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Ensemble Studios' Canceled Project Was Halo MMO
simoniker writes "Following the recent announcement that Microsoft-owned Age Of Empires creator Ensemble Studios would close after the completion of Halo Wars, Gamasutra has discovered that a now-canceled Halo MMO was in development at the studio, unearthing prototype UI and level screenshots of the Ensemble-developed project. The prototype art, which was at one point made available on an Ensemble-linked online artist portfolio website, further confirms previous rumors that the studio was working on an MMO based on the Bungie-created sci-fi franchise."
We discussed the future closing of Ensemble Studios a couple weeks ago. The set of pictures which seem to be screenshots and graphic models from the canceled Halo MMO has been posted on Flickr. In other Halo news, Bungie may be teasing the announcement of the next game on their website.
Perhaps Halo Wars isn't living up to the hype and expectations and Microsoft is looking to cut there losses. On the other hand, the AoE series was always excellent, so that would be pretty surprising.
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill
anyone notice that one of the UI screenshots looked just like WoW, just done in glowing neon, without the gryphons on the end of the skillbar? heck even the inventory slots are on the end and look like bags.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
We didn't need another WoW clone. They're right.
I prefer to go past the movie cliches and nuke my karma.
By the way, have you heard of the GNAA?
I wouldn't think a Halo MMO would be feasible. Its FPS. Hellgate failure anyone? (And i had high hopes for that one) with an EPIC main character which CAN be done, Conan does a half decent job of it but you can't let everyone play a spartan.
In Conan you are a warrior just like everyone else. You are better than common warriors in theory but everyone has the same potential that you do. The halo universe is extremely unbalanced. There are only X number of spartans, certainly not enough to populate an MMO. And playing Halo MMO as a marine would be more of a Team Fortress with experience and items type game. Not a bad idea for a game, but an idea that doesn't fit the Halo universe at all.
I also can't see the fans of the Halo gameplay appreciating roll-to-hit combat, nor do I see typical MMO players taking to the twitch and adrenalin style of play that would cater to the FPS gamers. You will end up alienating one full half of the group a Halo MMO appeal to.
There are exceptions to each rule (I like both styles of play myself and I really enjoy the story to Halo) but you have to appeal to a very large group of people to keep an MMO going. It was a smart decision to cancel the project and I appreciate the fact that they were willing to forgo some quick easy cash in order to work on something else.
And a sequel to Oni. Frogblast The Vent Core FOREVER!
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
Yes, the reflections are all wrong.
Don't forget that it seemed to borrow liberally from Half Life, but it didn't have nearly as good of a story as Half Life, nor the level design. Yet Halo seems to be unfairly credited as this innovative thing. In reality, Halo had many features cut when it was first moved from the Mac to the XBox and wasn't nearly the game that was promised. For many people however, it was their first experience at multi-player FPS as opposed to just playing against the computer. That multi-player experience is what so many enjoy, and why Halo is so highly regarded.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I remember reading about someone licensing a Multiverse engine and the Firefly property about 4 years back, and then never hearing about it again, but then tons and tons of MMOs were canceled in droves around that time.
http://www.multiverse.net/press/pr20080902buffy.jsp?cid=6&scid=9
According to that fairly recent press release, Firefly is "delayed".
