14 DAY TRIAL // Most of the gamers who like RTS (Real Time Strategy) games remember Ensemble Studios as responsible for the very solid and popular Age of Empires franchise. But, as the franchise was considered by Microsoft, the owners of Ensemble, not very profitable in the long term, the team was informed that the studio would close down.
Although the news caused quite a lot of uproar in the gamer community, Microsoft tasked the studio with one last project before having its doors closed, Halo Wars. This upcoming game, slated for an early 2009 release, will mark the entry of the popular shooter franchise onto the realms of the strategy genre. We have already heard from its creators that a PC version would not be developed, as it is custom made for the Xbox 360, but industry analysts are very skeptical about that, especially considering the fact that Microsoft has already brought a lot of previously console-exclusive titles to their GamesForWindows platform.
Graeme Devine, one of the executives of Ensemble, talked about the challenges the team faced when it started working on this project. He went on to say that they started from scratch, as only a few artbooks from Bungie, the studio which developed the shooter series, were received. The task of taking a game's forward perspective and placing it on the top of the battlefield wasn't very easy, as a lot of compromises had to be made.
“At the time, the movie deal was in process, so [Bungie] actually prepared a lot of stuff for Weta,” said Devine. “We used that. We also found the Halo art books to be very useful. But one of the other challenges was, all of their stuff was from this forward perspective, and all of our stuff is from the top. So we actually had to change things up quite a bit for that perspective, to make the units recognizable.”
Devine added that, although the popular Warthog buggies, found in the shooter series, would look the same in this new game, they would actually move a lot of faster and would be able to do their special jump move with a lot more power. All these things prove that even though you work on a game that is already made, the development process isn't very easy.
Look forward to Ensemble's magnum opus at the beginning of 2009, when Halo fans finally have something to do with their spare time, waiting for the expansion Halo 3: ODST set to appear in the fall season.