TGR: Do you feel this game is going to appeal to hardcore strategy fans or newcomers to the genre? Or do you think that it is going to bridge the gap between the two?

DP: I don’t think that we would be pretty close to shipping if we didn’t think it would bridge the gap. I think it has appeal for very different reasons. The way we kind of look at it is, obviously we are on a console, so it has to be a game that makes a console gamer happy. The gameplay is shorter than at least our average strategy games have been in the past. H2, AoM, and H3 were all 35-, 45-minute scrimmage games. Halo Wars is more like 15 minutes. It is a lot more action-oriented, too. Plus, to be honest, it is a Halo game, and I want to blow some stuff up! People need that. It is not a game where I want to ask my Spartan to go get trees and bring gold back to my town. He needs to be out doing what Spartans do, and so we have definitely skewed the gameplay to focus on the combat. In that sense it is more spectacular than any game we have worked on. Combat is more meaningful.

One of the things that I think a lot of people liked about Age is that you could just out-econ somebody. You can see me play better "air quotes" now, you take a good look and build up your economy, and then you go to lunch with the guys and kind of ask about the battle, and a lot of people don’t even watch the battle, then they go back to managing their economy. Halo Wars is definitely the exact opposite of that. We want those big, sort of epic economic decisions, and I am big on the theory of continual investment in your economy in a strategy game. It is not something that we want you to set up on autopilot in the first 30 seconds and never go back to it.  We have got that typical strategy game and the typical Ensemble game depth in the economy, so naturally, I think it will appeal to the people who have always liked our games, but it is now in a much more console style. When you want to go back and upgrade your economy you pop back to your base and you can just press left on the d-pad to do that. You can switch on one of the supply pads and upgrade them, or maybe you will build another supply pad, so there are different ways to do that. There are a limited number of building sites on a base, so you have to decide: "Do I you want more economy?" "Do I want to upgrade?" or "Do I want to expand?" That is a really classical strategy choice.

So we have that in this game, and I think people will recognize that, but it is much faster-paced. Sort of strategy boiled down to the essentials. And I think in that way, I do hope that it appeals to everybody. Not that I am widely optimistic enough to think that we won’t get roasted by some of the hardcore Age fans and the people who say, "OH! Strategy games can never be played on a console." You know, some people think that you can’t play strategy games on the console. I am not sure there is anything that we can do to convince them; if people are open to the idea that a strategy game can work on a console, I think that they will play it and I think that they will really like it, but for very different reasons.

Halo fans will look at it all, get it, and say, "Hey this is really Halo in a new way and I get to control an army and I get to fight against, you know, a whole screen full of Flood from a top down perspective. I get to play as the Prophet in a multiple player scrimmage, or in the Covenant, you know as the Arbiter." Then there is another one that we haven’t even announced yet. But they will see those Halo things.

I think that people coming from maybe the Ensemble background will come over, and they won’t necessarily focus on the Halo things, but they will see the gameplay. They will see the idea that you have different things that you do in each unit, and if you don’t want to build lots of heavy tanks, that requires me to total up a little bit, and they will see those typical strategy things in the game first. And then hopefully they will kick each other’s ass.

TGR: The Halo universe has a wealth of vehicles, weapons, and enemies, have you announced exactly how many buildings and vehicles and units there are going to be available in this game?

DP: I don’t think that I am allowed to give the final, FINAL answer on that.

TGR: Okay.

DP: Yeah, it is around the order of.... I may have mentioned the "one button does one thing" mantra, but I also said a lot about that there is the rule of eight, so we have a circle menu that pops in the center of the screen and it has eight places for stuff on it.  If you select a place to build, you can have just one of eight; you can actually have a few less than that. It is along the order of ten or fifteen units per site versus five.

We just talked about Ensemble fans and that people come just for Ensemble, so for them there is the UNSC and Covenant playable sides and those, I think, are probably our most differentiated civilizations that we have ever done in terms of gameplay. Then we have three leaders that sit on top of that. It is sort of like Age of Mythology, if you remember that one, where there were Greeks and Egyptians and then Captain Cutter is our Zeus and Sargent Forge is our Hades. So we want to get again into that type of replay. We know that strategy gamers enjoy a lot of long plays, when there are a lot of depths to explore. I think that is one of the coolest things that is different about Halo Wars from Halo the shooter. In Halo, we have a deathmatch and then we get around the water cooler and we talk about that. We talk about getting cool head shots and things like that, but we are not really talking about the interests from a competitor’s standpoint. There are different strategies that we may employ, like picking up a different gun and being a different spy in there, but strategy games have so much more to do differently in the next game than just a shooter. It is a different type than what people are used too, so I am really excited to have people be able to have different water cooler moments with Halo Wars, like, "Oh! If I had just gotten my economy rolling earlier, I could have just gotten my Scorpions out and maybe X # of Grizzlies before you came in with your Hornets," and things like that. It is a different way of thinking about Halo, and a different way of thinking about how your next game is going to go than people have gotten used to on the console, and I am really excited to see how that turns out.