Creative Assembly and 343 Industries have wrapped up core development on Halo Wars 2, announcing that the game has officially gone gold. This means that the base game’s final code has been compiled and burned to the gold master disc and is ready to be shipped off for manufacturing and retail distribution.

The news comes courtesy of a tweet by the head of 343 Industries, Dan Ayoub, who posted a picture of the team with the new AI in Halo Wars 2 with the text “Gone Gold” at the bottom.

Halo Wars 2 went Gold today! Great working with this incredibly talented team! #HaloWars2 @Halo @aarongreenberg @XboxP3 pic.twitter.com/kPBxUeioxD

— Dan Ayoub (@Danayoub) January 18, 2017

The game was announced during the Xbox E3 presentation and has slowly been making its way toward the February 21st release next month.

We haven’t actually seen a whole lot of the game. There’s been a lot of secrecy surrounding the actual gameplay of Halo Wars 2. What we have seen are a number of cinematic sequences and story related promo pieces helping acquaint us with the main villain in Halo Wars 2, the separatist rogue leader named Atriox. The brute chief leads an uncompromising mercenary army composed of deadly killers, criminals and outcasts from the Covenant army who have taken up arms under his command.

The story for Halo Wars 2 sounds incredibly intense, and they’ve done more to characterize Atriox than all of what 343 and Microsoft did for Halo 5 and Spartan Locke. In fact, the announcement trailer for the RTS sequel was far more captivating than any of the smaller marketing tidbits they released for the last mainline Halo game. If you don’t remember what the trailer was like, you can check it out below.

Good goodness… that trailer. It nails everything perfectly. If there were actually enough decent trailers in 2016 to fill out a list, this would have been at the top.

Anyway, gamers won’t have to wait long to get their hands on Halo Wars 2. Fingers are crossed that they do Atriox and Cutter right proper and give us a good, healthy, military-style rivalry that can help revive the Halo franchise, because right now the whole thing is hinging on life support after the Halo 4 and Halo 5.