[quote]Halo Wars hit store shelves in March 2009. It was the last hurrah for the talented folks at Age of Empires developer Ensemble Studios. It was never meant to be a Halo game, however, and that unfortunately led to all sorts of friction between Ensemble, Bungie and Microsoft. In an interview to be published tomorrow on GamesIndustry International, Ensemble founder Tony Goodman reflected on the studio's last project. Goodman called Halo Wars a "really fantastic, under-recognized product," [i]but he also lamented how Microsoft forced Master Chief on the project after they were far into development.[/i] "Microsoft was pretty risk averse and 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," Goodman noted. The whole situation was made even worse by tension building up between Ensemble and Bungie. [b]While Bungie didn't have the bandwidth to take on the project on their own, the studio, according to Goodman, didn't appreciate the IP being used in another title in a different genre.[/b] [i]Interestingly, this goes against what Bungie AI specialist Damian Isla told Eurogamer back in 2008. "We've done a lot of talking with Ensemble guys, and we're all really excited about Halo Wars, because from everything we've seen so far it's a very cool, faithful adaptation... Everything we've seen has been very, very encouraging - we're very excited about it," Isla said at the time.[/i] [b]That's not how Goodman recalls it, however. "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]," he noted.[/b][/quote] Just disgusts me honestly. I hate Microsoft and Three Hundred and Three Forty Three Industries so much. I hate Microsoft for just milking the series to death. Part of me really believes Bungie never wanted to milk and extend Halo this badly. Part of me wants to believe they wanted to be done at Halo 3. No terrible Novel Milking, MMO Milking, RTS milking, no Halo 4 5 or 6. No Reach, No ODST. Just done after those Three Games. Halo is dead (to me). I wish it would have ended with Halo 3. EDIT: Should I manually -blam!- out the W word? The filter didn't catch it, not sure if that means it's fine or what... EDIT 2: Apparently I forgot to link the source. Source: [url]http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2012-09-27-halo-wars-bungie-saw-it-as-whoring-out-franchise-says-ensemble-founder[/url] [Edited on 09.28.2012 12:20 AM PDT]