The good news for Halo Wars fans who have been hanging in there waiting for more information and or images from the game is that Ensemble Studios will be showing a small demo of the game for select members of the press at E3.
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Microsoft's Robbie Bach just announced during the company's CES keynote that a demo for Ensemble's swansong title, Halo Wars on the 360, will be made available for download on Xbox Live on February 5. What's more, he announced that Halo Wars would be out on February 28, instead of the previously-announced March 3, bringing the US release into line with the rest of the world.
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Shacknews has learned via multiple independent reports that developer Ensemble Studios (Age of Empires) will shut down operation following the release of its upcoming title Halo Wars. According to sources, employees not associated with Halo Wars have been laid off today. Those attached to Halo Wars have been offered incentives to stay on the project until completion.
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There are so many ways that Halo Wars is an important game - it's real-time strategy on console, it's Halo in a new genre, it's Ensemble's swansong, it's another blow in the console wars - but while they could easily dominate your thoughts as you play it, they don't. Instead they just evaporate in the face of such a confident, self-assured and elegantly constructed videogame.
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Halo Wars deftly dodges between the hardcore micromanagement of real-time strategy and the instant gratification expected by Halo fans. Ensemble has nailed console RTS controls, but at the expense of some depth. The campaign missions often seem overly scripted and the experience doesn't have the wide-open feel of some other RTSs. The cinematic cutscenes are gorgeous, if the narrative is somewhat thin in places.
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The Halo Wars team over at Ensemble have updated their site yesterday, adding some shots and info on two of the units set to feature in the game. One, the Warthog, I'll imagine you're somewhat familiar with. It's fast, it's iconic, it's cheap, you can upgrade it. The other, though, is the UNSC firebase, your base of operations if you're playing as the human forces. It builds, it powers, it slices, it dices. Concept art and in-game model shots of both below.
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Australian site Gameplayer recently managed to snag a few minutes with Graeme Devine, lead designer on Halo Wars at Ensemble Studios.
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VGChartz has today release preliminary first day figures for Halo Wars. Over 250,000 units of the title were sold on the first day of release including midnight launches at many retailers across the country. Sales of Halo Wars are expected to comfortably pass one million worldwide, likely hitting 2-3 million making the title easily the most successful Xbox360 RTS game to date, with the title already having sold over 200,000 units outside of the Americas.
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We know, Halo Wars' cinematics look great, but what we really needed to see was how the thing worked. This vid shows how it works. There's a "circle menu" that drives most of the game's commands, and the whole thing looks it just might avoid being a total disaster.
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It was just revealed at the Tokyo Game Show that the long, long delayed Halo Wars (whose developer has had a bit of a struggle) will be releasing to the Xbox 360 EARLY 2009. Got that fellow fanboys, EARLY 2009 and you can bet we're going to hold Ensemble and Microsoft to that.
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