14 DAY TRIAL // Among new games, not a lot of them have impressed fans quite like Halo did. The hit first-person shooter made exclusively for Microsoft's Xbox and Xbox 360 has taken the world by storm, with its intricate single-player campaign featuring Master Chief and the top-notch multiplayer, which worked seamlessly with the Xbox Live online service.
Seeing how popular the series became, Microsoft decided to buy the IP from Bungie, the studio that created it and start to develop new projects with units and events from the Halo universe. As such, the upcoming RTS Halo Wars is such a project and more will come if we are to believe key Microsoft executives.
But don't think the company will “milk” it non-stop, as Jason Pace, the lead producer at the company's brand new Halo Studio, has revealed to Videogamer that the whole team sees it in a similar way to how LucasArts views the Star Wars franchise. He also hopes that people will look back after a couple of years and recognize just how much the Halo franchise brought to the gaming industry as a whole and, of course, his team's hard work.
“We as a studio view Halo as our Star Wars,” said Pace. “We want it to become that culturally pervasive. Our vision for what the franchise can be extends far beyond just first-person shooters that are appealing to a certain kind of audience. This is a vast universe, it extends back thousands and thousands of years, it's huge, many different worlds, races that we haven't even met yet. And so we view the future of the franchise in the same way that we would view any cross-cultural entertainment franchise property, which is we hope to tell many different stories in many different ways, capture the hearts and minds of new generations as we go forward. So absolutely we are committed to this franchise.”
You can clearly see Pace’s enthusiasm. Hopefully it will translate into some interesting projects that will in turn give birth to great games, worthy of the Halo brand. It definitely seems that fans are going to get a fair amount of titles in the future from Microsoft and this brand new Halo Studio.