Halo Wars 2: A UX Postmortem

[Music] all right so couple of quick housekeeping notes uh try and keep those cell phones uh quiet during the presentation and the second thing is if you could please fill out the survey that you get uh towards the end of the talk you'll get it via email uh everybody would really appreciate it so thank you now to provide some context um what's my background so I've been working in games for a while uh I've shipped a variety of different games um like many people start out in one role kind of transition to others so starting with gameplay engineering and then doing design work and then moving into a more um a broader design role that then encompassed more ux and so for the more recent titles I've been a lot more heavily involved in that particular aspect of um design and today we're going to talk specifically about the ux for Halo Wars 2 so as a starting point it's good to think about what the constraints are for any given game that you work on and Halo

Wars 2 is uh an RTS it's a sequel to a game that came out um about 10 years ago and um whenever we bring a new title to the Halo franchise we always have to think about what these kinds of constraints are going to be so the first one of these here is expectations right so 15 years of history for this franchise um makes for a lot of passionate fans um a lot of features that have evolved over time and making sure that every game that we build delivers on the expectation those fans there's also our own internal team expectations though which is how do we move the franchise forward what do we bring that's new that's exciting that pushes the boundaries of modern ux design another unique thing about Halo Wars 2 uh that's different from the original game is that we wanted to take it to more than one platform so Halo Wars 1 was designed to be a console specific RTS and a lot of the ux was built with console in mind to be a good experience for that particular platform

not only did we want to bring it to these two platforms we also wanted to enable the ability to crossplay with these two platforms and there's a lot of considerations we had to make in terms of how we modify um what that core game is and what the right experience for it is next one here is team so there are a number of folks at 343 that have worked on the Halo titles number of Halo titles um but there's also new people that come on board and we also had the Good Fortune to partner with uh creative assembly in the development of this title and that was a lot of learning for all of us to work together basically on what our design process would be together and then how we um continue to evolve this franchise together and a lot of great debate around what the core pieces that franchise to carry forward are and finally uh it's something that we all deal with but it's a pretty important consideration in the way that we design anything which is just time is always a constraint and I used to think that once upon a time perhaps you know that there was a bad design that was implemented and who knew what what reason it was and any given particular

title and over time I've come to appreciate that uh for a variety of reasons whether it's the amount of time that you may spend um working on a feature spending too much time on it or not keeping in mind when the project needs to be shipped this is a constraint that basically forces us in some cases to make imperfect decisions so from these constraints we also think about what our ux vision pillars are going to be for the game so for Halo Wars 2 uh there's several here that we're going to cover and we're going to talk about how these Vision pillars inform the decisions we made around specific areas of building this game so the first one is how do we instill the feel of Halo into the titles that we build and there's a lot of different components that go into this but a lot of it comes down to the fact that we really want to highlight the things that people expect out of the franchise get them to feel as they come into the game that it's a good experience that it's something familiar and uh Halo Wars 2 is no exception in that regard we want to build an RTS for everyone so RTS has been around for a long time

and Halo Wars did a lot of work to bring in a new audience of players that maybe were intimidated by the RTS before but even still matches could last for a long time and we heard feedback from folks that basically they wanted a way to get in they really wanted to learn how to play the game but they were intimidated by you know the economy or the base building or just some of the other features of RTS so we wanted to bring in new mode a new way to play this game that would help people to come in and feel like they had a good entry point the next one here is being a approachable and deep and this specifically applies to the way we thought about this new mode which is our new uh Blitz mode basically and uh it's a new mode where it's a hybrid of a card strategy game and the RTS genre it's played in 5 to seven minute chunks we wanted to make sure this appealed not just to new casual players but also to players that would get into it for the long run and play competitively play in tournaments um make sure that this particular mode had legs it's also expected that a given for

