The Lamer Gamer

The demo for Halo Wars was released yesterday and I immediately dove into it.  I’d heard the rumor of it containing a multiplayer map a few times, so it was a disappointment when I selected multiplayer and all it did was pop up an ad for the game itself, booo.

There were, however, the promised 2 campaign missions, which don’t get very deep into game play, but show me enough of the story to hook me and get a good feel for the controls.  HW looks to have much of the same story driven action that the rest of the Halo series employs.  Still works for me.  The better thing to disect is of course the controls.

First, and foremost, Ensemble did something I haven’t seen from other console RTS games; they stopped thinking of the controller as an analog of  mouse.  Any game controller is not as precise as a mouse, which is pretty much the root of all flaws of trying to emulate said rodent interface.  

Halo Wars corrects how you interact in a few ways:

• There are no drag box selections – Instead these are replaced with controls that really do work better on a console.  There is of course the select all button, but the major change is the paintbrush.  Hold down the A-button, and sweep it over units to select them.  Since you won’t be as nimble with the controller as a mouse, it’s hard to keep the dragbox around moving units.  Having the paintbrush makes it much easier to make mass selections quicklyand accurately.
• Select and cancel selection are exclusive controls – With the mouse, typically clicking off a unit deselects.  Halo Wars limits deselect to the B-button only.
• Unit move speed changes based on grouping - if you put Marines on foot and Warthog in the same group and issue a move command, they travel together keeping the advantages of both.  I always found it frustrating that in other games, you purposely build units that support each other well but end up having to micromanage their movement as a group so they don’t get separated and picked off if one type is faster than the other.  I realize this has nothing to do with it being on a console, but recent games still haven’t implemented this and it annoys me.
• What you can build and where it can be built are limited – For those used to StarCraft-like games, it might be a downer that your base is monolithic, and so the structure strategy of building masses of photon cannons near some choke point is lost.  Also, there isn’t what appears to be a ton of overlap in unit purpose, and that’s fine.  There’s no need for 3 levels of aircraft that do largely the same thing only slighly better than the last level.  Variety may be the spice of life, but it’s the death of a console RTS.  Things become way too complicate with too many different unit types.

As for gameplay, the game, already being somewhat simplified by having less types of units, and thusly less types of buildings necessary to produce units, is fairly easy to control.  As mentioned, units keep in their heterogeneous groups, and fight somewhat intelligently together. There are the typical advantage units, which are disadvantaged against some other unit, which are disadvantaged against… eh, you’ve seen it before.   Warthog beats Infantry, Tank beats Warthog, Infantry beats Tank.  It’s not quite that cut and dry as there are upgrades which make each unit more effective outside of its designed purpose, but that’s generally it.  

Overall, I didn’t feel like micromanaging was all that important, nor do the tutorials particularly suggest it.  There are occasionally reasons to point unit X at unit Y and use some special ability or use cover in the environment, but I’m an old school rushing kinda guy.  Rushing held up as a good strategy in the demo for me though.  Build a whole bunch of units, send them all in, mix in “Leader Powers” as they call them, repeat.  

I have to draw some comparisons between the HW interface and Supreme Commander’s on the 360.  Both share a bit of the same failings in trying to implement “stickyness” with the cursor.  I’d rather that someone figured out how better to handle acceleration with the thumbstick.  To me it speeds up too fast, and doesn’t land where I want.  This is particularly more frustrating in HW since there’s specifically a trigger dedicated to fast scrolling.  Both use a wheel style selector, but Halo Wars has far less options, making it easier to accurately select what you actually want.  I know I’m harping on the whole “less is more” maxim but there’s a reason.  The problem has always been that there are two categories, PC RTS and Console RTS, and they aren’t the same, or portable.  Pikmin wouldn’t be anything special on a PC and Command and Conquer was terrible on a console.   Unfortunately I feel like I’m advocating putting lame, simple games on a console is the only way to handle that the RTS issue, but I’m eager to see the whole of Halo Wars and how far they can go before it breaks.

Should you want to grab the demo, you can queue it up to download the next time you sign into Live by following this link.  I’m still thinking this is a rental, without the multiplayer demo, I can’t say that I’d want to keep playing it for sure.  Plus, the addition of the Mythic map pack comes at a higher cost, so it’s probably a wash on that front.

I’m the Master Chief’s little bitch.  They could put out “Halo: The Musical in 3D” and I’d be there.  So I’m obviously excited about the impending release of Halo Wars (2009-02-28 if you believe what you hear from CES).  The Halo franchise has been so consistently good over the years that I was kind of sad that Halo 3 would likely be the last we’d see of the Master Chief.  This of course means that Halo Wars has a lot to live up to, especially since they can’t rely on the chief as a crutch.  Since the story for any of these games comes from Bungie’s bible, that part at least should be solid, and from the video I’ve seen, they’ve put great care into conveying Halo’s iconic look and feel.  But what about the gameplay?

The controls are apparently built from the ground up, expressly for the 360, so you’ve gotta think there’s some hope that it will be more playable than say C&C3 or Supreme Commander.  I really wanted to love SC, after all, it’s from the guy that brought you Total Annihilation (only the best RTS ever!).  But Supreme Commander on the 360 was terrible.  The controls didn’t (couldn’t?) compete with a mouse/keyboard, and the fact that the damned thing might lock-up the 360 every time you attemped to save, or worse every time you finished a level.

From the preview videos out there, the controls look somewhat similar to those on Supreme Commander.  Ensemble has essentially re-invented “The Wheel” again.  For anyone that remember “The Wheel” in SC, it’s a menu that is arranged in a circle, that’s contextual to whatever is selected.  It’s not a bad idea, but I thought it was still a little hard to work reliably.  That could really just have been a issue of accuracy.  When the Wheel was full, it got a little hard to select exactly what you wanted quickly.

Perhaps the real problem is always going to be that any game controller is no match for the mighty mouse, with its comparatively stunning accuracy and awesome right-click.  We’ll see after getting our grubby paws on Halo Wars I guess.