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Microsoft To Close Halo Wars Studio
Shacknews reports that Ensemble Studios, developer of the Age of Empires series, will be shut down by Microsoft Game Studios (MGS) as soon as the upcoming Halo Wars title is complete. Microsoft execs said parts the team would continue to work with MGS. Halo Wars is scheduled for early 2009, and Eurogamer took a look at the Halo-styled RTS game last month.
Ensemble is not "the Halo Wars Studio." To call them that is an insult to their reputation.
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Ha, right, because it's sooooo easy to picture you anonymously trolling on Slashdot during orgy breaks.
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How could I not have heard of this? This has to be a joke. You can stick ANY genre on Halo and it'll probably sell?
Halo Dating Sim! (You know you want to.)
What manager thought it would be a good idea to announce, before the product shipped, that -
Doesn't this pretty much guarantee that Halo Wars will be late (delayed by people who don't want to lose their jobs), full of glitches (since devs don't have to worry about the ramifications), and avoided by customers (who will know that the product is DOA?)
I thought this gaffe was only a software engineering myth. I'm gonna have to bookmark this post for future reference :) ...
- David Stein
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
We could go on all day...
>Perhaps Microsoft has finally decided they need to stop wasting their time in the console market and will start to turn their attention back to making keyboards and mice.
Fixed that for you.
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They need to make a game actually called Red Ring, to follow up their earlier hit Blue Screen.
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Dude, your post makes no sense. Why would MS want to stunt the xbox?
They let their one big developer Bungie leave to go work on multiplatform titles.
Bungie wanted to leave. MS allowed them to, kept the rights to Halo, and first right of refusal to Bungee games. It's better this way (for the xbox) -- Bungie remains a happy studio, and they make games for the xbox. The other way around, Bungie employees get pissed and leave, and MS is left with the skeleton.
The let Bizzare and Bioware leave exclusive Xbox development.
They don't get to choose this. Blizzard and Bioware can do whatever they want. MS and Sony usually pay huge sums of money for exclusive titles (on a per-title basis). More and more, they're both deciding it isn't worth it. Everybody wins this way of course -- 'cos more games are available on both platforms. If fact, MS is probably wagering that the Xbox live experience is the differentiator that makes people choose to buy non-exclusive titles on an xbox instead of a ps3. Either way, they've done the math and decided most exclusives aren't worth the price. They still do have exclusive titles when they are important enough (for example, Gears of War II).
They've shutdown other minor firstparty exclusive Xbox developers over the past year or two.
Sources? Anything??
Tecmo appears to be going full multiplatform now that Itagaki is gone.
Repeat after me: MS does not control independant studios, and this is Good Thing anyway.
That leaves Microsoft with just Rare, Lionhead, and Turn 10. Maybe one more. Compare that to Nintendo who has 10 first party studios. And even worse to Sony who now has 20 or so first party studios.
What's the point of having 20 first party studios if you don't even have 20 total games that are worth playing? I just don't understand your point. Are you trying to say there's a dearts of good titles for the Xbox? I hope you realize how ridiculous that sounds.
It should be obvious why Microsoft has had virtually nothing new to show at game conferences over the past year. Getting 360 ports of PC games isn't going to do anything in the console market - especially now that even mid range PC graphics are far beyond 360 game levels.
??
Remember that the xbox GPU is more powerful than the PS3 CPU. See here for details. It's normal for GPUs in the market to outstrip console GPU performance mid-way through the life of a console. You're trying to make some convoluted argument to support your statement about MS trying to kill the 360, but you're not making much sense.
btw: The new xbox dashboard, netflix "watch it now", gears of war II. Nothing new to show at game conferences over the past year?? There's more, but your claim isn't worth responding to.
Perhaps Microsoft has finally decided they need to stop wasting their time in the console market and will start to turn their attention back to PC gaming.
Do you actually beleive what you just wrote? Look, at this point, I assume you're a PS3 fanboi. That's fine. Why can't you just enjoy your PS3 without dissing the 360? Think about it -- without stiff competition from the xbox, the PS3 itself wouldn't be as awesome as it is. And remember that MS's efforts have brought us the Halo series, GoW, Xbox live. By what yardstick do you think they are wasting their time??
Microsoft now says that it will shut down developer Ensemble Studios (Age of Empires) following the end of work on the company's upcoming RTS Halo Wars.
People use AoE as a generic term but there were several releases of which I loved AoE, AoE2: The Rise of Kings and Age of Mythology. AoM was one of the best selling RTSes for a good time (and so were the AoE* titles).
It's a shame that the staff is mostly being let go. Who's next? Bungie?
Studios that have recently left Microsoft for one reason or another in the last 12 months:
FASA (Shadowrun, Crimson Skies, Mech Warrior, Mech Commander)
Bungie (H A L O, Marathon)
Ensemble (Halo Wars, Age of Empires, Age of Mythology)
Hired Gun (Halo 2 Vista)
Any others?
-516
This of course would be the reason why often when looking at game available on both platforms the Xbox native game resolution is higher than the PS3... if the Xbox 360 can handle a higher resolution, what does that tell me about the PS3 and how they could have (in your words) "graphics hardware so weak" they can't even keep up with the Xbox?
i.e. pretty much biggest cross platform game released recently: GTA4 native res: Xbox 360=720p, PS3=630P
You're correct. MS just doesn't have the corporate mentality to make games. I know some pretty bright and creative people in Microsoft's internal game division that have long since fled. I've had dealings with them as a 3rd party studio. They can be a great publisher (you really just need a lot of money for that, and a willingness to go the distance to make a great product), so long as they stay far, far away from any sort of decision making about the game design itself. But unless the studio has quite a bit of clout, that's not going to happen.
The problem, it's far too irresistible for manager-types to stick their finger in the creative pie of game design. Frankly, nearly everyone *wants* to design games at some level, but not everyone is really cut out for it. I've seen time and time again "helpful" suggestions by publisher's producers that did nothing but waste developer time and throw the project off track. BTW, this isn't necessarily an exclusive problem with MS - I've seen it with other publishers too. But this seems to happen pretty consistently when Microsoft is involved.
It's an eye-opening experience when you listen to internal meetings about how product managers and producers display an amazing arrogance regarding the product. They'll think nothing of belittling the developers (the guys who actually did the damn work on the game), all the while praising Microsoft's effort to "kick ass" and get the product out on time, or nonsense to that effect, ignoring the price damn near paid in human sacrifices by the actual developers in order to meet their timetables. Interestingly enough, I noticed this during the "Age of Empire" days. I'd be surprised if it's improved much since then.
In most cases (although admittedly not all), great games are created from the vision of a single creative director. In the movie business, this is the Director. The power of the Lead Designer varies from studio to studio. In my opinion, giving the designers a largely free hand to implement their vision means the best chance of success for a game. Nothing is bulletproof, of course (Daikatana anyone?), but having producers making game-related decisions seems to be a recipe for mediocrity at best, disaster at worst. Too bad about what's happening at Ensemble... I wouldn't be too surprised if managerial interference is running pretty high for them these days.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
The 360 is still ahead of the PS3 and since both MS and Sony have managed to convince themselves into believing that Nintendo is in a completely different market they'll think they won. Both MS and Sony will probably keep this futile battle up because they dream of being able to tie all kinds of extra services into their console to make more and more money. Meanwhile Nintendo is pulling out the market from under them but hey, that fad is going to end any day and people will go back to their same-thing-with-better-graphics consoles, right?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.