A lot of you have been suggesting that there should be space battles in Halo Wars 2. Hear is a list of key reasons why it wouldn’t work and it won’t happen:
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Balancing: The main thing that makes or breaks an RTS is the balancing of the Units and characters. Obviously a space battle would favor the covenant. In every part of halo, the covenant have shown they can win 50 to 1 fights in space. More importantly, how would leader powers work? I don’t think a carpet bomb or arby’s rage would work very well, especially while he’s suffocating in space. The UNSC are meant to be a ground force and they simply cannot balance them enough and make it believable. - Rock-Paper-Scissors: At the base of Halo Wars was the Rock-Paper-Scissors format between the unit types. The entire game revolved around this format and was simply built around it. Microsoft has said in the past they wouldn’t start from scratch with a sequel and that they liked the format of the original game, so Halo Wars two will have a similar format since they can’t keep a part of Halo Wars without keeping the format. So why does this matter with space battles? There is no way that a space battle can encompass infantry, one of the legs of the rock-paper-scissors format. It also couldn’t hold most air units and vehicles. It would only revolve around a small amount of units that simply wouldn’t be in the game in any other match. - Time: The game comes out in less than a year. Most high production games take two to three years to be perfected. As I mentioned before, Space battles would involve adding units and mechanics that could not be utilized in other parts of the game. It would almost be like making another game with how much different and independent things they would have to add. They simply don’t have the time to make space battles and give us a balanced and bug free game. (I should note that we don’t know how long production has been, I would guess it started with a small team around the time that teaser appeared in another game at E3.) - When have we ever played in a space battle?: I’m not talking about on a space station or in a sabre against few small fighters, I’m talking about a large scale battle, with dozens of cruisers and ships. The answer is we have never had one. It’s uncharted territory that the franchise has never figured out. The franchise is already taking a large, very large leap from the main titles with Halo Wars 2 and they can’t risk moving any farther away if they wish to grab the main titles’ player base. The only space battle we ever had in reach didn’t work very well either, it was very easy and it felt as if you were just in a banshee and you could have been anywhere, but you just happened to be in space. The franchise has never found a way to make space battles work, and I doubt they are going to be doing it with a small side title (sorry I don’t like it either, but HW is). My guess is we will see more space battles in Halo 6, or we never will.R.I.P space battles
I respectfully disagree with you. Your points are well thought out and good, but I believe that there is still distinct potential for space battles to happen.
- I believe that the developers would find a way to balanced battles, specifically making the UNSC have to use numerous weaker ships, while the covenant ships would be much more expensive, albeit more advanced. The book canon isn’t always seen in the games, so I don’t think that it needs to be followed to the letter. Leader powers would need to be carried over into space, but perhaps individual leaders could command units, similar to Empire at War or the Covenant in the original halo wars.
2.With space battles rock-paper-scissors can still work - if they are choosing to keep that model. Simplify Fighters (bombers in particular) could attack capital ships, capital ships could beat frigate class vessels, and frigate class vessels could be primarily anti-air platforms. Empire at War did a very good job at this in particular.
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You are very right on this point. If they haven’t already started working on this yet it probably wont happen, but we do know that they looked at the forums for ideas before development started, so they may have already started designing for space battles.
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This is the only point where I wholeheartedly disagree with you. While maybe not in an FPS, we have witnessed many space battles (Earth in Halo 2, High Charity in Halo 2, Ark in Halo 3). We may not have been able to see much in the way of tactics, but 343 did release fleet battles, and the books do talk about space battles quit a bit. I personally think that an RTS platform would be the perfect platform to expand on this aspect of the universe. I don’t think that they will shy away from this simply because its a big jump in gameplay. Personally I believe that they may see this as a natural evolution of the series.
Halo Wars, while maybe considered a spinoff, still has a lot to offer for those that love it, and a dedicated fan base to advocate for it. Hopefully we will find out more soon.
I was thinking it would be interesting to see a galactic conquest kinds of setup where players send ships to planets and fight it out on ground. Players could still create ships and what not, but the actual focus wouldn’t be space combat, but more like a “board game” style approach to battling it out in space.
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> I was thinking it would be interesting to see a galactic conquest kinds of setup where players send ships to planets and fight it out on ground. Players could still create ships and what not, but the actual focus wouldn’t be space combat, but more like a “board game” style approach to battling it out in space.
Empire war and Command and Conquer 3 have a similar approach to that.
That didn’t stop Halo wars (while it was more even on the ground, it still heavily favored the covies) Also Space Battles was more akin to 3 to 1(Cole) So the average admiral probably had around 4-5 odds (not 50-1). Just make the UNSC units cheaper and in bigger squads, bam balanced and sticks somewhat to the cannon (just like Halo wars)
Yeah we probably won’t on the grounds that 343i does not seem to like space battles (Look at the Diadact’s ship, the UNSC ships just became the background, along with super macs)
I don’t really agree with your arguments, but I don’t want space battles so I won’t bother debating them
While I agree that Halo Wars 2 will not have space battles, I do think we will see them in a future RTS title. One does not simply read the stories about space combat in the novels and not want to experience them. Imagine Star Wars: Empire at War Halo style and with new graphics. It would be the best RTS for the next decade no question.z