Alpha Alpha Alpha
If you haven’t seen enough love from Ensemble Studios moderator Paragon lately, you’re right. He, along with most of the company, has been spreading his love around by visiting a private set of forums that was set up for the Halo Wars Alpha. The Alpha has come to a close, so he’s all yours once again.
The Alpha included several thousand Microsoft employees and a solid version of the game that allowed them to get online and play in multiplayer matches. This version of the game was limited to a brief tutorial and multiplayer. It was also limited to a specific set of units but it did give folks an idea of what we have in mind. The feedback that we got has given us a good idea of what was fun and where we need to spend our time in the months ahead to get things right. We’re pretty happy that we did this now, as opposed to later in the project, so we still have time to make changes.
The highlight of the Alpha for me was playing the game with people outside of Ensemble Studios over Xbox Live and then reading their feedback in the forum. The team here at Ensemble was also jumping online to play with the Alpha testers, and we generally tried to take it easy on the new players since we’ve definitely played the game a lot more than anyone else. If they had a mic hooked up we’d ask them what they thought of the game or answer any questions they might have. I’d generally run a Warthog over to scout out my opponent’s base to see what they were building so I could gauge their skill level. In some games my Warthog would get tagged by a rather impressive army of Scorpions and Marines, revealing someone who had certainly been playing a lot. At that point the gloves were off!
In addition to the Alpha testers, it was also exciting to get some more feedback from the gang at Bungie. Showing them a build is one thing but having them jump on Xbox Live to play is another.
While we definitely found plenty of things to improve, we were very encouraged to see how well the control scheme was received by players. Everyone seemed to pick it up in short order and had units fighting across the map in no time, and we feel like we’ve got the game pointed in a great direction. The Alpha definitely confirmed a lot of the high level gameplay choices and design decisions that we have made to make an RTS game rock on the console.
GamePro
Look for some Halo Wars love in the July issue of GamePro Magazine. Some of you have already seen that they mentioned they were going to include some information on the game in an upcoming issue. The writer for the piece was here on Friday, May 2, and got to talk at length about the game with the designers, sound team, and producers. He also got to see a build of Halo Wars first hand. So keep an eye out for the July issue, it should be tough to miss with the trio of Spartans on the cover.
The Campaign
Outside of our multiplayer playtesting sessions here at ES, designer Jerome Jones has been organizing open playtest sessions for the single player campaign. Lately these have been taking place at about 6:30 in the evening, right after crunch dinners when we’re working a late night. Jerome makes the call inviting employees who have a bit of time or want to give their input to head to the 15th playtest lab. Each evening we play through a set of three scenarios, one to three or four to six, and give input as we play through them. Are the objectives clear? Is it fun? Bugs and suggestions are logged by Jerome or other designers who take our feedback.
These tests occurred every evening during our last couple weeks of crunching on this latest milestone. The campaign has come a long way since earlier this year, but scenarios are still being reworked based on feedback from these sessions. I played through scenarios four through six on two consecutive evenings, and each of the scenarios had a number of changes made to the timing of events, objectives, and language used in the voice prompts. The voice overs during the scenarios are often temporary recordings of Ensemble Studios employees reading lines, which can be a little funny when you’re sitting next to the person who’s annoying voice is telling you you’re failing an objective, but these can be easily changed to refine the language used to keep the player informed of what they need to do. Once the wording is finalized, a professional voice actor with them be used to record the final dialogue.
The story for the campaign is not something that we’ll be discussing in any depth, probably until the game hits the shelves, but we hope to introduce you to the characters involved and give you some idea of how everything gets to where you find yourself in scenario one.
On Demand...
Some of you noticed a screenshot of Halo Wars floating around the web that wasn't in our gallery. I believe it was from the OXM Australia feature earlier this year, and it has just been added to the screenshots section as ya'll have requested. It's available in a bit of a higher resolution than is available on some of the other sites out there. We hope you enjoy it!
That's all for the moment. Those of you who will be enjoying a long weekend later this week, have a good one!