Ensemble Studios' (of Age of Empires and Halo Wars fame) Halo MMO was apparently killed to secure an Xbox executive's bonus, according to one former developer.
Cast your mind back to Halo's golden years in 2008 - Halo 3 just became a juggernaut, Ensemble Studios' Halo Wars strategy game was on the horizon, and whispers about the same studio working on an MMO set in the sci-fi universe were in the air. However, things took a bit of a nosedive when Microsoft unceremoniously shut down Ensemble.
Now, Sandy Peterson, a prolific developer who worked on everything from Doom and Quake to Age of Empires and the mysterious Halo MMO, has taken to social media to dish on the project.
"In 2008, Ensemble Studios started planning a gigantic MMO set in the Halo universe," the former dev recently tweeted. "We code-named it Titan. It was to take place tens of thousands of years ago, before the Halos were set off and destroyed all sentient life in the Galaxy. I was in charge of the universe-building - planet histories, alien species, etc."
Peterson explains that players could choose to take control of the Forerunners, the ancient civilization that built the Halo rings, or "their enemies, the Covenant." Not to be an insufferable lore nerd, but the Covenant didn't exist as we know them during the Forerunner era, so perhaps the MMO would've found a way to repurpose already recognizable Halo aliens, like the elites and grunts, into a faction with a new name.
And it sounds like the ambitious project was pretty far along, too, as the team "had quest lines all worked out, homeworlds for the species, etc." Microsoft had even projected that it would make $1.1 billion, at the very minimum, but "it was all brought to naught when Don Mattrick realized that his stack bonus was based on income MS had from games in 3 years."
"You see, we estimated 3.5 years to finish Titan if we did it right," Peterson continued. "And that's beyond Mattrick’s drop-dead date. So by firing ALL of Ensemble, he didn't have to pay for our expensive studio for 3 years, and he didn't care about Titan. All he lost was a game studio who never sold less than 3 million copies of everything we made. I don't believe he did justice to Microsoft stockholders but hey - Don started as an EA hatchet man so what would you expect?"
Another Ensemble developer, Dusty Monk, said the project was killed because Microsoft wanted to appeal to a more casual audience and wasn't too receptive to "this very expensive, very long, and very protracted $90 million USD project we were working on"... back in 2010.
Age of Empires eventually came back under a new studio called World's Edge, and multiple other companies were spun up by ex-Ensemble talent. Though that Halo MMO never recovered from the fallout, at least we have these alleged Titan screenshots to puff on for copium.
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