any given Halo title that we offer a great multiplayer experience and this has everything to do with you know how you join up with your friends how you matchmake um and then the options that are offered to you when you play custom games um all the way to the controls and you know the feel of the game from moment to moment and once again it's something that we need to think about for each of these games uh independently and the final Point here is to be a platform showcase so now that we are on these two platforms Xbox and PC we want to deliver an experience that feels great for folks that are coming in from both the console side and from the PC side so let's talk a little bit about what the Halo feel uh encompasses so when you look at Halo titles you know it's something that you want to feel from the moment you launch the game right it establishes the mood creates a sense of wonder it brings you deeper into the universe it makes you curious about the franchise we offer you fantastic worlds and we want to make sure that all players feel like they're taken on this journey from the the moment they start

to each of the different areas of the game that they might explore so you know as they go through the campaign they're starting to think about what story elements are there what the characters are uh what options are available for them to customize their multiplayer experience we want to bring forward a lot of these memorable characters and the heroes and to let you wonder about them and to think about them in how it relates to the story and to get you to come back and to also think about how you can customize your experience and bring yourself into these games and importantly uh we've built up a lot of history here and we want to make sure that things feel familiar so we spend a lot of time going back and creating you know style guides and flows that we can apply for each game and it's not always the same necessarily from game to game but the ideas remain and the consistency remains it's something that feels comfortable from the moment you get in you start playing so as it applies to Halo Wars 2 Halo Wars 2 is unique in that it's an s and so a lot of the game is played from

a fairly zoomed out perspective you don't necessarily get a closeup view of these characters so one of the cool things that uh we really wanted to get into that initial experience and uh creative assembly had spent a lot of time building a lot of detail around these characters and vehicles and units and you just don't get a good perspective on them while you're fighting and playing the game so as you come into these menus for the first time you'll see these diaramas where the camera pans around these characters it zooms in on them and uh it really gives you a good sense of you know what they look like and it makes you wonder about okay cool you know there's this there's this deeper element to what's here even though I can't necessarily see it you know from the the way that I'm playing the game normally we also want to make you wonder about what's going on in the campaign and what that experience feels like so when you switch over to this area of the game again you're presented with the um the hollow table of the arc which is an important uh place where a lot of events for Halo Wars to take place and once again you'll see it from different angles it'll pan around um it's an important uh un element throughout the

cinematics because the characters will frequently talk about how they're going to different places here and what they're doing and you know by bringing this forward um we just create more of that sense of intrigue around what the campaign has to offer and finally we're delivering a new mode here with blitz and this mode specifically you know it's a card-based RTS hybrid and there's a lot of work that made that went into illustrating these cards and um you know making them feel very unique and uh when I first saw the screen I was really excited because I've played a lot of physical card games and I don't know if you ever seen like an un uncut sheet of cards but it's a really cool thing to behold and these particular menus as you get in you can basically see uh a lot of these illustrations put together on posters that you know you pan between different sections of that poster and it brings you into what it feels like to to have that card game there and it lets you know that it's a very distinct and unique area of the game so let's talk a little bit about how we actually went about creating that RTS for everyone and specifically with respect to the way way we iterated on

the blitz mode specifically so as I mentioned it's a hybrid of a card game in RTS the matches are meant to be 5 to 7 minutes long we want to make sure that there's a good focus on core RTS combat and um basically you know map control uh fighting for resources but not having to deal with a lot of that early game experience of how you build up your economy and upgrade your tiers and knowing the Tex and everything so early on we wanted to establish some pillars around what the mode would entail and we had some initial challenges because we wanted to make sure that we had the right controls the right deck size hand size uh things played well on on multiple platforms and it felt like a card game so an early version of this that we were looking at was uh being able to deploy cards uh at the position of the cursor with the directional pad basically this was fast um but as you can see the cards themselves you know they would have been small we've had different scales of this but ultimately they they didn't represent the same type of card

throughout the experience right so it's just hard to see the details there the deployment was fast you don't really hold cards this way so you didn't have that card game feel um and they took up a fair bit of space in the HUD so we started to think a little bit more about okay can we basically take more elements of a traditional card game and and bring that in and then maybe drop this down a bit in the HUD and maybe this would help us accomplish more of our goals and so we did this basically card hand fan uh down in the bottom you can see the cards are now bigger they're more legible still not perfect though because you do have some overlapping elements selection's not entirely clear but we're starting to get a little bit closer into something that feels like it fits in naturally with the way the game plays and so for our final solution we went with a four card hand we laid them out horizontally dropped them a bit down in the HUD um but all the core components of the cards as you can see are fairly legible you could see the cost the type the name an illustration and uh if you want to go and then you know deploy these cards get a little

