Ensemble Studios' Canceled Project Was Halo MMO 118
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.
Bad News for Halo Wars? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
WoW UI (Score:2, Interesting)
Just off the top of my head... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:And nothing of value was lost.. (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:And nothing of value was lost.. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Bad News for Halo Wars? (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, the original version of Halo (pre-Microsoft) was to be a MMO game first and foremost, and Apple used to demo it at Mac events. Then Microsoft bought up Bungie, nerfed Oni and killed all development on Halo that wasn't XBox-relevant.
Kinda sad, really, that the dream of MMO Halo was never realised. The ringworld would have made an interesting battleground.