It’s no secret that Ensemble Studios, the team behind the Age of Empires series and more recently, Halo Wars, were working on a Halo MMO (codenamed Titan) prior to their closure. What’s new though, is that the project was officially cancelled because Microsoft felt that they’d do better to pursue the casual market, after becoming fixated on the numbers Nintendo’s Wii console was pulling in.
Speaking to IncGamers, Dusty Monk – formerly of Ensemble, now Windstorm Studio’s founder and President, revealed the thinking behind the decision to cancel the game, which the team had been working on for nearly 3 years.
“There was a bit of a changing of the guard at Microsoft at this time,” he said. “Microsoft, from its gaming division, was really changing directions. They were looking really hard at the Nintendo Wii and they were really excited by the numbers that the Wii was turning.
“This was about the time that Microsoft decided that its Xbox platform and XBLA really needed to go more in the direction of appealing to a more casual, broader audience.
“So part of this changing of the guard at Microsoft came along with the changing of the attitude to this very expensive, very long and very protracted $90 million project we were working on, which was Titan. To cut a long story short, Titan was closed down.”
Monk says that the game was “absolutely going to compete against” World of Warcraft and remains confident that they’d have had a shot at it too.
“Even though a lot of people talk about how you just can’t build a WOW killer, I absolutely believe that we could have built an MMO, if Microsoft had maintained their commitment, that if it hadn’t been a WoW killer it certainly would’ve competed.”
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