Ensemble Studios had spent practically a decade mastering the real-time technique style when it grew to become a sufferer of its personal success. Its 1997 debut, Age of Empires, had been an immediate hit and spawned a number of beloved sequels and expansions that cemented the studio’s glowing repute. Imitators—some novel, some slavish—rapidly appeared of their droves, and by the mid-2000s, dad or mum firm Microsoft anticipated nothing of the studio aside from to construct on its legacy with one other recreation in the identical vein.
The one drawback: Ensemble wasn’t a lot . “We had been making an attempt for therefore lengthy to do something however an RTS recreation,” says Dave Pottinger, a veteran of the studio who labored there throughout its lifespan. “If we have been going to do one other one, one thing needed to change.” An thought was floated: persist with the RTS format on which the group had constructed its repute, however go away PCs behind to make a recreation for consoles. Ensemble would have one thing new to chew on, and Microsoft could be left joyful. Or so that they hoped.
“Everybody there thought it was a catastrophically horrible thought,” says Pottinger. “We had by no means designed a console recreation, a lot much less a console RTS, and so they did not actually exist again then.” With Ensemble having already spent a few years creating an authentic IP and prototyping concepts, Microsoft gave the studio an ultimatum: rework the sport right into a tie-in for the most important Xbox franchise of the day, or scrap the entire thing. “In the event that they have been gonna take an opportunity on a console RTS, it needed to be tied to Halo,” says Pottinger. “That was the one manner they thought it could promote.”
And promote it did. When Halo Wars hit cabinets in 2009, it offered 1 million copies in below a month. It was the type of industrial success any developer could be pleased with, largely pushed, Pottinger admits, by the Halo model.
But have been these Microsoft executives to have a look at Ensemble’s authentic console RTS as we speak, they could be extra approving. In a far cry from its early years, console technique gaming is the healthiest it’s ever been. Knotty grand-strategy titles equivalent to Crusader Kings III sit alongside the extra approachable likes of Minecraft Legends, action-focused video games like Aliens: Darkish Descent, the extra typical real-time battlefields of Firm of Heroes 3, and administration simulators like Two Level Campus. Simply this 12 months, Ensemble’s PC basic Age of Empires 2 was ported to Xbox platforms with a bespoke gamepad management scheme, and Age of Empires 4 adopted swimsuit solely final month.
It speaks, partially, to the overall homogenization of the medium. “The road between consoles and PC gaming goes away,” says Lewis Ward, gaming analysis director at market analysis agency IDC. He notes that seven of the ten top-grossing video games on Steam final 12 months are additionally accessible on consoles, and publishers themselves are more and more blurring platform distinctions. Sony has ported a number of of its greatest PlayStation exclusives to PC previously few years, together with conventional console mascots like Ratchet & Clank and Sackboy. And the launch of the Steam Deck has allowed gamers to entry the world’s greatest PC storefront via a console-style machine.
Previously, {hardware} disparities have been a serious headache for multiplatform builders, as giant chunks of a recreation must be tweaked to assist the bespoke processes and methods of every console. “These days the CPUs and different {hardware} are literally surprisingly related between all of them,” says Ben Hymers, technical director on Two Level Campus. “Some platforms are extra highly effective than others, however the precise core structure of issues is about the identical.”