14 DAY TRIAL // We all know that Ensemble Studios, one of the biggest developers of strategy games out there, is closing because Microsoft, the owner, says its games won't attract people in the long term and that the IPs that were in development there didn't have a high number of fans.
The studio is currently working on its last game, the Halo Wars RTS (Real Time Strategy) title, which is set to hit the store shelves at the beginning of next year, on February 2. The game does indeed promise to bring the Halo universe to the gamers in a way that hasn't been explored by any other title and has made fans very anxious to test their strategy skills.
But the team also had in development a Halo based MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) that was one of Microsoft's tickets to the very profitable online game market. A few details about this project did appear a while ago, but because the Redmond-based company canceled it, nobody could get any other information about it.
Now, Dave Pottinger, the director of technology at Ensemble, has revealed a few details on the game. He said that the studio did indeed wish to work on an MMO and, because of this, Microsoft offered it the chance to develop this Halo title. But, sadly, the new company bosses then decided that the project wouldn't make such a big profit and canceled it.
"Ensemble has been wanting to make an MMO for a long time. That was in production for a long time. The Halo IP was a great IP to launch an MMO with. Microsoft... hasn't had the best track record with those. And 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 had actually been green-lit, and then it got canceled after that."
Some pretty interesting stuff, but most people think that Microsoft should have kept on going with the Halo MMO because there are a lot of fans out there who would surely want to venture online with their custom character from the popular universe. Only time will tell whether we will get the chance to see this project picked up by any other studio and developed into a full game.