Ensemble of course was the muscle behind a Halo MMO that was greenlighted and then scrapped sometime last year. Cole’s pictures (two are on his site) are titled “Halo Universe City”, and in his description, Cole capitalises “Halo Universe” a second time. Could have been a working title of the game. Joystiq also points out it could have been “Universe City”. Which itself could have been a placeholder name. Who knows.

Of course it all doesn’t matter. The project is kaput. But the pictures are pretty, and tell us a little more about an evolution of this franchise not meant to be. For now.

Halo Project – City Designs [Dylan Cole, via Joystiq]

Ensemble made the Age of Empire series. Which was hugely successful. Ensemble were, however, recently shut down. Was it because they were too successful? A former employee thinks so.

David Rippy – who is now in charge of Bonfire Studios, and leading a team of other ex-Ensemble employees – says the former Age of Empires developer went down because it had been pigeon-holed as an RTS specialist.

With the cost of creating games so high, studios are almost forced to diversify across platforms. Aside from the financial risk of sticking to one platform or one genre, you also risk being pigeonholed in the industry.

Ensemble was kind of a victim of its own success as an RTS shop. As hard as we tried, we were never able to have one of our non-RTS prototypes greenlit, largely because we were ‘the RTS guys’.

I’d like to sympathise, but really, Relic and Creative Assembly seem to be doing OK.

Ensemble Studios a “victim of its own success” – Bonfire [GI.biz]

Now that Halo Wars is out the door and Ensemble Studios has gone the way of the dinosaur, former employees of the developer have seen fit to release some of the game’s lovely concept art.

There’s some spectacular stuff here, worthy of desktop wallpapering, visual inspiration for many of the game’s gorgeous cut scenes. Perhaps it’s time for a point and click Halo Adventures to really breathe some exploitation into the series. What’s that you say? “Jesus Christ, no”?

To start browsing the full gallery, click here.

Halo has been safely nesting in the loving hands of Bungie for more than seven years. And it’s excelled as a first-person shooter, proving finally that you can make a great shooter on a console.

In Halo Wars, gamers return to the beloved Xbox franchise to explore its early days in a real-time strategy title by Ensemble Studios. The game promises the chance to control not one Master Chief, but an army of marines, Spartans, Warthogs and Scorpions.

Can Halo Wars ride on the success of its lineage and, with the help of some of the best real-time strategy developers in the business, do for strategy what the original title did for shooters?

Loved
Essence of Halo: The biggest selling point for this strategy game is its setting, characters and story. Set in the Halo universe, Halo Wars delivers across the board on everything a Halo fan could want, from a tightly paced plot, to memorable characters, to the rush of commanding a squad of Spartans

Cut Scenes: One of the best parts of this game are the cut scenes. Delivered in amazing detail with highly polished graphics, there’s enough there to keep you captivated throughout the single player campaign.

Graphics: The cut scenes are spectacular, but the gameplay graphics are just as adept at delivering an eye-catching experience. Units from the UNSC, Covenant and Flood are all meticulously detailed and the backdrops vary just enough to keep things interesting.

Eclectic Missions: Instead of having gamers run through a familiar gauntlet of control points and forward bases, Halo Wars relies heavily on the story to create an interesting selection of missions on multiple settings, from ship hulls, to infested planets. You even have to solve a puzzle in one.

Strategic Strategy: The smartest thing that Ensemble Studios did in making Halo Wars was realizing the limitations of playing a strategy game on a console. You don’t have a keyboard of hot keys, or a mouse to zip around the map with. So the game limits the size of maps, units and pushes things to the point of being hard to manage, but not frustrating.

Hated
Simplistic: While creating a strategy game too complex for console controls would have killed Halo Wars, making it a tad too simple means hardcore strategy fans will at best find this game a brief amusement. Gamers new to the genre might find it a good introduction to strategy.

No Hot Keys: While Ensemble Studios couldn’t include keyboard controls in the game, it would have been nice for them to come up with a better system for group selecting and saving to buttons. As it stands, you can only really jump between types of units or local and all units. Something that severely hampers the experience.

Camera Issues: The camera works relatively well, though I noticed that it got hung up on scenery around the border of maps at times. My biggest complaint, though, is that the zoom doesn’t zoom enough. There were plenty of times when I wanted to really zoom in and watch a Spartan beat down a bad guy and steal his vehicle, but the zoom doesn’t offer that level of detail.

Not Many Units: There really aren’t many units to pick from in the game. In the single player this isn’t that evident, but once you start slugging it out with real people online you start to realise that there’s not much to choose from in this game of Rock, Paper, Scissors.

Limited Multiplayer: Real-time strategy games, like first-person shooters, live and die in multiplayer gaming. After you get through the game’s 14 single-player levels, that’s the only reason you’ll still play it. But there’s just not much there. No multiplayer Flood. No massive battles. Not much of a map selection.

I enjoyed my time with Halo Wars, it was just too short for a game that I can’t see myself playing much online. Perhaps gamers would have been better served if this iteration of Halo Wars included more campaigns, played from the perspective of the Covenant and Flood, and less multiplayer.

It’s odd, being a long-time fan of both strategy games and Ensemble Studios, to love the single-player experience of a game they made, but feel so flat about the multiplayer sessions. Halo Wars is a fun ride, an action strategy game that delivers on everything but, perhaps, where it needs to deliver most to succeed: multiplayer gaming.

