RISK, Halo Wars edition.

Glasgow · Jun 7, 2009

This is real, no joke. It's basically RISK with a Halo Wars theme. It sounds good, although I've never played RISK in my life. Good for the collectors though, (RISK and Halo collectors.) It's also for ages 12 and up, meaning this Halo game has the lowest "rating."

quoted from Halopedia:

Confirmed to go on sale in Fall 2009, RISK: Halo Wars Collector's Edition will give players chance to choose one between the three main factions from the Halo Universe, the UNSC, the Covenant and the Flood. Announced here, the game comes complete with a custom game board, 7 dice and 290 pieces, taken from the Halo Wars era, including Marines, Spartans, Scorpions, the Arbiter, Wraiths, Grunts, ProtoGravemind, Infection Forms and Carrier Forms, which will battle over 42 territories and six sectors. Three different game types, including classic, basic and advanced will be featured for a minimum of 3 players to a maximum of 5.
Since we love either to save mankind or to obliterate it, shouldn't we appreciate all this?
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In other Halo Wars related news...(copied from HaloWars.com) Why Ensemble/robot entertainment/whatever scrapped the E3 2007 styled bases (think, Age of Empires) and implemented a new, more combat friendly base.

How to Build a Base in the 26th Century

Published Monday, May 18, 2009 1:10 PM by Aloysius

Halo Wars had its fair share of challenges. We were trying to bring the strategy genre successfully to the consoles for the first time. We were working with someone else’s IP. We had never done a console game. The list could easily be bigger than that, but you get the idea.

Now that Halo Wars has shipped and everyone’s had a chance to see, play, and evaluate it, we have the opportunity to discuss more about the process of making Halo Wars. For example, everyone knows how base building works in Halo Wars. Each base has a fixed set of slots (though you have to upgrade to get access to all of them). You click on a building site, make a deft move with the left stick, and tap A. Presto, here comes that Barracks you ordered. Nifty. It’s fast. It’s quick.

But is that a good thing? Most strategy games are noted for their deep city building and economic elements. WTF Halo Wars??? Why don’t you have an Age of Empires-like infrastructure game where the truly skilled players can “out econ” the newbies? The fairly un-sexy answer is that we just wanted a faster game with a larger focus on combat. Okay, fair enough. Let’s look at the iterations that base building went through to achieve those goals.

When we started Halo Wars, we had the relatively simple idea of bringing the “Age Experience” to consoles. The longer we worked on Halo Wars, the more we realized that we were doing something else: bringing a new strategy experience to consoles. Age is a PC game with PC sensibilities. Halo Wars needed to be something else given its platform. The games needed to be shorter. The action needed to be faster.

So how does that affect bases? Well, given our background with Age, the first base building system we implemented on Halo Wars involved placing buildings wherever the player wanted. Just like Age. For us, this was a logical starting point. Over the years, we’d fought hard to hold onto the idea that nothing invests a player in his base more than building it himself. And, most designers will tell you that base investment is a good thing for a strategy game.

After we got farther, though, we ran into problems. Players were spending too long building out their bases. At one point, we were even letting players rotate individual buildings. That made the problems twice as bad, not to mention exposing some brittleness in our new engine’s placement code. Players would agonize over the decision of where to optimally place a barracks instead of spending time watching their troops. On the one hand, that’s good. We want folks to care about that non-combat stuff. On the other hand, every second spent in your base was a second not spent in combat.

So, we tried to simplify building placement to make it simpler and faster. We made the buildings all the same size, so it was easier to visualize/control the layout. Yuck. The buildings all ended up being on the “big” side of the spectrum to accommodate our need to drive tanks out of them. That was a lot of wasted space. So, we made them all smaller. Too hard to tell them apart. So, we went back to varied building sizes. But, we took out buildings so you had less to build. Blech. That was definitely too far. It was clear that players didn’t have enough to do in their bases when we did that. All the time we were struggling with this issue, players weren’t having fun. Building placement was frustrating and it was killing the game.

