THE MAKING OF...

How Ensemble’s final game went from skunkworks experiment to part of Microsoft’s biggest series

BY CALLUM BAINS

Format 360, PC

Developer Microsoft Game Studios

Publisher Ensemble Studios

Origin US

Release 2009

Given the opportunity to do anything, what would you choose? When Ensemble Studios’ management team asked itself this question, in late 2004, there was a consensus: not this. The studio had spent the better part of a decade iterating its brand of realtime strategy, following its 1997 debut Age Of Empires with two direct sequels, a number of expansions, and a spinoff in Age Of Mythology that not only pivoted this winning formula into fantasy but also its first fully 3D engine. Since Ensemble’s acquisition in 2001, this path had been followed under the firm encouragement of Microsoft. Now, as the team began to look beyond Age Of Empires 3, it was growing restless. The RTS had been all Ensemble had ever known, and it wanted to spread its wings.

Some in the studio’s leadership were keen to try their hand at an MMORPG, spurred by the wildly popular beta of World Of Warcraft; others suggested an action RPG in the vein of Diablo. Both were backed enthusiastically, but lead programmer Angelo Laudon floated a more conservative option, one that would help keep the suits upstairs happy: stick to the RTS format on which the studio had built its name, while expanding beyond the PC audience.

At the time, the most high-profile example of a console RTS was StarCraft 64, a clumsy port of Blizzard’s PC classic that ran poorly and lacked essential features. When Ensemble’s own Age Of Empires 2 had been brought to PlayStation 2 a few years before, the port did little more than tie cursor movement to the left analogue stick and the Select button to X. “Angelo and I always felt like there were ways to pull it off that nobody was doing,” Halo Wars producer Chris Rippy says. The plan, then, was to build a truly console-first RTS from the ground up, something that could live comfortably on the soon-to-launch Xbox 360. The bulk of the studio was tasked with finishing Age Of Empires 3 before moving on to the Diablo concept, another team was put onto the MMO project, and a final group – composed only of Laudon, Rippy and four others – got to work prototyping a console RTS codenamed ‘Phoenix’. One of those four was Graeme Devine, a well-travelled designer and programmer whose credits spanned Doom 3 and cult puzzler The 7th Guest. Studio leadership reckoned his talents were being wasted coding Age Of Empires 3, and suggested he take the reins of Phoenix’s design. Relatively new to the studio, he hadn’t yet burned out on the genre – and previous experience had taught him not to write off experimental console ideas. “I thought back to my time at Id, when we were just beginning Doom 3, and Halo came out for the first Xbox,” he recalls. He and his colleagues dismissed the idea of a console FPS outright. “And then we played Halo and were like, ‘Oh. Look at that. That’s pretty darn playable’.”