Halo Wars was developed by Ensemble Studios and published by Microsoft Game Studios for the Xbox 360. It will be released on February 26, for $99.95. Played single player campaign to completion, played multiple battles on Xbox Live against other players.

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Robot Entertainment isn’t the only development house rising from the ruins of Halo Wars developer Ensemble Studios, as 35 ex-Ensemble employees join together as Bonfire Studios, already hard at work on an original title.

Days after Ensemble co-founder Tony Goodman announced the formation of Robot Entertainment, former management team members of Ensemble announce Bonfire Studios, a new development house based in Dallas. Like Robot, Bonfire is currently working on developing a new intellectual property. They just don’t have to worry about maintaining support for Halo Wars and the Age of Empires community at the same time. Freedom!

“Ensemble had an incredible group of highly talented people and the companies coming out of it are really made up of the best of the best. Ensemble was one of the few studios with two A-teams,” said David Rippy, president and CEO of Bonfire Studios. “We are already working on an original IP that we’ll start talking about in the next few months.”

It should be interesting to see what sort of original properties are produced at both Robot Entertainment and Bonfire. I wonder which one is good and which one is evil?

Last week, five lucky Kotaku readers got the opportunity to visit Xbox Australia’s HQ and play the final version of Halo Wars. I asked them to write up their impressions of Ensemble Studios’ swansong, and here they are.

The latest video documentary for the real-time strategy game Halo Wars takes a look at the individual units appearing in the game, from hordes of Spartans to swarms of Locusts.

Seeing the units in Halo Wars up close and personal like this, even a moderate Halo fan like myself can’t help but get a little excited, especially at the prospect of finally getting to see whole squads of Spartans in action. I especially like the allusion that campaign lead Jerome Jones makes regarding controlling a squad of Spartans versus controlling the ultimate Spartan, Master Chief.

It’s like if Batman was here now, and you heard stories that there used to be twenty Batmans, and that was when they could really kick ass.

Yes, Master Chief is the Batman of the future.

Mega Bloks, best known for their over-sized, LEGO-like building toys for ham-fisted infants, is releasing Halo Wars-themed toys this summer.

The deal cut between Twentieth Century Fox Licensing and Merchandising, which handles licensing for the teen-rated game, and MEGA Brands will see the toy maker developing construction toy sets based on the key characters and vehicles of Halo Wars under the Mega Bloks name.

The blocks are due out this summer.

“We’re excited to have this exclusive opportunity to partner with Microsoft and 20th Century Fox Licensing & Merchandising and build on the immense success of the Halo franchise,” said Vic Bertrand, Chief Innovation Officer of MEGA Brands. “We look forward to bringing the iconic characters and vehicles of the video game to life through Mega Bloks.”

“We consider MEGA brands to be one of the premiere leaders in the constructible toys and games category. Their reputation for creativity and innovation is inspiring and we look forward to seeing it applied to the legendary Halo franchise,” noted Michael Peikoff, Senior-Vice President U.S. Licensing, Twentieth Century Fox Licensing and Merchandising.

Note the absence of Microsoft, Ensemble or Bungie quotes.

What’s next Grand Theft Auto Tonka Toys?

While Ensemble Studios – recently shuttered by owners Microsoft – were busy stowing their gear and shutting down operations, Gamasutra thought it’d be an idea to go ask a few more questions about the Halo MMO.

What they found was that the game has a long, long history. Indeed, it began before Halo, as a sci-fi project by the name of Titan, an MMO inspired by Ultima Online. Then, when Ensemble were brought into the Microsoft fold, the Halo licence “was incorporated in the game”, and the project’s name was changed to Orion.

Apparently, “everyone at Ensemble expected this MMO to be the new focus of the company”, and work even began on a new building to house the dev team. Down the road, however, “work on the new building stopped”, and it wasn’t much longer until Microsoft closed down the entire studio. A suggestion that the cancellation of Orion led to the studio’s demise, perhaps?

Moving on from Halo, a number of other unreleased projects came to light as concept art and design documents were packed away. There was a “fantasy-adventure RPG”, a “Diablo in space” game, a “pirate-themed take on Diablo”, a “Ratchet & Clank-style platformer” and a cartoony platformer called “Agent”.

Interestingly, one more older project was unveiled: “Phoenix”, an RTS pitting humans vs martians that “changed over time” to become Halo Wars.

The full report – including some concept art for both Orion and Agent – below.

Ensemble Studios: The Last Tour [Gamasutra]

ust because Ensemble Studios is dead that does not mean the studios’ Halo Wars are gone. The game will live on!

As Jason Pace, Halo Wars lead producer and MGS Halo franchise overseer, points out, Ensemble is forming a new company and will help support the game with bug patches and whatnot.

When asked about a sequel, Pace adds that he was “very excited” about all the potential. Supposedly “dozens and dozens” of game features did not make the final cut. “And those kind of things,” says Pace, “without mentioning anything specific, are always the kinds of things that we would be looking at to enhance the game moving forward.”

Microsoft, he says, is interested in keeping its relationship with the new Ensemble studio. Nothing is finalised, however.

“I can tell you right now that we are really interested in continuing our relationship with Ensemble [the new studio]. We don’t have anything finalised that I can discuss, but certainly that is something we’d love to continue if possible,” said Pace.

“Obviously what’s happened with Ensemble has presented a new set of circumstances for us to think about. But that certainly hasn’t altered what we’d like to do in the future with the title at all.”

Ensemble involved in Halo Wars’ future News [Eurogamer]