Halo Wars has a really cool terrain system, perhaps the best we’ve ever built. It needed it, frankly, to even compete on the console. The game had to look hot. As we moved away from our random map heritage, though, things got more complicated. The terrain was more varied, so simply plopping a building down anywhere was harder because the ground was never really very flat. The code to dynamically raise and lower the terrain hadn’t turned out as well as we wanted, so we had problems just letting you build anywhere. As we looked at our options for fixing building placement, we decided to live with those limits and build the design around having players only build in “mostly flat” spots.

As you might expect, our next iterations were played on exceedingly boring, flat maps. Not good. After a while, we couldn’t take it anymore and the maps went back to having height variation. That was really a blessing in disguise. That issue pushed us over the edge on finally accepting that we needed to keep our bases “collected” in small areas. This turned out to be great for helping people parse and learn the maps quickly, which suited our faster play goal. But, that also sucked royally with our placement system. Things were too cramped.

As the playtest feedback inevitably started to re-suggest making buildings smaller again to work around the cramped towns, we stepped back. Something big had to change. After what turned out to be a couple of months of hemming and hawing, we left behind our “place anywhere” traditions and adopted the so-called socketed building model.

In hindsight, I think this was one of our best decisions. It instantly made the gameplay in bases quick like we wanted. The bases also looked a helluva lot better, too. The random, ramshackle hodgepodge was gone. There was some order, which sorta suited a heavy military game anyway. Design-wise, it was also a clear system that visibly presented you with your tradeoffs. You knew how many sockets each base had. You didn’t have to play Building Tetris only to find out that there wasn’t any space for the building you wanted to place.

It was somewhere during this 5th redo of the buildings that we realized the next problem. The bases were still too big. They looked awesome, sure, but they were too big. We couldn’t have enough bases on our 3v3 maps with the base size as it was. I think the only time I’ve ever truly feared for my life was when I had to tell the artists that we had to redo the buildings again. If only that was the last time.

The next (and last) big problem on base building and building size turned out to be the need for the units to exit their buildings. We really wanted to showcase that. It had been received very well in our E3 2007 demo. We had gutted that base scheme during the various un-fun iterations of the “place anywhere” systems, so most of the E3 2007 stuff was gone. But, we were determined to keep the units exiting their buildings. But those tanks are so f’ing big. Each building site had to be big enough to accommodate the Vehicle Depot, which was killing our attempts to reduce the base size.

I honestly don’t recall who suggested that we have each unit exit from some building. I do recall that it was met with the burning hatred of 1000 suns when I pitched it to the team. It wasn’t a popular idea. It was another piece of the vaunted “Age gameplay” that we were taking away. But, taking it away was the right thing. We could make the central building bigger and the outlying buildings smaller, which fixed our base size issue. Plus, design-wise, it made gather points much easier to manage since players only had one. Another “win” for ease of play on the console.

Okay, I lied. We actually had to redo the buildings one more time after that because the Design Department kinda goofed on some calculations with the turrets. But, let’s not go into that one.

Dave Pottinger, Lead Designer
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I personally, wanted the Age of Empires-esque base building style, where you can build anywhere, and expand as much as you want. I loved building a castle near the enemy, and slaughtering them with my Samurai. Wahahaha.

Anyways, comments? Thoughts?

Rifte · Jun 9, 2009

Seems good for any halo and Risk fans, but I'm probably going to pass. I've never really liked board games(except for monopoly), and I've only played Risk once with a LOTR edition. I was more interested in the figurines rather than the game itself though. Gonna guess that this will be priced somewhere around 40$?

laxman91 · Jun 9, 2009

There will be so much halo stuff in the next 5 years I bet.
All I have to say...........halo is taking over the world!

DunkinMyCookies · Jun 9, 2009

laxman91 said: ↑

There will be so much halo stuff in the next 5 years I bet.
All I have to say...........halo is taking over the world!
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That was the plan.

Glasgow · Jun 10, 2009

danIz3pic said: ↑

That was spam.
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Fix'd. Also, taking over the world is step 7.

It probably won't make a lot of money, but it will fare well in the market, and not be some product that everyone will ignore completely. A Halo board game is a good idea, but it should be of it's own game, not be a version or RISK, or monopoly, although a Halo monopoly would be awesome.

RISK, Halo Wars edition.

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RISK, Halo Wars edition.

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