Microsoft closing Halo Wars website
Migrating community to lose online stats.
Why is Microsoft closing the Halo Wars forums and getting rid of the game's online stat tracking? So that Halo Wars can move under the Halo Waypoint umbrella.
From 15th December, game chatter will be resurrected on Waypoint's better moderated and better supported website.
Microsoft realises that losing online stat tracking "will be rough on a lot of you", but said the decision to close the Halo Wars website wasn't made "lightly".
To make up for it, anyone migrating to the Waypoint site will get an exclusive forum avatar. Cor, lucky.
There's also an update for Halo Wars due on the same day. Title Update 5 fixes Theater issues and untangles some of the game-code that talks to the Halo Wars website.
"Unfortunately, it won't include many of the fixes that we all wanted it to include," the Halo Wars website admitted.
Halo Wars, a real-time strategy spin-off, was made by now-defunct studio Ensemble for Xbox 360 and was released in February 2009. With that brand and that developer (Age of Empires), Halo Wars was tipped to be the game that brought RTS to console - in much the same way Halo brought FPS to console.
Did it? Kieron Gillen judged for Eurogamer.