What did you think of Halo Wars?

Ensemble founder Tony Goodman recently divulged that in opposition to stories that had already been released, the entire process of the 2009 bomb Halo Wars was a result of Microsoft being afraid to take a risk, Bungie not having the ability to create the game themselves and the essential “whoring out” to another company (Ensemble) to help make the game.

In the upcoming issue of Games Industry International Goodman is quoted as saying:

“Microsoft was pretty risk averse and they said, ‘I don’t know if we want to take the risk of creating strategy games on a console. We’d feel better if Halo were attached to it.’ The difficult part of that was it took the game back about a year in development, and I think it never quite turned out the same. They just said, ‘Why don’t you just paint over what you have with Halo stuff?’ But things aren’t quite that simple,” Goodman noted.”

Add to this that Bungie was essentially pissed off that they had to give up the IP usage of Halo to another genre’s creators and you have a explosion waiting to happen. Contrary to what was previously released Bungie Damian Isla, it appears as if Halo Wars was essentially nothing more than a paint job over a pre-existing Age of Empires set up and one that obviously created more tension than was originally let on.

“Another problem was that Bungie was never up for it… Bungie was kind of sore about the idea. What they called it was ‘the whoring out of our franchise’ or something. Yeah, that didn’t create a great relationship between us and Bungie; they viewed us as someone infringing [on their franchise].”

Fortunately for fans, we instead get Halo 4 as the next game in the franchise and not another spin-off.