Halo Wars Interview with Jason Pace, Senior Producer with MGS

Part 2

by jinx

Creating a prequel to the original Halo game must have given you amazing opportunities for adding to the Halo mythology. What’s your favourite addition?

The chance to introduce new major human characters into the Halo universe was an awesome opportunity to show the conflict with the Covenant from different points-of-view, and the interaction between these new characters adds an entirely new dimension to the game play experience. Forge and Anders have great on-screen chemistry. J

What is your favourite unit in Halo Wars?

There is nothing quite like building a Scarab and taking it with your army to your opponent’s base. BRING ON THE PAIN! :-D

Why is a strategy game on the console different from a strategy game on the PC?

The biggest difference is the input mechanism: a mouse and keyboard allow for extremely precise and rapid actions compared to a gamepad, and the mechanic of most Strategy games has evolved over the years to take full advantage of the precision you get with that combination.

As an example of the above, many traditional RTS games focus on the need for a variety of resources collected all over the map as requirements for building and advancing – currency, wood, ore, grain, etc. all must be gathered/earned/produced in order to succeed, and that translates into a lot of very precise actions executed in rapid succession via keyboard shortcuts and the mouse. In Halo Wars we’ve streamlined resources to a single type that can be produced on a player’s main base, so the need to manage a large number of remote locations is greatly reduced and game play can focus on the combat and action Halo fans love. Removing the need to micro-manage many areas of the map solves one of the biggest hurdles with RTS controls on the gamepad.

However, in order to create diverse units and/or units with powerful upgrades in Halo Wars you’ll likely need to manage multiple base locations to produce sufficient resources to fund your choices -- bases have a fixed number of available build sites, and resource production utilizes those precious slots (as do power plants, both of which are required to produce units and unit upgrades). In this way Halo Wars requires the same kind of careful logistics planning across multiple sites as a traditional RTS, but the centralized base build-out plan makes it easy to navigate to remote bases quickly with the controller’s D-pad. There are similar innovations to the traditional PC RTS mechanic throughout game play, and it’s this ground-up approach to game design that we feel enabled Ensemble to make Halo Wars a breakthrough title on the console.

What games have you worked on before Halo Wars, and how was this game different?

I’ve worked in genres ranging from casual puzzle games to third-person action games  to the FPS Halo games. Halo Wars is the first game I’ve worked on that attempted to translate a genre from one platform to another by fundamentally rethinking the entire game mechanic. Ensemble didn’t just work to change the controls of a traditional RTS game; rather, they adapted both the controls and game play so that the entire experience would feel natural on the console.

What kinds of advancements do you see in videogames in 5 years?

There are two major areas I’m personally really excited about, and they couldn’t be more different: I think there’s an explosion going on with indie games right now, and Xbox LIVE is committed to helping that community grow and thrive... which is awesome and overdue, in my opinion, because the biggest leaps and innovations frequently come from a few people working in a garage studio. On the other hand, I’m also totally excited for how major franchises are helping to drive the bar higher for production values across all fronts, from scripts and voice acting to music and visual style. What we’ve seen, especially over the last few years, is that there’s plenty of room in the industry for great games to succeed no matter where they come from.

Continue to Part 3 >>