Halo Franchise Creative Director Frank O’Connor went on NeoGAF to discuss Halo Wars 2. In the post he revealed that the game will take full advantage of both Xbox One and Windows 10’s strengths. Below is the post…
“for folks wondering why we don’t “just” port the whole game – realtalk:
While I personally believe it’s an evergreen masterpiece of whimsy and wonder, it would be a year old by the time Forge released, and given the architecture, cloud, matchmaking, etc etc etcetc differences between platforms, it would be neither trivial to port, nor uncompromised in that process, given it was designed with targeted Xbox One perf in mind to begin with.
Both audiences deserve better than that, as you’ll see with Halo Wars 2 onwards, which was designed with Xbox AND PC in mind from scratch and makes the most of each platform’s relative strengths.
Both things were considered very carefully during development and both versions will take full advantage of their respective systems strengths. in this case the shorthand for that without committing to specific features is “Creative Assembly REALLY knows PC RTS games inside out,” and Halo Wars as a franchise has had some innovative and appropriate ways to make the game genre work on console. I think both audiences will be pleased and not feel compromised.
We have to work on things that are sustainable for the studio, and make sense for long term planning. This is something we wanted to do for Xbox One forgers for a long time and is of course an extension of the existing suite. This is a sustain beat for Halo 5 on Xbox One. It’s certainly a big bonus that PC creators and players will get to play around in that sandbox, but that’s not really the primary purpose of the tool.
We knew there’d be latent demands for a full version of the game (as there have been since H2 on Vista), but neither the time nor the finances make sense this far along the calendar. Halo Wars 2 will be a more palatable and straightforward example of the fact that we take PC gaming very seriously as an organization and a studio.”