more information on them with just a click of the mouse or a pull of the trigger you get the expanded card View and in here you've got a very you know clear uh large card in um right in your face there the selection elements are clear and it feels natural it feels like a card game it works well on PC and console because it's just a couple of button presses or a couple of clicks away and it felt like we'd hit the right sort of um the right look for what we're going for here now thinking about this some more though remember we wanted to be approachable for new players but then also deep for players that want to play competitively and we had a lot of assumptions coming in about what it meant to be a card game right so typically for a lot of card games you know you've got fairly large deck sizes and you want to have all these really interesting choices about what you can pull in and how you can play those cards and when we start to think about this from the con context of you know being on console and having a deck editor deck view um it starts to get fairly busy uh

so you know ultimately you've got some way of representing your deck and the card library on the same screen and you can move cards back and forth and there's variations on this for different console card games but it's also something that is hard to keep in your head all the time right if you look off to the sides you're going to notice that you know you can't quite see everything that's in your deck um the duplicate you know the ways they're represented it's you know not always obvious uh and then obviously you're only seeing a slice of your card Library and on top of that there's just a lot of buttons here so we changed our frame of reference we thought well what if we went to a model where the decks themselves are only 12 cards and the card could be represented in its entirety on the screen in that deck view or the card um the deck view that's there you basically can snapshot this share it easily with your friends and um you know the way we get around the the choices in terms of making sure that there's depth in the choices is we only allow one of Any Given card in the deck and so you still have to make a lot of interesting choices around what type of

units you bring the very uh the various costs that they bring and how that shapes your deck and the leaders themselves add a Twist to it because they have their own um they have their own unique sort of play styles that affect how you build these decks now when we go to look at how we do deck editing again it's a fairly similar presentation uh except this time now we've put the actual deck on the left side of the screen we put the rest of the uh library on the right and you can quickly and easily get your cards in and out of your deck with a single button press or a single click one adds one removes uh it feels pretty natural you know you can't obviously see your whole library at a time but you can page through it fairly quickly uh and it felt like we were able to solve a lot of these problems just really by thinking about this in kind of a different way and there's still a good bit of deck variety and the leaders provide the variety and all those things work pretty well together so when we think about our next pillar it's really delivering on a great multiplayer experience and this means many things right it means how you're able to play with your friends and matchmake you can do for your custom

games and then also how we bring depth into the multiplayer experience and for Halo Wars 2 specifically we wanted to go even deeper than the original game in terms of how you differentiate your armies so we had this notion that we wanted to bring in these leader command trees you know something where if we play the same leader for example I may focus on faster moving units that can capture points quickly and heal themselves and you may choose to focus more on you know long range attacks kind of AOE um in a in a more aggressive style of play and as we were building this out um we you know we felt like we were bringing in the depth but there was a concern that we had as a team and then also something that we wanted to see through our beta which is does this provide a bit too much of a jarring context switch for a real-time strategy game is they're too heavy of a mental load for this and it came to be that you know we were pretty split amongst the team um during the beta the feedback pretty much reinforced this notion and the way that you deploy these leader poers is you know in the game you

basically pull the trigger and you get a radial menu that allows you to actually activate these powers and then um Target where they they go off we wanted to figure out could we potentially merge these two concepts together so as we started to think about changing it we started to think okay how can we merge the depth of this command tree into this radial menu and as you could see kind of in our initial pass uh there's you know a lot to explain here there's levels uh there's the differences between you know the lock State unlock State how those Powers change over time and there's a lot of things to parse here uh it's also you know something you you don't get a good sense of the larger meta level of what your uh leader power state is and you have to basically walk the wheel in order to really get a good sense of uh what exactly is happening so when we got to our final version we did a bit more work in terms of pulling up you know those those levels of those Powers you can see the notches on the edge they're a little subtle but you can see at a glance

