From Halo Wars to Fleetbreakers…

This is Dave, one of the co-founders of Last Keep. This week, I decided to take a bit of a step back in time and share some of the inspiration behind Fleetbreakers. It's been quite a journey, but one worth taking.

I’ve been making games for a long time. I was one of the key folks at Ensemble Studios. As director of technology, I hired the programmers and oversaw engine development at the studio. I worked on all the original Age of Empires, Age of Mythology, and Halo Wars games. I was also lead programmer on Age of Empires 3 and lead designer on Halo Wars. If you want to talk about formations in Age of Empires, that’d be me.

Halo Wars was a massive project with several twists and turns. For a long time, Ensemble Studios had a second team working on “anything but RTS games”. For a variety of reasons, some internal and some external, we just couldn’t get that second team going. That team eventually decided to make a console RTS.

They ported Age of Mythology to a gamepad to prove it could be done and then dove headfirst into an original IP. That gamepad port was both terrific and terrible. It proved we could technically have Age gameplay on a controller. That was the team’s passion and the hook for the project. Unfortunately, it was not fun for everyone. Cramming that much gameplay onto a controller required dexterity/control memory that many people didn’t have. That debate lingered throughout the entire project.

Eventually, we were given the option to cancel the project or convert it to the Halo IP. Internally, there was a lot of frustration over the change, but we did understand that the game needed that jolt of excitement that Halo would bring. Graeme Devine, the original lead designer on the project, really got on board with the transition and became the undisputed Halo czar inside Ensemble.

Gameplay continued to struggle, though. While we were still discussing how much complexity we should bring to the console, we had a new wrinkle of whether or not our gameplay was “Halo enough”. Luckily, Halo started out as an RTS IP, so the unit roster was well suited to the differentiation we needed for a strategy game. We started to shift the game to more action gameplay, though. It was imperative that we deliver a great Halo game.

I took over as lead designer to help pull the game together. We cut a bunch of units that looked the same on a TV screen. We emphasized action gameplay like spartans jacking a wraith tank. We accepted that multiplayer games were going to be shorter and more focused; a little closer to Starcraft than Age, though that meant we were well outside our heritage and comfort level. We never quite nailed what we were after, but I was so proud of what the team delivered whilst going through the real-life difficulty of the Ensemble shut down.

I think time has been kind to the original Halo Wars. While we had some missed opportunities, I think we did the impossible: we brought a modern RTS (for the time) game to consoles. We borrowed some controller ideas from games like Pikmin and preceding console RTS games while blending in some of our economic soul gameplay. I did miss our procedural maps a lot, but static maps were honestly pretty in-line with Halo fan expectations. Perhaps that was a push in the end? We all missed proper group controls.

With Fleetbreakers, we want to make a new kind of strategy game. We like RTS controls and the tension of realtime combat. So that’s our base. But we also want something that is equally at home on a gamepad or mouse+keyboard. That opens up more platform options. Additionally, it forces us to redefine features like unit selection and army control in ways that we never quite solved with Halo Wars.

Instead of individual units, you control squadrons in Fleetbreakers. Each ship comes out as its own group. Smaller light ships might have 8 or 10 ships in a squadron. Heavier ships will have less. You can select all the squadrons to command them all at once or just tap the hotkey/dpad to quickly select individual squadrons. Replacing dead ships is done through this same squadron control system. This is the group management system I wanted way back in Halo Wars.

We also want shorter missions in Fleetbreakers. Not that there’s anything wrong with long missions per se. We’ve just already made the long mission games. Plus, we’re in a different place now. We are simply excited about the idea of a game with shorter individual missions. We might still sit there for an hour overall, but completing 6 or 8 missions in that hour feels exciting and new for us.

Those shorter missions also do a couple of neat things…

Shorter missions make for a shorter reward loop. When you lose a five minute mission, you get clear and quick feedback that your choices were suboptimal. You don’t play for 20 minutes wondering if you’ve made the right choices. Obviously, seasoned RTS vets will say that it’s your fault if you play for 20 minutes without checking on what your enemy is building, but that’s a vet move. It’s not intuitive for new players. We want to try to reduce the barrier to entry for RTS games while still providing the depth that excites us veteran players.

With shorter missions, we still need to ensure that each mission has a beginning, a middle, and an end. That’s led us to streamlining choices and execution. We’ve pulled out gatherer management, for example. You still need to gather resources and build defenses (if that’s your thing), but there’s less overhead involved to allow you to focus on the faster, more action-y battles. We like that change. It’s exciting to pull off fun combos in battle. But, of course, if you solely focus on the battles, you’ll find that you run out of resources to keep your squadrons at full strength. That balancing act is there, but in a way that feels different. Fans will tell us how we did there ofc.

Those faster reward loops and more action-focused missions also support another big piece of Fleetbreakers… the roguelite structure. Whether you’re playing the story mode or our larger, Free Play mode, each game is organized as a roguelite run. Your permanent upgrades change the starting state of those runs, but you’re quickly grabbing higher rarity ship squadrons (each with its own set of custom enhancements) and collecting relics as you work through the procedural map sectors. The missions you choose offer different rewards which you turn into different colonies or vendor purchases. Some colonies will produce resources after each mission while others will offer classic strategy tech upgrades. You can rush straight to the boss or boom your way to technological superiority.

I like to say that the RPS (rock/paper/scissors unit relationships) is the starting point for each run. But by the time a run is finished, the RPS has been fundamentally customized based on everything you’ve collected during the run. Harkening back to Halo Wars, this is another way we’ve tried to streamline a typical RTS while still providing tons of depth. I think about a run in Fleetbreakers as a deconstructed game of Age. Each mission in Fleetbreakers is you deciding to take that gold mine over there or destroying an enemy’s forward base. The sum total of those missions is that “hour long game”. Just in a way where you can manage it better or play it in 3 different sittings with your Steamdeck.

The RPS doesn’t just change for you, though. It changes for the enemies, too. They might be running a set of light Scouts that normally wouldn’t do much against armored ships. But, if they can start stacking upgrades like longer stun duration and pierce for those scouts, then they’ve changed the dynamics of the RPS, too. Your standard counter to Scouts would be something with armor, but if you can get shots off and their Scouts have pierce, then you’ll need to pivot. That dynamism and thinking-on-your-feet make for great roguelite gameplay.

We’re excited to get Fleetbreakers in front of you all. We think we’ve got something new-and-cool, but we’ll need you all to tell us how we did. Early Access will be starting later this year.