Halo Wars ViDoc: Jaws of Victory

Jaws of Victory is the fourth and final ViDoc created during the production of Halo Wars. It was released on February 18, 2009 and covers multiplayer as well as potential tactics.

Transcript

• Justin Rouse: Because everything's just blowing up, dying on fire...

• Jerome Jones: ...reverberating out from the center and stuff's exploding.

• Dave Pottinger: They're strafing all my—all my guys, and my Grunts are running for cover the way Grunts do...

• Justin Rouse: ...and Elites and Brutes and all these things together.

• Graeme Devine: The second you pick it up, you'll be drawn into it.

• Jerome Jones: It's just phenomenal.

• Justin Rouse: That was cool.

DESIGN

• Dave Pottinger: When we started Halo Wars, I think it took us a while to get into the mindset of "less is more."

• Graeme Devine: The simple controls and simple gameplay is actually just what people want and what's—what's more fun anyway, so we always pull back towards that.

• Justin Rouse: We kept to the core fun of an RTS and tried to let the fluff and extra accounting and meters and all that go away.

• Jerome Jones: We're pretty hardcore gamers ourselves, so we just tear things apart—controls and gameplay. We tear it apart to the point where, in the end, we want to make sure that we really think that it's the best game for the—for the players in the end.

WAGING WARS

• Dave Pottinger: There are a lot of ways to play this game. The way we expect people to play the game first is the campaign.

• Graeme Devine: In the multiplayer, you play a single leader. You play one of three UNSC leaders or one of three Covenant leaders, and that dictates your technology tree, and that dictates, you know, what upgrades and units you can get. In the campaign, it's much freer because you're playing, you know, as the whole of UNSC, so it's more mix-and-match.

• Dave Pottinger: But then they can also play Skirmish. So this is kind of our repeatable game.

• Jerome Jones: You can have Covenant and human on the same team playing against two Covenant. You can have human versus human. You can have Covenant versus Covenant.

• Dave Pottinger: You and I can go online, we can grab a buddy, we can play three-on-three against AIs. One guy can go econ, and he can actually give money to the other people and they can build the military units, and he can kind of sit back and just manage the economy and defend the bases. It's cool to have that option.

• Justin Rouse: They want that interaction of building up their armies with... my friend is sort of my ally, and he's doing as well, and I protect him, he protects me, and then we go out and destroy the—you know, fight the world, take on the world together.

• Graeme Devine: I think Halo was, if I was to sum it up into two words, would be: "epic experience." And you get that when you play the—you know, in the campaign mode, and you get that when you play online.

TACTICS

• Dave Pottinger: Halo Wars is a game where there's a lot of different strategies and tactics that people can choose to employ.

• Justin Rouse: Yes, standard tactics are, you know, your rush, your boom, and sort of your turtle, which is sort of the in-between—build defenses to hold off a rush, but yet don't boom up your economy quite as much as a pure boom that leaves itself undefended.

• Dave Pottinger: The balance of a strategy game is how good this unit might be against another unit, and usually people talk about the "rock-paper-scissors" balance relationship. You don't want one strategy that will always beat everything because, well, there's not much strategy to the game.

• Graeme Devine: I like to rush other people. I'll tend to play Captain Cutter and I'll build an Elephant. I'll just start churning out infantry, and I'll be in your base attacking you within like 30, 40 seconds. I'll absolutely crush you and wipe you from the map.

• Dave Pottinger: The one I like is the dual Scarab strategy for the Covenant. You can only have one of them with your default population limit. You have to actually go get a technology to increase your army size to actually get two. But you take two Covenant Scarabs, you can train some Engineers, which are the Covenant units that heal other units. You train ten of those, two Scarabs, and your Covenant leader, and you're driving around this destructive beam of light, just incinerating everything. It's throwing out hot lava and all that, and that's a good time.

• Justin Rouse: Whenever you think you know the strategy that beats all, somebody comes up with something else to beat it.

Demo available Now
xbox.com/halo