Shack: Have you gotten the game into the hands of new RTS players? How have they reacted?

Dave Pottinger: Yeah, we've done a bunch of focus groups. Microsoft's got a great user research testing lab. We've done I think probably three times as many focus groups and usability tests on this game as we have on our previous games perhaps combined. It's been a huge issue.

We are almost creating a genre on console. There have been strategy games on the console, and a lot of them haven't fared particularly well. We really think we have a huge leg up, with the Halo IP, and building it from the ground up, not being a port.

But that's not to say that we didn't get some things wrong. We've streamlined and really worked on the teaching aspects of the job, and not having a sort of finger-through- the-nose, pull-you-through tutorial. It's a quick, short tutorial, and they get you into the game, and try to teach you things as you need them in each mission, and let's you have a lot of fun really quickly.

If we lose people on this game it's going to be in the first ten minutes. They're going to say, "Ehhh, I don't really understand this, it's too hard to remember." If we can get them past the first ten minutes, we've got them.

Shack: What in the game speaks to a hardcore RTS fan's sensibilities?

Dave Pottinger: From an Ensemble history standpoint, it's much more of a tactical combat game. The format in Age is military versus economy, guns versus butter. A lot of times you could out-econ somebody and win the game.

That won't happen in Halo Wars. You need to manage your army, you need to use your abilities, which make a sort of really cool, universal addition to the games that we've made in the past. You need to use those abilities at the right time. You need to use the powers at the right time, which is a little closer to Age of Mythology.

Looking back over our canon of games, Age 2 sticks out, and AoM has probably the most passionate following inside the company. So we've put a lot of that stuff forward, you know, the base model is AoM-ish. And the powers are certainly a lot of that. So using that stuff at the right time, I think that's all there. And it's a more combat-focused game, so it's new in that sense for our fans.

It's a shorter experience too. It's 10 or 15 minutes in a skirmish game, the campaign missions can go longer and whatnot. But we want that between-game fodder, those watercooler moments, where you and I play the game against the AI, and you get your butt kicked and the timer kicked in to get your base back, and we just by the skin of our teeth got it back, and then we talk about the next game going better.

That's something that doesn't really exist in Halo the shooter. You can talk about how you shoot your gun better, but there's not really that strategic talk between games the way you have in a strategy game. Bringing that to the console is huge. I think that level of depth, and that hardcore discoverability, where you say, "Okay, the third marine upgrade gives me a medic and heals my guys, and now I don't have to use my heal power the same way if I go with the marine strategy." That level of depth in there is really huge.

Shack: Did you struggle at first when deciding what elements of the Halo franchise to carry over into the RTS?

Graeme Devine: Well the game didn't start out as a Halo game. One of the things we wanted to--the initial task for the game was just to make a console RTS. We purely focused on just controls, and we used Age of Mythology as the base engine to do all that.

So it was thinking about, a lot of other RTS games port themselves onto the console, and use that word "port." They've just taken the same experience, gone with the same version of commands.

Shack: Right, with a straight cursor and everything.

Graeme Devine: Right. We thought about it from a different method. We took everything away, and took the keyboard, the mouse, even the interface, that U- shape has been there forever across the top, because gosh we must have those.

We took all that away and thought about what people wanted to do. People want to select units, they want to move units, they want to build things, they want to attack things--rethink those from the opposite end of the problem, rather than how it's been done before. So that actually was pretty successful in getting a lot of the early things, the circular menu in particular, and the building, those fell out that early exploration.

And when we approached Microsoft, they had been talking a lot about Halo, and we were like well, let's make this Halo. It was a good moment to step back and think about Halo, and actually learn to love the game, because making a Halo game--what does that mean? What do these two sides mean? And what Dave was talking about was the secondary abilities of the actual units.

When we first showed the game to Halo fans--which started to translate to the Halo canon, we have infantry now, grunts and so forth--we would watch them kind of behind the glass, and they were having a lot of fun with it, but they'd come back and say, "Well, where's my grenades?" [laughs] "Halo's about grenades, don't you know that?"

The secondary abilities came from that feedback, which has really added a lot of Halo elements to the game. The ability for infantry to throw grenades, the ability for Warthogs to move around, and especially the ability for Spartans to take other enemy vehicles is very Halo-like. So I think that evolution from just not thinking about Halo, to how do we control RTS on the consoles, it worked out pretty darn well. If we had gone any other route I think we wouldn't have ended up with a control scheme that works as well as it has to.

Dave Pottinger: And one of the nice things that the Halo IP provides is, similar to an advantage we enjoyed with Age--with Age you see a guy with a bow and arrow, you know what he's going to do. With Halo, especially with the platform we're on, the 360--

Shack: It's iconic.

Dave Pottinger: It's iconic. When people see the Warthog, they want to run over stuff, like Graeme was saying. Even the most jaded gamer cackles with glee the first time. It meets their expectations. Then we try to turn around and leverage that, so that the Warthog blows up really well, and the Scorpion tanks are heavier, and Hornets do this--we can play off of that and develop the rock/paper/scissors relationships that strategy gamers expect, and play to what they already understand.

So in that sense compared to something like Universe at War, we've got a huge leg up with a great IP, but have already set some expectations. Some expectations have been harder to do than others. Like the Spartans for example, the jacking ability, we knew that because everyone is seeing through Master Chief's eyes, the Spartan units have to be the coolest units in the game. But then again, it's a strategy game--we still have to be balanced.

So we ended up trying to reserve the coolest ability, where he backflips over the Wraiths, beats the shit out of the dash, rips the driver out and takes that--we tried to leave that for him. So he's got to be cool, but he still has to be balanced. So some things like that we struggled with, but overall I think the Halo IP was a perfect marriage for the type of thing we were trying to do.

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