The Halo MMO That Never Happened
New leaks show Ensemble Studios was working on a Halo MMO.
Despite so much talk about Halo as a franchise, it is still only a series of shooters. This is set to change with Ensemble Studio’s swan song Halo Wars RTS, however, the rest of the ‘Halo Universe’ is just talk.
Sure, there are books, but they come out of that pool of semi-talented fantasy writers hired to pump of fiction to fill in game lore. The real meat of a video game franchise is the games it produces, and while Microsoft talks up ‘unannounced’ Halo projects like the one Peter Jackson is involved with, it doesn’t actually show us anything.
When Microsoft recently gave Ensemble Studios a post-Halo Wars death sentence, it put a lot of people in the job market. It’s only natural that said people would want to show off their work, and a since-pulled online portfolio for one of Ensemble’s designers has lifted the lid on Halo’s best kept secret – a prototypic MMO.
Gamasutra has a low down on the screenshots, however, its analysis is purely from MMO and Halo ‘experts’ rather than anyone actually involved in the game. What is clear is that Ensemble was taking a very WoW-like approach to the games interface, even if the few shots give no indication whatsoever about the gameplay.
The images themselves have popped up on Flickr, ranging from concept art to environments to in-game shots. Obviously, this was a very basic implementation – odds are it never made it past a proof of concept stage until it was apparently killed a few months ago. It is not a huge mental stretch to consider that this may have been a factor in Ensemble’s demise.
It doesn’t necessarily mean that we won’t see a Halo MMO, though. Consoles have traditionally been a stumbling block for MMO developers – a large part is due to the nature of Xbox Live and the complicated revenue structures that make life difficult for the MMO model. A smaller factor is interface, but that is more an issue with cross platform games than an inherent console problem.
So, feasibly, the only company that could avoid the revenue issues would be Microsoft itself. Add to that a deal Sony has with NCsoft for PS3-exclusive MMO development and the market is going to get competitive. If we look at Microsoft’s stable of IP, Halo really is the only franchise established enough to sustain an MMO, especially considering it would bring a ‘fresh’ sci-fi approach to a market saturated with orc-decapitating gameplay.
This is purely personal opinion, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find out the Peter Jackson-tied game is an MMO. The only way to enter such a product-loyal market is with a bang (and a large wallet). It just makes for such a compelling combination of story telling and technical prowess. Add to that a decent developer, and Microsoft would find it hard to fail (it must have learned something from fucking up Vista, after all). It just remains to be seen if it can put the right pieces together.
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