Microsoft recently shut down its in-house Ensemble Studios would be shutting down after their current game, Halo Wars, is finished.

Perhaps because of this, some leaked concept art has come out that reveals that Ensemble was working on a Halo MMO at one point. In retrospect, they probably made the right call when they canned it.

The art for the female characters is pretty deep into the “No, just no” territory. There’s female soldiers in the Halo universe. They wear armored uniforms and carry rifles just like the men. They most certainly do not have bare middriffs and bikini pants.

There’s even a female Spartan in Dead or Alive 4, and while she may not be canonical, she looks a heck of a lot more like an armored soldier than the women in the cleavage Mjolnr suits. Halo has a pretty specific look to it, and it isn’t “generic fantasy pablum.”

I don’t thing a massively multiplayer Halo game is impossible. I actually really liked the Planetside beta back in the day, but dig this mockup on Kotaku. It’s more or less a reskinned World of Warcraft, right down to the twelve hotkeys on the bottom of the screen for your various abilities.

Trying to out-WoW WoW is not the right way to go with the Halo universe. WoW is really good at being WoW. You can’t beat them that way. (Warhammer Online seems to be working to prove me wrong, but I’m gonna stand by that statement for now.)

Obviously concept art and mockups aren’t necessarily indicative of what direction, if any, they decided to go with, but these examples are so far off that I have to wonder if they’re for real.

Of course, it doesn’t actually say that the Halo MMO was cancelled, just that Ensemble stopped working on it. Will we eventually see it in some other form before Microsft sucks Bungie’s intellectual property dry with endless spinoffs?

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