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First Person Shooters (Games) XBox (Games)

Bungie to Step Back From Halo Series 49

Posted by Zonk from the last-one-for-a-while dept.
Thanks to the BBC for their articles on the near future of Bungie. With Halo 2 ready to ship, it appears the company is stepping back from the Halo series for the moment. While they have over 100 years of plot fleshed out for the gameworld, plans for the future are in flux. For now, "Most people will take a week or two, some up to a month, but almost everyone will be back here in time for the game launch, to witness it first hand."
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Bungie to Step Back From Halo Series More

Bungie to Step Back From Halo Series

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  • takes place in the world of the Marathon series, right?

    Just like Tribes takes place in the Starsiege/Earthsiege universe.

    So, shouldn't it already have a lot of backstory?
    • Not explicitly, and I believe the timelines don't match up. However, they could always integrate it ex post facto, like they did with Marathon and Pathways Into Darkness. It would be interesting if the Jjaro were the Forerunners.
      • Then Bungie has a ready made, imo decent, story they could just plug in with a little bit of work. Any good/fleshed out backstory just adds to the coolness factor of a game in my opinion*. So that gives them a base to work from, and saves them work in the long haul.

        * - As do those long lost bonuses in the game box like cloth maps.
        • the "backstory" to Halo 2 is being laid out before us as we speak
          www.ilovebees.com
          timetravel, flash-clones, retired Spartan 1's, rampant AI's, Naval Intelligence coverups, illegal refugess; its really good stuff actually

          for those too lazy to really get into the storyline, just go to http://ilovebees.com/humptydumpty.html [ilovebees.com] to hear the story so far
    • Anyone remember a Macworld some years ago that Bungie demoed Halo on a Macintosh, touting that it was all being rendered "real time" on the Mac and blah blah blah and how cool it was going to be.

      Gee...how long did it take to make it to the Mac? I was so looking foward to it also.

      But as I said, this was many years ago.
    • Actually, they've stated that the two worlds are tied to one another, and that how will become appearent someday, however they aren't the same. Given how Marathon Infinity ended, it's not hard guessing how they are tied together.

      *SPOILER*

      Marathon Infinity ends with the AI which you interact with for the majority of the series, merging into an alien AI and surviving to the end of the universe. Where it finially realizes that you were Destinty Incarnate.

  • Whatever the next game is... (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I sure hope the Master Chef is still in it!
  • I thought they'd already stated a Looooong time ago that Halo 2 was the last game in the series. Props though to Bungie that they've been so tight lipped about it, that even now, just a month before the game comes out, even a new screenshot is a big deal.

  • If it makes enough money there'll be a third one (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Polarism ( 736984 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @05:45PM (#10434010)
    Only question being how much money that is..

    • Re:If it makes enough money there'll be a third on (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Sta7ic ( 819090 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @06:49PM (#10434554)
      That's one of the funny things about Bungie, they don't always seem to follow the straight and narrow money trail. Just look at their titles.

      Minotaur.
      Pathways into Darkness.
      Marathon Trilogy (the third, IIRC, wasn't quite done in-house even).
      Myth.
      Oni.
      Halo.

      Now call me naive (STA7IC YOU NAIVE FOOL), but there isn't an entirely straight line here. The Marathon Trilogy won awards in the Mac community and developed a cult following (even if the Windows M2 port didn't go very far), but when asked about a sequel, they responded that they'd be beating a dead horse for money. They finished the story that they wanted to tell, and were moving on.

      Myth was a great piece of work. They left the door ajar for Myth 2, and took that, but pretty much wrapped the story up at the end... unless you want to go backwards or forwards some 1000 years or so in the storyline. Take Two exploited this option when they put together Myth 3, which is pretty much ignored now.

      Oni was a one-shot storyline and great fun. We're not expecting to see any sequels, prequels, or addons here, unless Take Two is *really* after money. Bungie packaged that game up nicely.

      From the day it shipped, everyone knew that Halo 2 was in the works -- they *had* to keep it up, tell more about what that damn blue glowbug is up to. Visiting Earth will be a trip. From the day XBox Live was announced, everyone knew that Halo 2 was necessary for the continued good of XBox Live. I'd be interested in seeing the relationship between XBL subscriptions and Halo 2 shipping.

