You’ve just said the UNSC are typical boring space marines, but you can only play as them in the single player campaign. Why was that decision made?
I love the UNSC! Let me say that! I like being a good guy. That is something that I didn’t like in Warcraft 3 when I turned evil halfway through the campaign. When you turn it halfway through I feel like I’m being cheated of the entire story. I came up with a set of characters in Halo Wars that are more three dimensional than a normal game’s characters, because I always think that if you make characters that are believable then you can actually think about what they do. Then when they make a decision in 30 seconds that should take 4 weeks you kind of believe it! When you decide to blow up a spaceship or something that you should plan for weeks, it’s cool because the characters are three dimensional.

Halo’s renowned for its “30 seconds of action, repeated” notion, whereas RTSs are very slow burners. How do you deal with the expectations from RTS fans and from Halo fans?
Well, you have to get strategy players to play a Halo game and Halo players to play a strategy game and then you’ll hopefully get twice as many people! I think it’s safe to say that our game time is shorter than classic RTSs on a PC. We’re looking for more of a 15 minute experience, not a 45 minute experience, so it definitely is a shorter experience when playing a skirmish game. We also wanted to get you into combat faster with less hanging around your base. We really want you out there firing a gun two minutes into the game if you want to.

Do you think Halo Wars is going to appeal more to Halo fans or RTS fans?
I think Halo fans will love it because it’s got that story, so if you love the back story hopefully it will hook you in. I think there’s enough depth there for RTS fans as well, it plays really well. But there’s a very thin line down the middle and it’s very hard to follow.

Halo’s always been famous for the fantastic multiplayer and special modes such as Forge. How are you going to continue that?
I think Halo has evolved to get to the results seen in the third with Forge and lots of different multiplayer modes. Halo 1 came with lots of ways to play and there’s various ways to play Halo Wars online, but we haven’t evolved to that Halo 3 position yet.

Pages: 1 2 3 4

Have you downloaded the latest issue from GamerZines yet? Check it out here!