Halo Wars - future - Phil Spencer comments

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http://m.ca.ign.com/articles/2013/10/31/microsoft-talks-pgr-halo-wars-an...

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Halo Wars "I'm a big fan of Halo Wars," Spencer said when asked about the Xbox 360 real-time strategy game. Since its launch in 2009, the strategy spin-off hasn't been heard from again. It was never released on PC (despite seemingly being a perfect fit) and developer Ensemble Studios shut down following the game's completion. The studio's founder revealed last year that Bungie wasn't pleased with "the whoring out of [its] franchise." But years have now passed and Bungie is no longer owned by Microsoft, so what's the status of Halo Wars? "[Halo Wars is] something I'm very interested in. Bonnie [Ross, 343 Industries GM] and I talk about it quite a bit," Spencer revealed. "I think Halo Wars falls in the shadow of the Halo FPS. I mean, you're doing 10 or 12 million units of the Halo FPS, anything else that comes out Halo that doesn't hit those numbers, it's kind of easy for certain people to look at it and say, 'Well, that didn't work.' And I don't think that's the right measure of success; I think Halo Wars was a high-quality console-based RTS game. It was fun. "And especially now, when I think about some of the capability -- you might roll your eyes at this -- but when I think about some voice and other things that you could add to that, that's the kind of gameplay that I think would be great in those scenarios. And also a game that maybe I could play on multiple devices: I could play on Windows as well, I could play on console, because it has that gameplay that lends itself so well to that. So I suspect you'll see us do something with...they're kind of busy right now at 343, which is good, we're really happy with what they're working on. But I think there is opportunity for us to do something more with that franchise and Bonnie, Kiki [Wolfkill, 343 executive producer], and Josh [Holmes, creative director] are doing a great job in thinking holistically about the Halo franchise." As for who would develop such a game, IGN mentioned Robot Entertainment, the Ages of Empires Online and Orcs Must Die developer that was founded by former Ensemble employees. Spencer didn't seem so sure that's the direction that Microsoft would go in, though. "I haven't talked to [Robot Entertainment] in a while," he said. "In fact, I'm not sure what the status of that studio is. If we were going to do something we'd either have to think about doing it internally or finding a good RTS developer to help. There aren't a lot of great RTS developers out there anymore. We'd want to do a great job with it."