      But from here... who knows. Hopefully Bungie will surprise us with a new universe to romp through, whether it be scifi or fantasy. Or something set between 1900-1915 or 1950-2100. Postmodernism and historical fiction are both underdeveloped catagories in the gaming department if you don't have a war involved. Whatever they do, keep an eye on Bungie in a couple years, and ignore all the shiny weapons, vehicles, and maps they're sure to bring in over time as downloadable content. It's just another division of the Office of Bungie Mind Control that keeps me ... uhh... where'd my tin hat go?
      • I'd have to say that Bungie has amazing control over what they put out, and that they do a good job of maintaining the plot they set out with. But you do have to hand it to the guys, they sure put a whole lot of extra work into it, that's almost unnecessary. Cortana Letter's [bungie.org], anyone?
        • Yeah, the Cortana letters were completely unneeded, but very cool and generated a lot of hype.

          The little details, while often overlooked are what make the difference in the long run. The Marathon series is good proof of that. You don't need to read all the stuff in every console to get your objectives and complete the game, but they add a lot of depth to the game universe.

          Now, I waiting for Halo 2 just to find out if Cortana DID go rampant... (Theres some good circumstantial evidence of this)
      • They're now a part of Microsoft.

        Now, don't jump ahead of me here, i'm not taking the bandwagon stance of "omgz they're with M$ so now they're just a mindless arm of M$ omgz".

        It's more of a Microsoft has a little more influence now on 'em, so if they wave a few more bucks at them combined with whatever the massive sales will be (and they WILL be massive), there could be a 3rd game in the series, or perhaps an offshot of it, something other than a pure FPS, who knows.

        All I know is that the IP(intellectual
      • There was another game the Bungie people were working on after Halo - that being the mysterious 'Phoenix' [rampancy.net].

        Nobody outside Bungie really knows what sort of game it was, but according to Matt Soell, "the game formerly known as Phoenix has indeed been shelved. The consensus was that we could finish the game but we would not be happy with the result. If the team didn't think they'd enjoy the game as designed, they could not seriously expect others to enjoy it."

        Who knows how many other game ideas they've been h
      • When you said historical fiction was underdeveloped it made try to think of games of that type. The only one I could think of was The Last Express. A war is kind of involved there but not at all in the gameplay. Are there more?
      • I'd sure like to see a sequel to Oni that actually let you remap the keys into a usable configuration without gettin carpal tunnel in your left hand while trying to do a running jump kick...
  • If microsoft drops a bomb and lowers the price of the Xbox to $99 when Halo 2 is launched that would be sweet.

    • Naw (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Wait for Halo 2 to clear out a million units at 49.99

      Then do a price dropped bundle of xbox + halo 2 for 129.99, and xbox, halo, halo 2 for 149.99. And then do a Halo 2 edition xbox with halo 2 + patches and whatever for 199.99 with shinier plastic, master chief action figure and ghost/warthog vehical by McFarlane toys.
  • Maybe they're going to re-do the Marathon Trilogy, but with new technology. That'd kick 13 kinds of ass.
    • Yes, oh my gawd it would (actually, it would kick 7 kinds of ass, just to pick a nice bungie number)
    • I agree that seeing a new Marathon game would be something that every one, or at least all of us not noobs would like to see. I would also like to see the Marathon infinity files released into open source and a new verson of forge and anvil so I could actualy run Aleph one on my computer. Still though with the release of Doom 3 isn't it time for marathon 3. Of course there's no chance that Microsoft would let bungie release it on any thing but Xbox. Don't get your hopes up for any thing new from bungie yet,

      • Of course there's no chance that Microsoft would let bungie release it on any thing but Xbox.

        Right, because Microsoft didn't let them port Halo to PC (via Gearbox).

        Don't get your hopes up for any thing new from bungie yet, remember after this "break" they have to do the PC version of Halo 2.

        Unlike Halo 1, which started as a Mac project, then moved to PC and finally XBox, Halo 2 has always been XBox-based, and Bungie has never said a word about it being on any other platform. Why, then, do you a

    • We still play infinity at work. There is a version called Aleph One that you can use to play it on OSX and Linux now. It can be downloaded at Bungie and also Source Forge. You will need some of the old game files or the demo to run it.

  • So far there's only 2 posts higher than a +2....and that's funny...
  • This was from the same weekly update that was posted earlier about Halo 2 being "ready to ship".

    Uh, surprise surprise - they finished their part of a major software project - when ELSE will a product team finally be *allowed* to take some vacation guilt-free (believe me, trying to squeeze it in at some "lull" in a project schedule rarely works out as planned)? If I was upper management at Bungie (yes, they're part of MS, but I'm sure they still have their own internal reporting structure), I'd definitely g
  • Bungie has had a team of 55 people working on the game for at least 16 hours a day to make sure it was ready in time.

    So, I guess there won't be many bugs in the final product then, right?

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