The developer behind the massively successful Age Of Empires series and Halo Wars, the Halo universe realtime strategy game coming in February, has criticised Microsoft over the studio’s closure and the cancelation of its Halo massively multi-player online (MMO) game.
Speaking to Shacknews, Ensemble Studio’s director of technology, Dave Pottinger has admitted that the Halo MMO was not just an idea on paper: “It had actually been green-lit, and then it got cancelled after that. We worked on it for a long time – we had staffed up an almost 40-person team. And then there was some reorganization at Microsoft, and the new bosses thought it wasn’t the best idea anymore. It felt very Halo – we had a combat demo that felt like a very action-oriented MMO, but still had that MMO depth. Definitely more actiony than World of Warcraft.”
Ensemble, bought by Microsoft, was responsible for the Age Of Empires series – which made “700 million dollars” for Microsoft. Which makes the decision by Microsoft to close down the studio following completion of Halo Wars rather mysterious. Pottinger himself is perplexed: “It’s Microsoft’s right to decide where they wanna put their money. Personally we all disagree with the decision. It honestly doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
One fear is that Microsoft, in its rush to embrace the casual games market with the New Xbox Experience and titles such as Lips, has decided to drop in-house development of anything like strategy or MMO titles as too geeky. But Pottinger says: “Microsoft has plans for [Age of Empires], but I’m not really at liberty to discuss it. But it will carry on. It’s a great franchise.” So it seems unlikely that’s the reason for closing Ensemble.
Halo Wars out Feb 09 | £45 for Xbox 360 | Halo Wars
