Creating Halo Wars was an enthralling challenge, and the creative minds at Ensemble Studios were tasked with remaining faithful to the original vision, but also to add to and extrapolate the unit backgrounds, storylines, and canon. The remainder of this book showcases some of the very best pre-production artwork from every facet of this game’s creation. From the epic battlefield art to the character studies, the strange alien landscapes to augmentations for familiar troops and foes; the following is but a glimpse into the latest evolution of this popular franchise.
Let’s face it—Halo Wars has some serious “badass” units. Preexisting units like the Arbiter and the Hunter are hard not to love. In conceptualizing these units, we gave them the attention that they deserved, treating them as if they were our own original ideas. When it came to re-creating units like the Brute Chieftain, the same rules applied. There was a lot of excitement and passion in the process from start to finish.
You can’t have a Halo game without Spartans—it would be like having Star Wars without Jedi. In Halo Wars, we had the opportunity to introduce the Spartans before Master Chief’s time, and in a first for a Halo game, we get to see multiple Spartans in combat on the world of Arcadia! We ended up with a ton of different Spartan images. Looking back over our inventory of artwork, it’s clear just how cool the Spartans are, and it’s easy to see the impact that Master Chief has had on other video-game heroes and characters.
The biggest challenge from a conceptual standpoint was to develop new ideas while at the same time staying true to the successful foundation that previous Halo games had established. I’m a little biased, but I definitely think that we did a great job with these unique units, both for the Covenant and the UNSC.
Creating a variety of creatures for multiple environments was a blast for the art team. We were excited at the possibility of having animals with distinct and individual behaviors accent the various worlds of the Halo Wars universe.
While it goes without saying how much fun it was to work on the UNSC and the Covenant, with the Insurrectionists, we had a great opportunity to branch away from the traditional Halo factions. These bandits live on Harvest and Arcadia and salvage their equipment from UNSC vehicles, weapons, and civilian buildings.
The Flood...’nuff said.
Here we explored new units while keeping some very recognizable UNSC traits. For the Flamethrower, Vulture, Elephant, and Grizzly, our goal was to add spice to the hugely successful Halo recipe.