When Halo went back to its RTS roots

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As Microsoft sets out to reinvent Halo yet again with Halo 5: Guardians - festooning Master Chief's crenelated bulk with jumpjets and pop-out holographic reticules, like a long-serving plastic Christmas tree - it's worth digging up the last game to take similarly drastic yet successful liberties with Bungie's old action sandbox. Ensemble's Halo Wars rumbled onto shelves at a comfortable time for Xbox, a year or so ahead of the first Kinect sensor, and was spared the pressures and mammoth sales targets of a core numbered Halo. But in other respects, the project's challenges leave Halo 5's in the shadow.
It's not just that Halo Wars was a real-time strategy game for controllers, that hardest of hard-sells. The game began life as a different IP, unburdened by association with one of the leading lights of another genre, and was completed on the eve of its developer's closure, Microsoft having fallen out of love with real-time strategy at large. According to studio founder Tony Goodman, the platform holder's belated request that the game be rebranded set work back a year, as Ensemble struggled with the same elementary difficulty now faced by 343 with the squad-driven Halo 5 - the extent to which Halo's space opera and unit ecology are predicated on the antics of a single warrior who can flatten tanks with his fists.
"Don't get me started on the Spartans," reflects Ensemble's former director of technology and lead designer David Pottinger. "Toughest unit we ever had to deal with at Ensemble. Taking the iconic face of an entire franchise and balancing it to [work with rock-paper-scissors RTS design] was difficult enough that we just cheated. The UNSC could get a handful of Spartans and that was it. In the hands of experts, they were deadly." You won't win many battles outright using Spartans in Halo Wars - they can't, of course, be recruited from the off - but any opponent who goes overboard on heavy armour may live to regret it, as costly vehicles are pounced upon by swaggering super-soldiers and turned against their owner.
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