Microsoft announced something apparently dire that lead a certain prominent blog I won't bother naming to declare "Halo Wars Goes Dark on Dec. 15". Darn! I always meant to get back into that game. It was pretty good for a real time strategy game on a console system. There was a lot of clever stuff in there. Now I only have until December 15 before it shuts down and I lose my chance forever? That's downright Electronic Arts!
However, given the source, I figured I should find out what was actually going on before shaking my fist impotently at Microsoft. Turns out "going dark" simply means turning off stat tracking and folding the official forums into the rest of the Halo community. That's hardly "dark". It barely even qualifies as "dim".
It does mean all the wonderful numbers you can see here will be gone. And if that happens, it means the Covenant will have lost the war, because they've only won 40% of the matches. So I guess that's it for the Halo wars.
To be fair, the stat tracking is important to a lot of players. Particularly the kinds of people who play shooters like Halo, which reaches an e-sports level of minutiae with all the numbers for weapon usage, accuracy, kill/death ratios, and so forth. Hardcore shooter fans love that sort of thing. But RTS players? Yeah, sure, we like to analyze data after a match, and that's not doing away. But I'm not convinced we're as invested in stat tracking as the typical Halo player.
So for the record, Halo Wars will still work fine after December 15. At this point, it can sit in perpetuity on the list of games I keep meaning to get back into.
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