Halo Wars Strategy Guide Strategy Guides and Books

Halo Wars Strategy Guide Product Details

Released on 27/02/2009

• History of Halo: HALO WARS

  HALO WARS - Xbox 360 (2009)

  
  

  With the FPS trilogy now complete, Microsoft began exploring other avenues for the Halo brand. One of the most obvious was to turn the epic conflict between humans, Covenant and Flood into a Real-Time Strategy game. And with Age of Empires developers Ensemble Studios at the helm, Halo Wars was guaranteed great gameplay to match the series' epic scenario.

  Story: 20 years before the events of Halo, human forces are locked in battle with the Covenant across the known universe. Halo Wars sees players controlling the forces of UNSC warship the Spirit Of Fire and uncovering Forerunner technology to aid in the interstellar struggle.

  Gameplay: Typical RTS fare, with a few efforts at streamlining the genre for the console crowd, and controls tailored specifically to the Xbox 360 pad. A story-driven campaign (which could be played in co-op), plus online multiplayer Skirmish mode made Halo Wars one of the few strategy titles to succeed on console, and easily the best RTS on Xbox 360. At the same time the plot, characters and ambience all allowed Halo Wars to fit snugly into the franchise, meaning it also appealed considerably to existing FPS Halo fans.

• Bungie lifts the lid on Master Chief

  Bungie has been discussing the creation of its iconic Halo star Master Chief over at Industry Gamers - thanks for the story, Eurogamer - and the developer has explained why the big green giant tends to keep his thoughts to himself.

  "We left out details to increase immersion; the less players knew about the Chief, we believed, the more they would feel like the Chief," explained Bungie lead writer Joseph Staten. "Immersion was the main goal here. Also keeping the Chief a man of few words reinforced what we wanted to be a tough-as-nails soldierly persona."
  
  Staten adds that to give the game a bit of oomph, Bungie wanted players to understand the Chief predicament. "In the first Halo game we absolutely designed experiences around themes of loneliness and abandonment," Staten revealed. "Halo didn't dwell on the loss of the other Spartans (the closest we came was some of the 'combat dialog' from friendly A.I. For example, 'Look, a Spartan! I thought they all died on Reach...'), but we did absolutely want players sometimes to feel the weight of the Chief's heavy responsibilities. Take, for example, the mission where the Chief leaves Cortana to search for his commanding officer, Captain Keyes, only to end up witnessing the recorded deaths of other soldiers who might have lived had the Chief been with them."

  Master Chief was last seen in Halo 3, of course, but if you want to catch up with his Spartan buddies in something a bit newer, check out last year Xbox 360 exclusive, Halo Reach.

• Microsoft unveils Halo Fest

  Ready to feel old? Microsoft best-selling Halo series is 10 years old this year. A decade of Master Chief! To celebrate, the Xbox giant has announced Halo Fest, a three day event celebrating all things Spartan, which will take place during the Penny Arcade Expo, due to hit Seattle this August.

  The event should be a blast, and will see Microsoft swamping attendees with tournaments, panels and all sorts of prizes. The reason why wee excited, though, is that, even if wel be stuck in rainy old England for the event itself, several websites looking at you, Eurogamer - are speculating that Microsoft might use the occasion to announce a new Halo game.

  With Bungie leaving the series it created with last year Halo: Reach, it over to the franchise new custodian 343 Industries. The team has been hiring game developers left, right and centre for quite a while, and Eurogamer seems to think that a tenth birthday party would be the perfect time to reveal what 343 been up to.

  If you're not in Seattle this August, don't worry too much. We'll have all the news for you right here.

• Halo 4 beta invites are a hoax, warns 343 Industries

  Halo 4 beta invites are a hoax, warns 343 Industries

  David Ellis of 343 Industries, the studio which inherited the Halo series from Bungie, has taken to Twitter to warn fans that offers to take part in a beta trial for the upcoming Halo 4 are not to be trusted.

  If you see a page claiming to allow you to sign up for a Halo 4 beta be advised, IT'S A FAKE, he posted, which is pretty conclusive. It seems fans had been lured in by unscrupulous phishing sites which requested personal account details in return for access to the hotly anticipated FPS sequel.

  Halo 4 sees the return of Master Chief, having sat out both Halo ODST and Halo: Reach, and marks the start of a new trilogy for the award-winning series. The game is expected later this year, exclusively for Xbox 360 of course, but Microsoft has yet to announce any further details.

• The Rise of Multiplayer Gaming

  It's hard to image there was ever a time when we couldn't assume our grimmest war-face, fire up our consoles and do battle with a global army of enemy combatants from the comfort of our armchairs. We're certainly come a long way from sitting hunched over our Commodores, battling as much for keyboard space with our siblings as we were on-screen! But where did it all start?

  Things really started to evolve in the 90s though when LAN parties were the in-thing for the hardcore gaming hobbyist. If the prospect of the violently seductive Doom wasn't enough to keep you up into the early hours by itself, there was no better way to bring the competitive minds of a whole generation of gamers together than by syncing up a few PCs and spending hours, even days, doing battle in the flesh.

  

  The blossoming Korean e-sports scene took the concept even further, and now commands a staggering national audience for televised championships. Blizzard's outstanding StarCraft series rules the roost in this domain, and not even the awesome sequel released in 2010 has put a dent in players' enthusiasm for the best-selling original. The competitive scene for StarCraft II is still buzzing in the West, and it's never too late to get stuck into a game that'll be around for years to come and still has two explosive expansions in the works.

  

  Then there's World of Warcraft, the game that really did change everything. Released in 2004, it arrived just at the right time as the mass uptake of increasingly fast broadband connections became the norm, unleashing a greedy clamour for the world of Azeroth - one so extreme that it saw Blizzard pull the game from store shelves at one point, their servers unable to keep up with the snowballing demand. It now enjoys a seven-figure subscriber count, and with three award-winning expansions under it's belt, there's more content for you to get stuck into than you'll know what to do with!

  

  While consoles such as the sadly-undersold Dreamcast teased gently around the potential for global gameplay, it was arguably Microsoft who broke new ground for console gaming with the launch of the Xbox LIVE service, putting a whole new world of gaming at player's feet - and long before PCs became a breeze to hook up for the living-room lounger!

  So while PC gaming might have dominated the early days of competitive multiplayer, it was titles like Halo 2 that brought the idea of mass gaming to the forefront of game design. While the single-player components of the Halo games continue to blow us away, the passion for Halo 2 was so extreme that players left their Xbox 360s running for days at a time to prevent the eventual switch-off of multiplayer support for all original Xbox games in April 2010.

  

  These days it's show-stopping blockbuster titles like Call of Duty that continue to change the way gaming is viewed and played online by the console crowd. For many, it's the only game they need to buy each year, and new services like Call of Duty Elite are doing even more to add greater depth to the experience, allowing gamers to track, log and show off their finest moments on the battlefield.

  

  No-one can guess what the next evolution in multiplayer might be, but we're already seeing some extraordinary innovation in the likes of Nintendo's StreetPass, allowing gamers-on-the-go to make new friends without ever saying hello, and the awesome potential of the augmented reality features in the upcoming PlayStation Vita. One thing's clear, multiplayer is here to stay and the future can only bring us even closer together.

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