It's been a busy month for us! Please excuse me for sneaking this update in here on the last day...

E3 Awards

We were all pretty excited by the response of those who sat down to play Halo Wars at E3. Our demonstration of the game involved a brief talk on what the game was all about, a look at the Five Long Years movie, and then the press sat down with a buddy to play against two AI players. The controller was placed in their hands and away they went in their co-op 2v2 game. It was very encouraging to see how many of these folks got the hang of playing the game with our control scheme. They got it and beat down their AI opponents! Getting the controls right is such a huge part of making an RTS game work on the console and it looks like we’ve cracked that part of the equation.

It was really cool to watch the game being demonstrated on G4, especially with the enthusiasm of the hosts. They seemed honestly impressed with the game and even nominated Halo Wars for the best Xbox 360 game of E3! Not bad for our first console game. The nominees for the Game Critic Awards have also just been announced and we're up for Best Strategy game there as well.

Legendary

We had to make sure the game was solid for E3, so we spent a lot of time playing the co-op 2v2 part of the demo against the AI to check for bugs, and difficulty level. Most of the games would be played on the easier or normal difficulty levels at E3 so we played a lot of games on those settings, but for those of us who have played the game for a number of years against each other this wasn’t much of a challenge. It became a bit of a contest to ratchet up the difficulty level to see if you could beat the two AI players on legendary, where the enemy was made especially difficult in a number of ways.

One evening late in the process of getting the E3 build ready, I was paired up in the playtest lab with Jerome Jones, the designer who is in charge of the scenarios for the campaign. I wasn’t too sure how good Jerome was at the game since I hadn’t played him in a multiplayer match, so when I noticed he was taking his sweet time getting a second base going in our game on heroic difficulty I wasn’t sure if he was just messing around or not. We beat the heck out of the AI players, despite Jerome’s slow start, and then he suggested we take things up to legendary, which is quite a jump in difficulty right now.

As we got underway on our second game on the harder difficulty, Duane “Saint” Santos and Brad Robnett were in the middle of a legendary game. Duane was having a rough time of it and by the time Jerome and I were mopping up our two AI players after double teaming them one at a time, he was declaring that the legendary AI could not be beaten, which was followed by plenty of laughter and jabs from our side of the lab. Great game Jerome, you can be my wingman any day.

With the rules and units of the game getting fleshed out and finalized, work on polishing, refining, and balancing the AI for the various difficulty levels is fully underway. These E3 AI opponents were just the beginning. Legendary will be a challenge that will be worthy for the most experienced players.

Leaders

Those of you who watched the E3 coverage on Halo Wars closely probably picked up on the mention of Leaders and unique units in the game. Dave Pottinger mentions Captain Cutter and the Prophet of Regret in this 1UP.com demo: http://www.gamevideos.com/video/id/20150

Leaders give you access to some unique abilities, units, and bonuses, depending on which one you choose. As mentioned, the Elephant is unique for players who choose Captain Cutter as their leader, giving them a mobile barracks to train units out of and also potentially saving you a building site if you choose not a construct a barracks at your base. The Cyclops is another unique unit that will only be available to a specific leader, and the MAC Blast and Carpet Bombing abilities that you saw are usually divided up between two leaders. For the purpose of the demo at E3, we wanted to show them both so our leader had two abilities. In a normal game that wouldn’t be the case.

Which leader you choose will influence what strategies you might want to try during a game, and various combinations of leaders can compliment each other well in team games. They are a pretty cool part of the game that we’ll discuss in much more detail in the future.

Upcoming Milestones

There really aren’t that many milestones left, so they are all monumental from here on out. We’ll have another situation report for you next month with what is going on with the project and how we’re progressing.