Microsoft’s Halo studio, 343 Industries briefly took the stage at tonight’s The Game Awards, to reveal a new trailer for next year’s Halo Wars 2, along with a big new incentive for those who pre-purchase the upcoming real-time strategy spin-off digitally. If you pre-order an ‘Ultimate Edition’ copy of the game on the Xbox Games Store or the Windows 10 Store, you’ll get, “Special preview access” to Halo Wars: Definitive Edition from December 20th.
Halo Wars: Definitive Edition is, naturally, a current-gen remaster of the original Halo Wars, which at this point is exclusively being offered as a freebie to those who purchase Halo Wars 2’s Ultimate Edition. It’s currently unknown whether Halo Wars: Definitive Edition is planned to be sold separately. For those who do secure the remaster, it will offer improved graphics, additional achievements and every last bit of DLC that was made for the original last-gen build of the game at no extra charge.
The original build of Halo Wars released exclusively for Xbox 360 in 2009, and is one of the industry’s only examples of a well-received real-time strategy game that is exclusively built for a console. Halo Wars: Definitive Edition will finally expand the experience to PC, the genre’s usual platform of choice however, at least for anyone who owns Windows 10, and isn’t afraid to put down an extra amount of money early for a digital copy of Halo Wars 2’s Ultimate Edition.
Halo Wars 2 will release for Xbox One and Windows 10 PC’s on February 21st, 2017. The sequel, and by extension, the remaster of the original, will be part of Microsoft’s new ‘Play Anywhere’ incentive, which will grant both versions together with a single purchase of either, and will allow for cross-play, cross-save and shared achievement capability between the two platforms.
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