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Given the opportunity to do anything, what would you choose?
Since Ensemble’s acquisition in 2001, this path had been followed under the firm encouragement ofMicrosoft.
Now, as the team began to look beyond Age Of Empires 3, it was growing restless.
The RTS had been all Ensemble had ever known, and it wanted to spread its wings.
This feature originally appeared in Edge Magazine.
He and his colleagues dismissed the idea of a console FPS outright.
“And then we played Halo and were like, ‘Oh.
That’s pretty darn playable’.”
The RTS was perhaps even more bound to PC and mouse-and-keyboard controls than the FPS before it.
Rippy lists some of the questions that faced the team: “What was it like to select units?
What was it like to move units?
What was it like to gather resources?
It was really just the most basic things.”
“We needed to prove ourselves.”
An alien race called the Sway would follow the noise, triggering an invasion of Earth.
Designs changed often, and the team’s small size meant it could nimbly prototype and implement new ideas.
Eventually, they honed Phoenix to a state where they felt it was fun to play.
“That was the point where we went to Microsoft.”
The publisher hadn’t greenlit any of Ensemble’s smaller prototypes in the past, but it liked Phoenix.
There was just one snag.
Devine took this hard.
He had spent a year building out a world of alien races, languages and future history.
Now, he was being told to chuck it away for a series about which he knew little.
“I baulked,” he says.
“I baulked badly.
I did not like the idea.”
He was given the weekend to think about it.
“Well, OK, then,” Devine reasoned at the time.
“I guess I like Halo.”
The atmosphere was tense.
Many Bungie staff seemed confused.
Ensemble was on board, but not Microsoft: “‘No, we want Spartans’.”
Except Ensemble couldn’t use the one Spartan everyone knew.
Give us space
While Halo Wars was progressing, Ensemble’s other projects were struggling.
The MMO team had pivoted that game into another Halo-themed spinoff without Microsoft’s request or approval.
The team was split up, and its staff distributed among the MMO and Halo Wars.
The extra hands were sorely needed.
Devine was left to focus on the narrative, while lead design duties were handed over to Dave Pottinger.
“The complexity of the game was difficult for console players,” Pottinger says.
Under Pottinger, the game was streamlined.
Difficulties remained, though.
But which was it first?
“In my view, it was: Halo, console, RTS.
Once you decide to make a Halo game, you have to deliver a Halo game.”
But finding a balance between compelling and console-friendly design was always the challenge.
“Then we ran out of time to put the right amount of depth in.
I think about Halo Wars as a lot of missed opportunities.”
Yet when the game finally launched, those missed opportunities weren’t as clear to players as its makers.
Halo Wars was popular enough to get a sequel albeit not within the same studio.
It made sure, at least, to go out with a bang.
And it was Ensemble at its best."
This feature originally appeared inEdge magazine.
