I listened to the Element270 podcast today, where Spartan Neil and Spartan Derek were interviewed about the Halo announcement, the Spartan Games Kickstarter terrain project, and Firestorm Spec Ops. Here are the major points I gleaned from the podcast.
I had seen this as well, but I haven't listened to it yet!
1. We will see the initial models for the Halo game in the first half of 2015. (Woohoo!)
That's exciting news, indeed. I'm hoping that we will see the actual game's release by the end of the year!
2. Spartan Games has been given permission by Microsoft to design ships that were never seen in any of the Halo games, commercials, videos, etc. So any ship that was featured in any of the fluff for the console/PC games, Spartan can actually visualize on their own. (I assume they have to get Microsoft's approval on their ship designs, but I don't know that for sure).
It's good that this has been confirmed, though I had kind of assumed it was a given. There just isn't a lot of cannon ships to go off of (ie, things seen in the games) to make enough variety, I fear. Similar to BSG, in some ways; the universe is awesome, and makes a great setting for a space combat game, but would be a bit limited without the addition of other ships not seen in the series.
3. There will be no fleet-building rules in the Halo fleet game. They said that they want players to be free to use whatever combination of ships they need to use to defeat the enemy.
Interesting...and somewhat concerning. The devil, as always, will be in the details. This could be interpreted to mean that there will be no point values of any kind attached to the ships, but I'm not sure how that would work. More likely, it will just mean that there will be no "order of battle" requirements (ie, you must have so many points in Large models, so many in Medium, etc).
I have no idea how this will work with linked/combined fire, etc. I also imagine that there will be drawbacks to running a fleet of only big ships--you'd do fine against other big ships, but would likely get chewed up by frigates and corvettes.
Well, keep in mind, the answer might possibly be that the linked/combined fire rules simply do not exist in the Halo game. We are getting hints and indications that the rules for this game will be significantly different than Spartan's standard engine, after all. We could wind up with a game that does not have exploding D6s, linking, MARs, or any of the other features we have come to associate with US/FSA/DW.
4. The UNSC and Covenant fleets were described as both being apex predators, but different kinds of predators. The Covenant rely on quality over quantity, and have large, very destructive weapons. The UNSC are almost the opposite, and overwhelm their enemies with large numbers of smaller ships.
So, it sounds like different play styles are being built into the factions from the start; that's good to hear!
5. Firestorm Spec Ops is still a go. But they said that it is not designed to be a massive force-on-force game--it is literally a special operations game, where you'll have small teams of highly trained soldiers working to achieve specific missions. It almost sounds to me like it won't even be a skirmish-level game, like Dystopian Legions is.
I guess it depends on what your definition of a skirmish game is...to me, any game that features around a dozen 28mm models or less on each side would qualify!
That's all I can remember. They also talked quite a bit about the modular terrain system, and mentioned situations where you could actually build the inside of a frigate from Firestorm Armada and play out a boarding action in 28mm. Cool possibilities, to be sure!
Thanks for the run-down! I really need to go and listen to this for myself.
