Nearly 20 years ago, the makers of Age of Empires tried to make a Halo MMO, and then the studio closed: ‘I still feel like no-one has really done the action MMO I see in my mind’

Rob Fermier has enjoyed a fascinating career, with his name attached to an impressive list of games, including Thief, System Shock and Age of Mythology. He co-founded C Prompt Games in 2018, the studio responsible for digital board game Heretic Operative and the Paradox-published 4X, Millennia. But between those periods he worked on one of the few actually good console real-time strategy games.

Halo Wars was developed by Ensemble, the studio behind Age of Empires. But it wasn’t the only Halo game Ensemble was involved in. It was also working on a Halo MMO.

“Part of it was that we loved MMOs,” Fermier tells us. “I still play World of Warcraft to this day, from day one. And it was a chance for us to bring something more action-oriented. I still feel like no-one has really done the action MMO I see in my mind. There have been a number of MMOs that have had action-based elements. But we had in that prototype a great sequence where you had a bunch of vehicular action, and a bunch of more traditional MMO cooldown management action, and it was all in this open world.”

The folks at Ensemble were also just big Halo fans. “Some people were more sceptical about that than others, but I loved the idea of taking that Halo world and giving people insight into a different part of it, letting them immerse themselves in a part of it they’ve never seen before.”

It sounds like it was a challenging project, trying to take a series with best-in-class gunplay and explosive vehicle combat and apply it to an MMO with entirely different needs and mechanics. “Obviously, it was a very different kind of shooting mechanic than you had in the base Halo games,” says Fermier, “and we had a lot of work to figure out how that was ultimately going to land.”

Bungie wasn’t especially involved in it at the time, though Fermier says if “that game had really gone forward, I think we would have gotten a lot of very valuable input from Bungie about how to make it feel authentic to the Halo experience while being its own separate thing. But it’s a challenge, obviously, when you’re working on any kind of licence like that. Where you carve out what’s your own, how you’re respectful of what’s there. There are a lot of interesting challenges around that.”

Ensemble had some flexibility because “it was set in a different part of the universe from the normal Halo games,” says Fermier. “But one of the things that MMOs can do very powerfully is really immerse you in a space—partly just from the hours that you spent there. I’ve probably spent more clocked gameplay hours in Azeroth than I have any other place. I love MMOs, I would like someday to make one.”

Fermier worked on the MMO for almost five years. It was “probably the biggest single game” that he worked on that “never saw the light of day”.

Tragically, Halo Wars would prove to be Ensemble’s final game. Despite being one of the most important strategy developers around, it closed shop in 2009, sticking around for just long enough to see the RTS genre fall into disrepair as publisher and player interest waned. There was still an appetite for MMOs around this time, of course, but “various business reasons,” as Fermier puts it, sealed both the MMO and the studio’s fate.

Despite the years between the events, it might explain why Fermier co-founded C Prompt and, along with co-founder Ian Fischer, created his first ever self-published game in Heretic Operative. He describes it as “a digital board game-ish sort of experience; if you’ve played Pandemic or Arkham Horror, it’s very much in that vein of pretty tense timing and resource management”.

He may have an impressive list of game credits, but the largely unknown Heretic Operative is the only game in his whole career where he “actually makes any money when people play or buy”.

Does he think we’ll ever see anyone else take a crack at turning Halo into an MMO? Halo Infinite is still out there doing its thing, and we’re getting a remake of the original game. But Microsoft is pretty risk averse, and MMOs are the most risky things around. It certainly wasn’t willing to invest more in it back in ’08.

“It would have been very expensive, and it would have taken a big commitment that at the time clearly Microsoft wasn’t willing to do. I think they could have been able to do it if they wanted to, but there’s a lot of political support that you’d have to shore up in an organisation like that to make a big commitment.”

He thinks Microsoft could absolutely do it now, though. “I have no visibility into what they’re doing at all right now, but if I were Microsoft Games, I would definitely be figuring out how to use some of the genius that Blizzard has developed over the years in World of Warcraft and bring that to other settings.”

Coincidentally, the project name for the Halo MMO was Titan. The same name given to Blizzard’s own cancelled second MMO. Surely it’s fate?