Dave Pottingner about campaign covenant colors

Hey,

You probably don't know me (unless you monitored the forums a while back as well), but I know you're the lead dev so I have one question
pertaining to a design decision you guys took.

Why did you guys choose to make all the Covenant units purple and all the UNSC units green in campaign? I understand this for skirmish and
multiplayer in general, but campaign should stay true to its source material. In the halo games, grunts are orange and red. Elites are blue and red, and other spec-ops variants. Hunters are blue as well.

I understand you probably won't reply to this, as it is critique on your game. But a man can dream right?

Regards,
L0d3x

Why wouldn't I reply?

In any event, it's a fairly un-exciting answer: Ease of recognition.

When we had the "right" Halo colors in the campaign, it was confusing people. Some of them expected the minimap colors to match the color in the world, some didn't. Some expected all the enemies to be the same color, etc.

We did try to strike a balance between Halo expectations and the RTS issues, though. From an RTS standpoint, I would always choose to make the human player blue, but that's a Cov color (vs. the standard UNSC green). Ditto for red being the enemy, but purple is a much more dominant Cov color.

It was the best compromise we could strike.
Dave Pottinger
Lead Designer, Halo Wars

Angatar wrote:They do get infected, but aren't combat forms, they become carriers.

Felix wrote:
the plasma rhino

Archangel wrote:a rhino that fires plasma....

Archangel wrote:its a campaign unit


hell, you're the one with the game.

dragoon9105 wrote:and thats not a reasonable excuse for the crayon colors they were just being lazy, notice how forge has unique colors now they could do that with any other unsc unit.

For the minimap use halo motion tracker colors Red for enemies and yellow for allies, halo players would regonize it and RTS players would adapt. on the feild unit visibility should not be a problem, hell i can see enemy stealthed units in starcraft fine, is a winter camoflauge warthog to much to ask?

Angatar wrote:They do get infected, but aren't combat forms, they become carriers.

CivBase wrote:
It's a better answer than we've been getting... but it sounds like they're going to far. A few gamers got confused? They didn't even release it to the public! They're just being lazy... Let a player play through 10 games, they'll be sure to learn by then. If not, they're probably not old enough to play on anything above normal, meaning it won't really matter if they have to take an extra five seconds to identify a marine.