Halo Wars FAQ

By Kumar Shah, edited.

Introduction:

From ES Themselves: Halo Wars is the next big real-time strategy game from Ensemble Studios, creators of Age of Empires. Designed exclusively for the Xbox 360, Halo Wars allows you to take charge of the human UNSC armies and see the Halo universe from a totally new perspective. Current Development Stage:

'Playable Prototype': According to Bungie, creators of the Halo franchise, they have played the game (and they say its awesome). This means, ES had a playable prototype ready.

What is Halo?

In the games, Halo is a an enormous, ring-shaped artificial space habitat, and, according to Bungie Studios, has a diameter of either ten thousand kilometers or miles. But what we are talking about here is the Halo Universe. It can be best described as a place in which the Humans and Convenants are in a constant fight over these ring-shaped artificial space habitats. More information about Halo can be found at Wikipedia.

RTS On a Console?

True, till now consoles have not been famous for RTS games. Here is some re-assurance from ES themselves:

Halo Wars was created for the Xbox 360 from the ground up, which meant we didn't have to make compromises or shoe-horn in artifacts from a Windows PC game. We were able to take all the best aspects of RTS games, make them work perfectly on the Xbox 360, and exclude the rest.

It is also interesting to note that Halo originally started as a RTS game before being converted into a First Person shooter.

What is the release date?

For now all that is known is that the game will be release in 2008.

Graphics:

Ensemble Studios has written a brand new graphics engine for Halo Wars. So far, from a demo video shown at E3 and recently released on the internet, the engine seems to feature expensive graphic qualities - such as real time shadows, beautiful lightning and reflections. Ensemble seems to have opted to use a Level of Detail to keep units with an extremely high detail when viewed close, but with better performance when not.

Story:

The setting of Halo Wars is before the original game, when the UNSC marines first encountered the Convenant. This will be updated as more infoemation comes along.

Multiplayer:

Halo Wars will make use of Xbox Live for multiplayer gameplay. The game will feature an online campaign co-op mode. Ensemble has mentioned that it will try to bring as much of the Halo multiplayer experience to Halo Wars

Gameplay:

The gameplay in Halo Wars seems to be very combat focused with little through to economy, which unlike the normal Ensemble game. Combat will, however, feature a lot of depth and strategy, making up for the lack of complex economy.

  • Civilizations - At the moment we can be sure of atleast 2 civilizations - Humans and the Convenant.
  • Units/Buildings - Check out our Units and our Buildings pages.
  • Unconfirmed Units - The following units might be included as they are available in the Halo Universe.
    • Convenant
      • Brutes
      • Jackals
      • Drones
      • Wraith

Misc:

  • Why is ES working on a Halo RTS?
    • Answers to such questions and many others can be found at the Official FAQ at the Halo Wars website.
  • Where can I get more information on Halo/Bungie?
  • Xbox360, what is that?
    • It is the latest gaming console from Microsoft. More information at the XBox Site.