Gaming: Nearly 20 Years Ago, The Makers Of Age Of Empires Tried To Make A...

The audacious quest ended all the way back in 2008 after five years of development.

Rob Fermier has enjoyed a fascinating career, with his name attached to an impressive list of games, including Thief, System Shock and Age of Mythology. He co-founded C Prompt Games in 2018, the studio responsible for digital board game Heretic Operative and the Paradox-published 4X, Millennia. But between those periods he worked on one of the few actually good console real-time strategy games.

Halo Wars was developed by Ensemble, the studio behind Age of Empires. But it wasn't the only Halo game Ensemble was involved in. It was also working on a Halo MMO.

"Part of it was that we loved MMOs," Fermier tells us. "I still play World of Warcraft to this day, from day one. And it was a chance for us to bring something more action-oriented. I still feel like no-one has really done the action MMO I see in my mind. There have been a number of MMOs that have had action-based elements. But we had in that prototype a great sequence where you had a bunch of vehicular action, and a bunch of more traditional MMO cooldown management action, and it was all in this open world."

It was a chance for us to bring something more action-oriented.

The folks at Ensemble were also just big Halo fans. "Some people were more sceptical about that than others, but I loved the idea of taking that Halo world and giving people insight into a different part of it, letting them immerse themselves in a part of it they've never seen before."

It sounds like it was a challenging project, trying to take a series with best-in-class gunplay and explosive vehicle combat and apply it to an MMO with entirely different needs and mechanics. "Obviously, it was a very different kind of shooting mechanic than you had in the base Halo games," says Fermier, "and we had a lot of work to figure out how that was ultimately going to land."

Bungie wasn't especially involved in it at the time, though Fermier says if "that game had really gone forward, I think we would have gotten a lot of very valuable input from Bungie about how to make it feel authentic to the Halo experience while being its own separate thing. But it's a challenge, obviously, when you're working on any kind of licence like that. Where you carve out what's your own, how you're respectful of what's there. There are a lot of interesting challenges around that."

Ensemble had some flexibility because "it was set in a different part of the universe from the n

Source: PC Gamer