Halo Wars 2 Release: What We Know
Big entertainment franchises always like to test their success by venturing into other places. For video games developers and publishers, nothing is more dangerous or potentially lucrative.Microsoft is known to take franchises made popular by its Xbox console and experiment with them. Halo Wars was one such experiment. Now, the company is preparing for a Halo Wars 2 release.
Halo is almost exclusively known for its first-person shooter mechanics. In traditional games, you’re Master Chief John 117, running around the universe and defending humanity from ever dangerous swarms of aliens. Halo Wars isn’t a first person shooter at all. It’s a top-down real-time strategy game. Instead of shooting enemies yourself, you’re tasked with building an unstoppable force. Winning in Halo Wars – or any real-time strategy game, really – requires careful resource management and good planning. Real-time strategy games can be relentlessly brutal.
When is the Halo Wars 2 Release Date?
The first Halo Wars made its way to store shelves back in 2009. Since then, Microsoft hadn’t said much of anything about the franchise. To be frank Halo Wars, though certainly popular with people who really love the Halo franchise, wasn’t as big a release as some expected it to be. Real-time strategy games just don’t seem to have the same appeal that a shooter does with console fans.
With just the mild success that Halo Wars, a Halo Wars 2 release seemed like a pipe dream. Microsoft delivered the good news at last year’s GamesCom trade show. The Halo Wars 2 release is scheduled for fall 2016, according to Microsoft.
A battle from the original Halo Wars.
What Platforms Are Getting Halo Wars 2?
Halo Wars wasn’t only notable for taking the Halo franchise into a new genre. It was also notable for being a real-time strategy game only for owners of Xbox 360 consoles. Games like Halo Wars are usually PC only, since players like the precision of a mouse for target enemies and a keyboard provides shortcuts for the many options that quality real-time strategy games offer.Halo Wars 2 will keep that unorthodox tradition alive. It won’t come to the Xbox 360 – Microsoft Studios stopped developing games for that console some time ago – it will come to the still new Xbox One. In addition to that, it’ll also make its way to PCs running Windows 10. Microsoft said last year that those with Windows 10 installed and the right hardware would get Xbox exclusives just like console owners.
If anything, this strategy makes more sense for the Halo Wars 2 release than it does for other games in Microsoft’s line-up. Quantum Break, Gears of War Ultimate Edition, Rise of the Tomb Raider and Ori and the Blind Forest handle better with a controller on Windows PCs. It’s hard to imagine that Halo Wars 2 won’t have comfortable keyboard controls first and foremost.
Who’s Developing Halo Wars 2?
Like other games in the Halo series, Halo Wars was developed internally at Microsoft. It was a collaboration between two power-house studios of the era, Ensemble Studios and Bungie. Ensemble created the Age of Empires series of games before being shuttered after completing the development of Halo Wars. Bungie left Microsoft’s family of internal developers to work on Destiny in partnership with Activision.
A battle from the original Halo Wars.
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