The Game Reviews recently caught up with Emsemble Studios’ Dave Pottinger to get some information on the upcoming console RTS adaptation of Bungie’s original franchise. Dave was happy to spill whatever he could about Halo Wars, and we were happy to listen.

The Game Reviews: Ensemble studios is best known for its critically acclaimed Age of Empires Series that helped define the RTS genre. What was it like transferring that passion to an already existing IP with Halo Wars?

Dave Pottinger: It was definitely different. Working with somebody else’s IP, I think, is always a challenge. The cool thing was that the whole team obviously loves Halo 2, and it has been a lot of fun to go in and deal with the flesh that IP has. I like superheroes and stuff like that, and my favorite part of a superhero story is the origin story. The way that we set this game 20 years before the events in Halo 1, and using the story that Graeme Devine wrote, gave us a chance to go in and put our stamp on the IP. It felt as much ours while still being in the Halo IP as if we would have set it the same, showed what Master Chief was doing, and stuff like that. At this point in the overall Halo fiction there is not a whole lot that had been defined, yet the Human/Covenant conflict had already started, so we had to go back in and sort of tell a bunch of the missing pieces. That is a lot of fun, I think, from a story standpoint. From a story standpoint, I think that we have been working on strategy games for 15 years or so now and it was actually very re-invigorating to the team to have the challenge of establishing a genre on the 360 console. Many of the demonstrators had never had the console before, so this holiday season I think that has shifted a bit. We still look at it as trying to establish this genre and as I said, it was a pretty big challenge. I think that we got excited a lot by that.

TGR: Like you were saying, the console strategy games have actually had a pretty difficult time gaining an audience compared to their PC counterparts, and it is normally a result of the control schemes. How does the team plan to overcome this obstacle? Did you ever consider an alternative control scheme such as voice command vs. using just the buttons on a controller?

DP: I think that is a legitimate question and I think that it exemplifies the whole reason why we got into this project in the first place. We have been making strategy games forever, and we had an idea, basically, for how to bring the strategy games over to the console and give those console gamers a chance to experience that gameplay. That idea basically evolved around the controls. We had the idea to continue to do the circle menu--to do the selection the way that we do it--and the whole game pretty much evolves from that.

The actual prototype that we used for the gameplay was to take the Age of Mythology game that we had done several years ago, and convert it over to be playable with the controller. That got to be really fun and hardcore guys got to be really, really good at that and eventually sort of signed off that it was as easy to play as on a PC. And that kind of told us that we were onto something, and that the ideas that we had, had some merit. In talking with Microsoft, the perfect marriage was born and we got a chance to use the Halo IP. The way we look at it is that we are still trying to establish genre. The Halo IP is the one we love, and to be honest, it’s a great chance to help get this game noticed. We have the challenge of convincing people that this type of gameplay, that they probably haven’t played on a console, before is something that they want from the the next Halo game. The Halo IP really, really helps that out because we  don’t have to try to sell an idea at the same time.

Given that, I think that we were able to do a pretty straight-forward development process, starting with the controls and building those from the ground up to be something that was possible on the console. The Halo thing makes sense, and we have been refining the controls for the last three or four years. The last big run at control changes that we made was right before E3 this year and we actually simplified our controls again. I think they went over pretty hugely from previews and from the feedback that we have been getting on the system. They say it is excellent. We have a couple of mantras on the controls. We have ’one button does one thing’ and yet it is easy in a strategy game to get very deep with hot keys and things like that. Now on a PC you expect the hot key usage. ’Well if I already have 90 hot keys, what’s five more?’ On a controller, we found that we have a hard time with people remembering different states of buttons and things like that, so, right before E3 this year, we actually stripped some of that stuff out. The usability and people just enjoying themselves went through the roof when we did that, because people no longer had to remember what they were trying to do. It just came second nature, and I think that is one important thing that we did in the game--we built the gameplay around those limitations on the controller.

Actually, one of the things that I am most proud of in the game is how we’ve not asked people to do insane things with the controller. If you want to play really hardcore and micromanage your guys, you can do it. Our hardcore guys do it, and they have fun. If you want to just press the left bumper and select all the guys in the world and tell them to do these special abilities, you can do that; it is very easy. And we find that is what, I think, as much as the Halo IP, gets people interested in the game. They can get a little skeptical about it, but when they play it a couple of minutes, they know the controls and they don’t have to worry about what they don’t know. I think that is an important thing when we are talking about establishing a genre; we need to convince people that this is a game that they can play. We know it is a game they want to play. The strategy genre has been in game consoles for a long time. We know they want to play it. It’s Halo and they want to play that too, but they don’t need to actually involve that and ensure that they can play it.

TGR: Okay.

DP: Like I said, to sum it all up, the idea is that we built it from the ground up to be on a console, and we have accepted that in the game designs. We don’t have a thousand units, we don’t have a lot of things to use to get into the gameplay; we have limited the gameplay with just what the controller can reasonably do. Necessity is the mother of invention, and I think that we actually made a pretty fun game of it.