Ensemble Claims Bungie Tension Over Halo Wars

Halo creators Bungie apparently disapproved of 2009's Halo Wars as it was essentially "the whoring out of [its] franchise", according to the founder of Ensemble Studios.

In an interview with Games Industry, Tony Goodman revealed some of the stresses and tensions that accompanied Ensemble making its final game.Apparently the game was never meant to be linked with Halo in any way, but Microsoft forced Master Chief on the project late into the development cycle amid fears that the game wouldn't sell well otherwise.

"Microsoft was pretty risk averse," He said. "They said, 'I don't know if we want to take the risk of creating strategy games on a console. We'd feel better if Halo were attached to it.' The difficult part of that was it took the game back about a year in development, and I think it never quite turned out the same. They just said, 'Why don't you just paint over what you have with Halo stuff?' But things aren't quite that simple."

What was more complicated, however, was the fact that this created a great deal of tension between Bungie, who created the Halo franchise, and Ensemble, who had already put an immense amount of time into the game. Apparently Bungie didn't have the manpower to take on the game itself, but was deeply unhappy with its IP being used by another company and on another genre.

According to Goodman, "Another problem was that Bungie was never up for it... Bungie was kind of sore about the idea. What they called it was 'the whoring out of our franchise' or something. Yeah, that didn't create a great relationship between us and Bungie; they viewed us as someone infringing [on their franchise]."

Ensemble Studios was established in 1995 and created the Age of Empires series of games before being acquired by Microsoft in 2001. It was then used as an internal studio before being closed down after the release of Halo Wars in 2009 and all its upcoming titles were cancelled.

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I really thought that Halo Wars was generally fun, and wasn't as much of a let-down as ODST. It's a strategy game, I like strategy, and I like Halo, besides for the lack of units and diversity of ways to play, it was a solid game in my opinion. I'd give it around a 7/10 alltogether, and definatly wouldn't say that it was "Whoring" the franchise.

I liked ODST a lot, but it was made by a smaller team than Halo 3 was, they had the concept of the game all perfect, but the characters and plot were pretty sloppy.

If they had improved the engine slightly, and tightened up on the character aspect, it would have been a much better game, but I was disappointed.

Perhaps 343 should step it up a notch and try to make another ODST game, or perhaps an ODST trilogy, that would be something fresh without the boring master chief save the day crap, if they made the story really dark, with lots of death and proper stealth aspects, it would be something amazing.

Yeah... Master Chief can get a bit boring but I personally don't like ODsTs. Maybe regular Marines would be kinda fresh and cool.

Marines, nah, that would be so boring, it would be to much like other shooters, it would be far to generic.

Oooooh... Yeah I forgit about that. You got a point. I sounded like a COD developer there. "I KNOW! IN MW4, WE'LL HAVE THE OLAYER PLAY AS A US MARINE!!! IS THAT NEW OR WHAT???"

Exactly haha, I tried to say that in the least critical way possible. lol