over the years are in this game. It's more interesting for me to decide to build a barracks versus a supply pad. Where I put the barracks? I don't really care that much.

So we've optimized out, streamlined, you don't have Building Tetris where you have to drag the building around. Basically because A, we couldn't really get it to work on the console, and B, it wasn't really the focus. Make that decision, get back to playing. It is a Halo game after all.

So yeah, I think we were successful in that, and really, building a console strategy game from the ground up is a huge factor in that.

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