Microsoft Kills Halo Wars Stat-Tracking and Leaderboards

Halo Wars was a pretty damned decent RTS, set in the expansive Halo universe. It did pretty good numbers for a console RTs, and still has its dedicated fanbase.

Which is why Microsoft’s kicking it in the balls comes as a bit of a surprise. Next month, a patch for the game will go live, killing the game’s stat tracking, as well as its accumulated leaderboards. The game’s official website, HaloWars.com will also be getting the axe.

"There will be a fifth Title Update for Halo Wars. Unfortunately, it won’t include many of the fixes that we all wanted it to include," said an announcement on the official site.

The patch will fix some issues regarding the game’s pretty awesome cutscenes, but will also sever connections to HaloWars.com and its features.  "This was a fairly significant amount of work, as we wanted to be sure that multiplayer for the game still functioned properly without HaloWars.com and other backend support." "So the forums will disappear and so will online stat-tracking," they clarified.  The patch goes up on December 15th – so if you’re on the top of said leaderboards at the moment, that’s how long you have to bask in the glory.

"In an effort to provide the Halo Wars community a lively, active, and well-moderated set of forums for discussion,” says the announcement “we are soon going to be transitioning the Halo Wars forums to Halo Waypoint’s forums." People, naturally, are pissed.

Check the vitriol being spewed forth on the game’s soon to be dead official site. You may recall that Halo Wars was developed by RTS veterans Ensemble Studios – also responsible for Age of Empires – who were shut down by Microsoft early last year.

Last Updated: November 22, 2010