Halo Wars… Whose lookin forward to it?

I have been a huge Ensemble Studios fan back when Ensemble wasn’t owned by Microsoft and when they first put out Age of Empires, etc. I’ve been a large participant in the Age of Empires community and have moderated a few Age of Empires fansites on Gamespy as well as Planet (now under the same company of course) and luckily gotten to know quite a few of the Developers and Testers who work at Ensemble. They even are the ones that hooked me into WoW and got me playing with them in their guild, etc. Either way from what I’ve heard and seen (though not much has been even shown or told to me yet) Halo Wars looks pretty freaking sweet. It’ll be an extremely interesting twist to see what they do for a RTS on the console though, as it is quite a tough challenge to handle. When asked about controls though, a few of my friends have said that the controls are phenomenal. As I said though, due to their NDA they can’t disclose much info with me and instead turn to bragging about their Starcraft II alpha that they’re in T_T.

Hate to break it to you but the last console based RTS like this that I can remember flopped. Hard. Most console gamers just want to point and shoot, not worry with commanding an army.

Oh Malley said:

But thanksfully it’s being made for console, instead of a PC ported to console.

That will help more than anything else. RTS games ported from PC to console ALWAYS flop. If they do a good job with the interface and mixing command/control/FPS aspects then I have no doubt the game will at least draw a moderate playerbase. The Halo theme will do more to attract players than anything else they could advertise on.

I imagine it would be more along the lines of N64 Battlezone. It was a great port but just didn’t flow like the PC version and certainly didn’t shape up to anything near a good N64 game.

tyr said:

Honestly if you check out the Demo here it looks pretty sweet. The controls look smooth and easy. Not to mention that the graphics look amazing and the fact that its very similar to the origional halo. Not the graphics but the vechicles and such. Personally I really cant wait for the game to come out next year. Sometime in November I think is the projected launch date.

Graphics alone don’t make a good game.

Even if it does flop, I’ll still own it. I think it looks awesome, and I LOVE RTS games. C&C3 seemed to work OK on the 360. I worry about objects in the game being too small, or the field of vision being too limited. That is what has has turned me off to RTS game play on consoles. That and controls being funky.