TGR: Very cool. The Halo franchise has obviously been a first-person shooter in the past, and it has focused on a lot of one on one combat, how important will the individual unit be in Halo Wars?

DP: It depends a lot on what civilization you go to, to be honest. Let’s start with that for a second. We have the UNSC Covenant as it is. They’re the fairly regimented army. Spartans kick ass; a lot of the best things about Halo Wars from Halo stand-point is that it is back when there were multiple Spartans alive in the galaxy, well, that you could access. So, with  multiple Spartans on the battlefield, this is the first time people will be able to play with multiple Spartans at one time. So that is cool. Spartans are really bad ass. They have probably the single coolest ability in the game, where they can hijack an enemy vehicle and jump on top of a Wraith, beat the crap out of it, rip off the hatch, toss out the driver, and now they’ve got the Wraith and kind of made like a super unit on the battlefield.

In terms of individual combat power, the three Covenant leaders are individually the strongest units in the game. The feasible spin on the Covenant that I think actual Halo fans will recognize is that the Covenant is lead by a bunch of charismatic leaders that are largely sort of religiously oriented zealots. The Covenant units, pound for pound, are just a little bit weaker, actually, than the UNSC units, except for the leaders; the three leaders in a skirmish game are the three best units in the game. So, if you are talking about the Covenant skirmish game, actually, the entire civilization is oriented around your leader. They have a bunch of leader-specific things that they can do; they have different barometers from the Prophet and in these civilizations mechanics are oriented around a leader in a really different way. Whereas UNSC may be a little bit more wookie-like in that kind of strategy game--it is definitely the simpler civilization to play--Covenant are kind of advanced.

When you play the campaign, you play as heroes from the story. We talked a lot about our characters and the campaign, such as Captain Cutter and Sargent Forge, who is the first survivor of the game. You just select Sargent Forge and his Warthog and drive him around, so in the campaign it is really, really important to get your units together.

We talked a lot about the mechanics of the skirmish game, too, where the Covenant leaders are very important. With that said, it is a strategy game, and everything has to have a counter. One of the challenges in making a Halo game that lives up to the Halo fan expectations is creating a game where the Spartan isn’t the most bad ass thing in the universe. We always hear the line that everybody remembers from Halo, "Tank beats all." Of course I am referring to the Scorpion. Well it beats all of them...sort of. In Halo Wars it has to have a counter too, right? So, I think that we have had some challenges bringing the Halo IP over and still having the Spartans feel like Spartans in order to meet peoples expectations there. But then, if I build the Spartans and a couple of Scorpions, you still have to have a way to beat me.

We have been able, I think, to pull that off pretty well, and the view that I think I am getting at is Spartans are really bad ass, Covenant leaders are awesome, and Ganks feel big and heavy, but it is a strategy game ensemble and it is just very well-balanced. We have had a balance team on this game for the last two years to make sure that it comes out that way, especially with LIVE and Halo and all the online games out there, so we know we are going to get a fair and fun experience online.

TGR: It was announced that the Flood is going to play a role in the game. Is it possible that the players will ever play as the Flood, or is it just going to be an enemy?

DP: It’s kind of an enemy to all. There are some ways that you can definitely interact with the Flood that we are not quite talking about yet, but we talk. We did actually think a long time about making the Flood playable and, for a couple of reasons, we decided not to do that. From a fictional standpoint, this is a time when it is still very much UNSC versus the Covenant. I think in order to tell the best story possible, we decided to tell a story from the UNSC standpoint only. And really, there was also the challenge with Halo IP; Halo has always been experienced through the Master Chief’s eyes, so we needed to separate that out, we thought, to make sure that the people weren’t expecting the Master Chief to show up in the game at some point. He is off doing something else in the galaxy right now in our time frame.

We also have an ensemble cast. The cool thing about that is that it is actually tied to the game player, alright? Because in Halo the shooter, the story is about Master Chief. You are Master Chief. Here you are everybody. There are four (or depending on how you count, five) main characters in our main story and you get to know each of them. You get to know what the motivation is. We have almost a half-hour of cut scenes that are vectored and high quality, that you receive kind of between the missions, and there are mission cut scenes, too. If you sit down and watch all of those movies back to back in the theater, it is a great half-hour show. It’s played well in the past, Graeme’s story, which I think is the best way that the Halo story has been told. It is fun to see again, to be able to do the gameplay differently, but also to tell the story from a multi-character standpoint.

So in that sense we wanted to keep the focus there on the UNSC versus the Covenant, and the Flood just kept sort of getting in the way, from a story standpoint. Gameplay-wise, we tried a lot of paper models on the Flood and to do the Flood right. It just wasn’t in our schedule because they need to be enemy to all. They are the most evil thing on the planet and all of that stuff, and we just didn’t have time to get that right and still spend all the time that we needed to on the UNSC and the Covenant. Maybe in Halo Wars 2. Depending on what Microsoft does with that, you can think about that.

But the good thing that the Halo fans can definitely hold onto is that the Flood are in the game in a big way. It’s not Halo without Flood, despite what I said about them. Definitely, to skirmish fans and stuff like that, the Flood do have some major scene things that you can do. We have some really cool maps and stuff like that with Flood on them, but I can’t quite talk about those yet. The difference will be there. It is a big part of the Halo lore, but the story that they focused on was the UNSC.