10 Things You Didn't Know About Halo Wars

Editor’s Note: Games aren’t always serious business. Sure, you’ve got your coding, meetings, and budgetary concerns, but there’s also a fair bit of, well, gaming goofiness. So we asked Ensemble’s Dave Pottinger, lead designer on Halo Wars, to write an article for us rounding up quirky facts about the game and its development. Here’s what he sent our way.

No. 1 -- Vampires are better than Gorgons

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.

No. 2 -- "December Madness" hits Ensemble

We have a lot of fun with various pools and tournaments, for events like fantasy football or March Madness. Back during the Age of Empires II days, we started doing tournaments at the end of the game’s production. By the end, most folks are playtesting 24/7 anyway, so they get pretty good at the game. Well, by our standards, anyway -- it’s a complete myth that most developers are great at their games. Sure, we have a professional balance team that’s astoundingly good at playing our games, but frankly, most of us kinda suck.

Our tournaments have gotten progressively more intense and organized. For Halo Wars, we’ve got actual trophies, are giving away Xbox 360 consoles and Halo Laser Tag sets, and so on. Karen McMullan, one of content designers, has even gone the extra mile this time to prepare Ensemble December Madness brackets. Everyone can put in their brackets to try to predict the winners in each game; we’ve got 29 teams, so it should be a challenge to get them all correct.

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