effectively what levels are locked what levels are unlocked and um you know where you've invested in the tree itself unlocks in quadrants so as you spend points the next quadrant moves uh you move into the next quadrant you can use powers there and we actually removed a bunch of the text here and the thought was that players would organically discover uh basically what the differences of these powers are um as you play the game more you read about it you learn strategies and it turned out to be the case that this ended up being a fairly really good trade-off in the sense that it was quick and easy to access again you can get in here uh open this menu uh upgrade Powers you know change them very quickly uh you lose some sense of that larger sense of progression but overall the speed needs of use um made these Powers really um a core piece of the multiplayer experience and we do see a good variety in terms of how players use these Powers amongst their leaders uh throughout the game so this is something where we felt like some things were lost but we also gained some things and ultimately this turned out to be a reason good

solution now the last one I talk about here is being a platform showcase so as I mentioned we're trying to be a great Xbox title be a great PC title and really satisfy people that are core Gamers um in in both of those platforms now in the original Halo Wars um one of the cool features of how the leader Powers were used is the fact that uh when you were bringing these up you would have this targeting radicle come in and you know the screen dims uh it goes into this scope view it feels very Halo it looks like almost like a sniper scope and uh it works really great on the controller so before we shipped Halo Wars 2 we actually created um Halo Wars Definitive Edition ported it to PC and tried to bring over these powers in a way that felt good for uh PC and mouse controls and it turned out these ended up being a lot harder to implement on the PC than we expected um you can kind of think about it in some different ways so for example uh without the cursor here your nor Al PC cursor you get a little bit lost in terms of

what you're targeting it also never quite felt responsive enough even if we you know mapped it to the mouse in a way that we thought made sense if we tried to leave the main PC cursor up then you'd have this like double cursor thing going on and if we kind of got rid of the overlay then it just didn't really have that same level of anticipation and excitement of deploying these Powers so ultimately for Halo Wars 2 we moved to a model where the reticles are more friendly for both platforms and um you know they look great the powers themselves look fantastic once they're deployed a lot of cool effects and explosions it's hard to deny though that some of that anticipation of using those powers in that transition um it's it's definitely missing right so it doesn't feel quite as exciting for that initial part of the power deployment there but at the same time the game runs cross crossplatform a lot of folks are enjoying it that way it feels Fair because you have the same targeting mechanisms for both games uh both versions of the game and um one of our main requests that we get from our Community is for more crossplay so at

the end of the day this is also another tradeoff where while it feels like something was lost we gained something else so as we think about you know the the various takeaways from the game and um what this iterative process brought us here's a few things that we would probably take from one game to another so the first one here is know your core right and so for us yes we've got a lot of history in terms of what the franchise is but how that applies to each game is a bit unique and it's important for us to make sure that we're constantly uh re-evaluating what that means updating our internal um documentation and specs for that and really just thinking about how it applies to that new title and how we take what we've learned and apply it in new ways for new modes and new ways to play the game as I mentioned you know again with our assumptions around the blitz mode it's really rethinking our frame or reference so sometimes uh we might have a tendency as designers to kind of spin on something for a long time time because we feel like there's a better

solution that's available and for us this was a key piece of again thinking about the deck sizes for Blitz where really just thinking about the deck size in a different way and depth in a different way and how we make those choices it simplified a lot of our design around how we build out the UI for those pieces of that game and finally Embrace tradeoffs so as I mentioned you know we had to move from being a console title to a multiplatform crossplay title and while it's true that we did lose some elements of you know what maybe would have been great to have for a native implementation each of those platforms uh our community continues to play with each other in these different platforms they enjoy it some of our best players are actually still on Console today even in a PC uh console crossplay world and they continue to ask for more ways to play um more multiplayer playlists so at the end of the day while there are some trade-offs in terms of the aesthetic and the anticipation of those powers and things like that those are probably things that the upside of it being being that we have this you know crossplay

audience is something we didn't anticipate in terms of the demand for it so that's been really great to see and that's it so thank you very much and if you have questions please feel free to step up to a microphone uh if you want to ask me uh via email there you go and um yeah welcome welcome what's there please fill out your surveys as well thank you okay oh no someone's got yes yeah Adrian

