Halo Wars!

IIRC, the Chief is a Spartan II, so those guys would be his predecessors, and likely not nearly as badass.

So it’s another RTS for the 360. How was Battle for Middle Earth 2 for 360? Any good? I mean, didn’t Goblin Commander bomb? The Pikmin games didn’t sell terrible well either did they?

BFME2 was surprisingly well done. The controls worked fine, but no way were they as good as a mouse and keyboard. I think that was because they took a console control scheme and slapped it on a PC RTS. I think they could do really well if they took that control scheme and put it on an RTS built for a console from the very beginning.

Also, I wouldn’t call Pikmin an RTS. A puzzle game, more likely. Like Lemmings.

So any word on a PC version, Xemu? Those of us in the, uh, Games for Windows world want to know. :)

As great as this sounds, the idea of RTSs being developed exclusively for 360 and cutting out PC versions sounds a bit scary for me. The PC is the RTS system.

I said this in the X06 thread but I’ll say it again here anyway: That trailer rules (Blur knows their shit), but the music is really bland. Halo has such a great, memorable score. I’m surprised they didn’t use it in that trailer, and I certainly hope the actual game isn’t the same way. It just isn’t Halo without Marty’s music.

Very nice trailer, although it illuminates the scarcity of units that was the first thing to occur to me when I heard this news. I mean you have Grunt, SuperGrunt (Spartan Mark I), Jeep, Tank. That’s it, isn’t it?

Oh right, dropship.

No artillery unit, no air fighter, no bomber, etc.

So everything else has to be created from scratch, doesn’t it? Wonder how that dilutes the “brand”…

There is the human Longsword bomber, several Warthog variants, and maybe orbital bombardments from Human cap ships. But yeah, alot will have to be made up.

“Q: Will I be able to play Halo Wars on Xbox 360 and PC?
A: Halo Wars is for the Xbox 360 exclusively.”

Meh.

Yeah, Halo Wars is 360-only. We absolutely did not want to dilute our advantage of doing a console-centric RTS by also having to support a more traditional PC interface. Also the engine is extremely tricked out to take advantage of the 360 architecture & capabilities.

PC may be the only real place for RTSes now, but people were saying the same thing about FPSes before Halo 1…

I can’t answer any of the specific questions about units and canon and history but I do know that the guys on the team are very concerned about that sort of thing and have definitely done their homework.

…and I think most people are still saying it.

When we going to see some in game stuff?

this has been a franklin donut joint.

You think so, Whitta? I haven’t seen numbers but I get the sense that games like Prey do better on the 360, and all the big franchises from the PC (Quake, Half Life, FEAR) seem to be well represented on the console, so I assume they do reasonably well. Certainly no one thinks the prospect of a console-only shooter is ridiculous at all, the way it was treated pre Halo 1 (yeah, I know many people said that after Goldeneye but I don’t think it was the same level of shift).

Anyways, I’m not predicting the death of the PC RTS. But I do think that we are presenting a console RTS experience that is really competitive with (and I think even better than) our PC RTSes.

Yeah, but put it out on the PC too, dangit!

Given that there are still very few games out for the 360 and Prey is rather mediocre, I don’t know if that’s a useful data point. Prey has very little competition on the 360, and very stiff competition on the PC.

But I thought the 360 controller was the Official Gamepad for Games for Windows, so surely the game’s controls wouldn’t still be compromised on the PC?

Playing an RTS on PC using a 360 gamepad is just all kinds of wrong.

Except that Halo is a console franchise so it makes perfect sense to make the Halo RTS for that crowd.

No worries, and glad to hear, just thinking out loud. Good luck on the project :)

Interesting, RTS on a console, and with that Marvel/Cryptic, an MMO on a console (yeah I guess there was FF11…). Interesting, all the new game flavors the 360 seems to be determined to bring to the masses!

Halo came to PC, so why not Halo Wars?

Halo (and Halo 2) came to the PC long after their console releases. I expect a Halo Wars port is also very likely but don’t expect it to be announced or released until well after Halo Wars hits the 360.