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
You are forgetting one thing that the Xbox does. It makes Microsoft relevant. If Microsoft can stop being associated with Windows and Office which most people have issues with, and start being associated with the Xbox, they have mindshare. It also helps keep at least one product from being "generic", for example, Live Messenger can easily be replaced with Pidgin, or AIM, Office can be replaced with another word processor, Windows can be replaced with your favorite operating system, Live Search by Google/Yahoo/etc, the Zune with an iPod or generic MP3 player. The Xbox and Halo represent one thing that can't be a drop-in replacement. Just look at the video game feuds of the '90s, Sonic wasn't a drop-in replacement for Mario, Digimon wasn't a drop-in replacement for Pokemon, granted, both of them were successful, but it wasn't a drop-in replacement the way that if someone decided to take a Linux desktop, theme it perfectly like your XP desktop, theme OOo to be like Office, etc, and the person I doubt would ever notice a change. On the other hand, give someone who is playing Mario a Sonic game and they would notice the change.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Meh, Kratos feels like another one of those forced coolness characters like Dante (the DMC3 intro was so fucking cheesy...). Better than those emo suckers that seem to be all the rage as heroes these days but not by much.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Blizzard doesn't do "innovative", they do "right". Starcraft wasn't something terribly new (though RTSes didn't have such diverse factions before it) but it was so well made it was simply better than the competition. If you look at (semi-recent) Blizzard games that's how they all go, not very innovative but very well done and always outperforming the competition. And what they do best is mass-market appeal. There are always the niche games with their fans that scoff at the lack of depth in the mainstream games but maybe the mainstream really doesn't WANT that much depth.
And just as Blizzard won markets with mass-market appeal so did Halo.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Halo was much, much more rooted in 'Marathon'. That was a Mac game, and one of the best Mac shooters ever. The plasma gun, in particular, and its charging up was a very Marathon touch. This is also because the same company, and many of the same employees, made both. I was upset when Microsoft bought Bungie and kept it off the Mac: it would have been a 'must-have' application for Mac owners, and a real incentive to get Macintoshes.
The Halo-hype is best understood once you look at its historical context. Yes it wasn't the first ever FPS, not the first FPS with an immersive plot (at least one other posting here compares it to Half Life, something I immediatley recognised when playing it for the first time). What it was, however, was the first FPS that Console players were drawn to en-masse (see below for N64 goldeney note).
The simple fact of the matter was that prior to Halo mouse + keyboard was the only way to play an FPS with any degree of satisfaction, to the extent that Quake III for Dreamcast practically required you to buy these too. FPS's were very big on the PC platform at the turn of the century but had had a very rough time being accepted on the consoles for both this and cultural reasons (the same problem was faced by point and click management-em-ups like Civilisation, for example). Being an FPS nut at the time I found it very hard to get into the various console FPS's, include ports like Quake II on the PSX.
Most of the time this is because they got the controller setup fundamentally wrong and/or wouldn't let you configure your own. Most glaringly they insisted on having Forward,Back and yaw on the left stick, very very very rarely (if ever) were you afforded Forward, Back and strafe on one stick with pitch and yaw on the other. Often (and this is true for Doom on the GBA for example, I'd waited years for hand held Doom to be sorely dissapointed!) strafe was bunged on the shoulder buttons because the developers didn't know just how important they were. Halo got the controller config exactly spot on: you could effectively circle-strafe, and as such it became the first Console FPS that anyone could actually play.
The next major flaw was auto-aim, obvious to any mouser is the ability to aim in a fraction of a second to any pitch/yaw point around you and get a nice headshot, simply impossible on a console. Past FPS's usually had it take you an hour to line up a shot, drastically slowing things down and stunting the potential gameplay as a result. Halo got the autoaim spot on - it's so cunning you might never notice it's there - this combined with the ability to strafe allowed proper battles with hoards of baddies for the first time.
The offshoot of all of the above is that Halo was console gaming's Doom moment - N64's Goldeneye therefore might be similarly married up to Wolfenstein 3D. The half life (pun intended) of Doom has been immense, with an active community almost 15 years on, myself semi-inclulded. This is what we're seeing on the Consoles now, it looks so strange to us fogeys here, wishing the console kiddies would get off our lawns because whilst we can see that the game is well put together and the plot well executed we've seen it all before in one guise or another, but those "console kiddies" (apologies to those who are consolers but not kiddies anymore!) had not seen it before making it all new and exiting to them. Even though by our reckoning they're 15 years late.
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
Latency is the issue for an FPS MMO. No 20 ping? No audience...