Trivia / Halo Wars

• Creator Backlash:
  • Bungie was not happy about their IP being used by another developer for a different genre. As such, they had little participation with the game. However, they seem to have eventually made peace with it; both Halo: Contact Harvest and "Dr. Halsey's personal journal" (which came with the Limited/Legendary editions of Halo: Reach) contain a fair number of direct references to Halo Wars.
  • Likewise, Ensemble also disliked having to make a Halo RTS. The game was originally supposed to be an original Sci-Fi IP before Microsoft forced them to turn it into a Halo game.
• Creator Killer: Despite the game itself being successful, the Troubled Production caused Microsoft to shut down Ensemble Studios before the game even launched.
• Cross-Regional Voice Acting: A mix of Los Angeles and Texas voice actors are featured in this game.
• Executive Meddling:
  • Why the game became a Halo title. The order to turn it into one was expected to speed up production, but actually pushed back development a full year. The execs thought it'd be easy to just port in Halo models from the previous games, not realizing that there's a big difference between a full-scale tank model for a high-res FPS and a tiny differently proportioned one for an RTS, not to mention all the new units that had to be made to fill gaps in the meta-game.
  • Halogen, a fan-mod of Command & Conquer: Generals was halted by Microsoft to prevent it from competing with Halo Wars.
• Throw It In!: Graeme Devine, the lead writer, made an entire press guide for the planet Arcadia. Bungie's writer Joseph Staten liked it so much that he included a mention of Arcadia in Halo: Contact Harvest.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The control scheme was designed separately for a yet-undecided original property. Microsoft was not confident about the sales of a new series as a console RTS, so they demanded for it to be a Halo game instead.
  • Incidentally, this game is What Could Have Been for the Halo series as a whole; Halo: Combat Evolved was originally planned as a strategy game when the game was still anticipated to arrive on Macs.
  • Unused plot ideas involved assaulting a Covenant mine and a crashing comet carrying Forerunner artifacts.
  • Ambient wildlife, such as alien whales on Harvest and wampa-like chaefka, were planned. The chaefka eventually became canon by appearing in Halo: Hunters in the Dark.
  • In a Reddit AMA, Graeme Devine revealed his notes for the opening of (a then non-existent) Halo Wars 2. The Spirit of Fire drifts in space for three years, piloted by Serina and Anders while Cutter is in cryo sleep. They follow a UNSC signal that calls them to a Forerunner dock, where it turns out to have been sent by none other than Sergeant Forge himself, who was teleported to the site just before the shield world blew up. This plot was discarded by Halo Wars 2.
  • There were plans to implement the Flood as a playable faction in multiplayer, but the studio was shut down before that could be tested.
  • Instead of representing Tech Levels, power was going to be a resource that functioned just like supplies. Halo Wars 2 notably reimplements this system.
• Working Title: The in-house alpha had the codename Sway.