Do you worry about the RTS principal of building up loads of expendable units against the enemy? Do you think that takes away something from the great thing about Halo, the enduring nature of Master Chief?
I hate RTS games that are like that. I feel like I’m just building up my base and building that thin red line to go towards the front line, you know, it’s a meat shield that hopefully slowly advances towards the enemy. If you’re doing that then you’re not really looking at the cool special effects, we want you managing that combat, we want you feeling as though you’re on the front line – we especially want you to care about the combat, we don’t just want you to think that it’s an expendable army. That’s why we added in secondary abilities to the game and the reason we gave veterancy to the units. So as each unit gets better, they gain veterancy, so I’m going to start caring about them more and so I’ll withdraw them and heal them. But yeah, I think if you play some RTS games where it is an expendable army, those games can be very fun but I don’t think any kind of game designer wants that back and forth gameplay.

Is the game constructed the way it is simply because this is still a Halo game, or would you have taken the same decisions if you were creating a new RTS game unrelated to the IP?
Well we spent the first year and a half just looking at making the game work with Age of Mythology. A lot of what we had there is still the same [in Halo Wars], the circle menu, the idea of building from a central structure; those have certainly not changed just because it’s a Halo game. I think one of the things we changed just because it’s a Halo game was, when we first started to playtest the game we were watching Halo players play it from behind a silvered mirror, which is always a fun time because you can’t talk to them! But talking to them in the debriefing, one of the things they said was “I wish we could throw grenades” and at the time all the infantry did was shoot guns and walk, like a classic RTS game. So from that came all the secondary abilities – the ability for infantry to throw grenades, the ability for warthogs to ram things – all of those are very Halo like and so that idea came from just being Halo.

A lot of Halo Wars’ story revolves around a struggle for resources, something that could be seen as being inspired by real world events. Is that the case?
I’d love to say that I wrote the story from a deep perspective, but I wanted to write a good Bruce Willis story and Sgt. Forge is the Bruce Willis character, and I wanted Halo Wars to be a good action adventure game. So for me personally, there is no comparison between background world events and what’s going on in Halo. Halo is great escapism, that’s the way I look at it.

What do you think makes it great escapism? Why has Halo captured the imagination of people all over the world?
I think if you just look at it from the human’s point of the view, the UNSC, then it’s quite boring because, you know, they’re kind of like space marines from lots of other things! Not many people look at the other side, the Covenant. I mean these purple guys are actually pretty interesting. The fact that they all hate each other’s guts and they have no imagination whatsoever, I mean, that’s one of the things we get to tell in our story, a little bit more about the Covenant’s complete and utter lack of imagination to be able to do things, and that they have a very different structure to their society than humans do. Getting to explore that a little bit more is actually a very exciting side to the game and what motivates those bad guys is really insane. To write from that perspective is very cool and it’s a very colourful world.

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