here thank you for the talk really useful um when do you know it's enough searching for a solution and it's time to embrace the tradeoff uh so the question was yeah when do you know you've you've iterated enough to to basically get to your solution and again that gets back to the knowing your core right so um I think at the end of the day it's really just about you know for any given game right what is it that's unique about it what's your hook and then um how does that apply to whatever particular thing that you're thinking about um the other piece of that like I said is just making sure that you're allocating enough time you know down the road because I think you always end up paying later for things that you end up spending too much time earlier on so generally speaking I think you're going to find your Solutions faster for things that are working and you know sometimes it's definitely worth it to pursue those things that that will take you a while to get to um but really just knowing your core and you know knowing how you parse out that time awesome thank you thank you so thanks for the talk um and I was just

curious a lot of your Solutions up there uh went back and forth between making a tradeoff in the direction of gameplay or in the direction of UI and I was just wondering if you had any process for figuring out like okay so the solution here is rests in changing the UI like with the cards where they go but then there was also a piece of that that was like we're changing the the hand size which has implications on gameplay yeah and that's that's where I said I think it's that's why I kind of encourage the the thinking about the frame of reference because like I said it's you could you could have solved that problem from a UI perspective and what we're finding is solving some of these challenges from UI perspective was taking a lot of cycles and so that's where it came back to you know does it really need to be this kind of gameplay are there other models other games you know other platforms where maybe card games have smaller hand sizes or smaller deck sizes that we could look at so that's why it's great to just have a you know kind of build up this pool of knowledge of the different genres and then figure out can you pivot you know based on the gameplay of the UI so I

don't know that there's a clear answer any one case but I think it's really on a case-by casee basis um and that just gets back to that point of like if you feel like you're spending a lot of time on something like try to try to try to look at it from a completely different angle thank you yep hello the M there you go great talk thank you uh I have one question what was the biggest ux design challenge you encountered on Halo Wars 2 and Blitz that surprised you and you didn't think it would be such a great challenge so the question is what was the biggest ux challenge we had that surprised us that we didn't anticipate uh to be honest like I mean I think it was just really the multiplatform you know uh how it impacted the ux because uh we really took for granted how much of the original game um was designed for console in ways that we didn't anticipate like I said the powers are a really good example of that uh because you figure normally for RTS you're coming in and it's going to be you know something that naturally fits to a PC experience we found we had to do a lot

of work actually to get the PC experience up to where PC players played it as so I think that's probably that was probably one of the harder pieces was maintaining what was great about that experience on Console but then coming back to PC and making it appeal to players that play a lot there great thank you yep got another one me okay yeah so uh going on with this PC and uh console do you had any problems in balancing do you had like moment that felt that it was easier on PC or it was easier on Console because you said about crossplay yeah so it's like naturally you want to have it balanced yeah yeah it's a good question so the question is you know how is balance affected by basically being on PC and Xbox and enabling crossplay and certainly I think there are certain aspects of the game that we saw early on in play testing where um just you know for per minute players PC players could

have some advantages as I mentioned though we we look at our balance data across the game and still I think actually like a chunk of our best players still play on console and I think a lot of that just comes down to the core gameplay um it doesn't require maybe the same amount of actions as you know a PC game RTS with much larger Army sizes or a lot more micromanagement so there's a lot of aspects of the game play with the way the units work and their powers that balances that out because it's it's more about timing and positioning and you know other things that you can control reasonably well on both console and PC yep um what was the size of your uh ux Team on the project like one designer two that's such a hard question to answer um because as I mentioned part of the point of what I was exping with my background like every time I've worked on ux for a game that ux team has been a very different kind of thing and it's typically a team of Specialists um and if I were to really think about it like there's a lot of folks within 343 and a

lot of folks within creative assembly that um you know are specialists in different areas so like if I had to put a number on it I you know I don't know maybe 15 20 people I guess roughly um but that's a again it's a hard question to answer because I probably don't even appreciate in some ways you know the contributions that some people would have made to what that is it's not a traditional ux structure and I don't think any of the projects we work on really are in that sense um but it's really just bringing in a bunch of these different kind of subject matter experts so good okay thank you