The existence of a Halo MMO is an ongoing rumour, but how likely is it?
It’s a safe bet that if anyone was going to be able to pull off a successful MMOFPS, it would be Bungie and Microsoft with a version of Halo. Of course it might just be on 360, but why wouldn’t MS try to tap into the Blizzard millions with a cross-platform version? This is more than wishful thinking: the clues are out there. No, they really are.
Why do we think there’s going to be a Halo MMO? Well, MS have said that their next game is not going to be a game starring Master Chief, that alone should set some lateral-thinking bells ringing. LOTR director Peter Jackson is, apparently, overseeing a game based in the Halo universe at his Wingnut Interactive studio in New Zealand, and some have tipped his commitment to make “filmic games” to be part of an MMO spearhead. I’m unconvinced by that- filmic says “single player” to me.
But there are some other clues that are littered around the internet. A number of these are rather spurious, and amount to little more than speculation. But the idea that consoles would do MMOs where text-input wasn’t really necessary (ie a shooter where the partying was handle by an augmented FPS interface) is a potent one.
More concretely, however, there’s DonnyBrook. That’s the codename for Microsoft’s MMOFPS research project. This hardcore research paper is what we’ve got from that so far. In short, it’s the maths of how to make an MMO action game work when things start to get really busy. This alone suggests that Microsoft are rather interested in the technology that will found an MMOFPS.
The concept is explained in a little more detail in this video interview with MS’s Jacob Lorch:
So that’s lot of people, fighting like in FPS, but at MMO numbers. Interesting indeed.
Lorch’s research is being done with Quake 3 – free source code makes it a cool toy for this kind of research – but there’s only one studio related to Microsoft that could potentially make full use of this technology. Given the propensity of publishers to rely on proven intellectual properties it’s hard to see that MS would launch an MMOFPS – a currently unproven genre – on anything less than its most solid title. The Halo world is already being massively fictionalised and fleshed with books and comics, ripe for more games set in the same world, especially the content-hungry MMO.
There’s also the degree to which Microsoft has to look at what its peers are doing. Sony announced “Massive Action Game” at E3 – I do hope that’s the final title – which intends to put 256 people into the same combat environment. If nothing else, a game of moderately-massive multiplayer aspirations gives the big publishers reason to be concerned, especially if MAG is a PS3 exclusive, as it’s bound to be.
Not only that, but it’s been a long, long time since Planetside – almost long enough to forget the hurt – and the MMOFPS gauntlet is overdue another shake. This time around, we’d suspect, someone is going to get it right.
Thanks to PC Gamer UK’s Tim Edwards for the heads up on some of these links.
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Halo 3 != Good
The bits with vechicles were good but the rest of the gameplay was/is meh. Nopt as visceral as GoW, not as tactical as Rainbow Six, not as daft as Stranglehold (to pick three console peers). Very much a last generation shooter.
Not to mention the risible storyline and dreadful characters.
Er, just so you all know… Despite it being pushed to the side to keep the games action-packed and fast-paced, the Halo series has a MASSIVE, MASSIVE backstory. Check out the official books for some insights into the Halo universe.
Forget a Halo MMO, it’s kinda had its day, they got it right with the console shooter, they key part is playing as a unique character like the Master Chief – change that and it becomes just another military shooter (albeit one with quite a unique style)
Rather – and I thought this immediately upon seeing Sony’s Massive Action Game – add a Warhammer 40k licence! 40k is ALL about the huge action, loads of characters each badass enough on its own to feel good to play as, but each a big cog in a galaxy-sized machine.
Take everything that’s great about the games, and put it in a class-based military world.
Imagine you meet up with your buddies. You, an infantry (jack of all trades) with a sniper sub-class, party up with your friends. One’s a vehicle technician, with an infantry sub-class. The other is an explosives specialist, with a technology sub-class (active camo, radar enhancements, etc). Now, working together to get the most out of your unique group of class set-ups would be intense. Vehicle guy drives the Hog, you man the gun, explosives guy sits passenger with a rocket launcher.
Have mini-campaign missions AND PvP stuff. Going to an uncharted planet to kill some Brutes or ridding an established human colony of a flood infection would be great. Fighting for galactic territory would also be great. Have both.
They should also have levels, skill trees, customization, medals (rewards for specific missions/tasks), and some social stuff (holographic training rooms, barracks, etc?). This has great potential. Also, if it’s decent, I think it would practically -print money-.
1.with out Master Chief there is no Halo!!
2. Halo will be FPS!!!
3. Only on Xbox 360
4. Coming 2009 September
5. We have no plan to make Halo MMO fans will be upset with that
Up till the invention of BFRs, or Big F’ing Robots as I like to call them, I enjoyed planetside. Been hoping for a new one 40-64 player matches are starting to bore me. Need some good old guild rushes to a base.
I will admit that halo has always seemed like it would work nicely with this, even though I really do not like halo.
I still reckon a Warhammer 40K MMO would work great if it was done in the Planetside mould. Way better than Halo ;-)
BR working in a similar way so you can start off immediately effective. City fights, big tank battles, 3 or 4 mates working together to control a titan, thunderhawk gunships dropping squads behind enemy lines, terminators teleporting in, drop pods. It COULD be ace!
Did you hear about Crimecraft? It was in one of the major gaming mags this month. Supposedly a Free to play, third-person-shooter, using the Unreal 3 engine.
You don’t read RPS nearly enough:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008/04/15/crimecraft-mmo-unreal-powered-and-free/
lol my bad. Just stumbled upon this article from a story over at Kotaku.
I’m sure I read in an ancient EDGE issue when they first started talking about Halo that it was originally envisioned as a ‘persistent multiplayer world’. And I remember seeing initial screenies where there was no Masterch(i)ef either.
It sounded brilliant, and I suppose it might still be.
Yes Jon it was originally going to be a MMOFPS for the PC until Microsoft acquired Bungie and made it an Xbox exclusive.
Anyway, I’d be interested in playing this but it would need to be a drastic rethink on the MMO experience. Cut out the grind, take away the loot, no more levels. Just give me ranks and let me customize my weapons and armor so I can tune my guy for specific situations. When I think MMOFPS, I think that instead of a server browser you just have a staging area to run around in and then you take off for a fight somewhere, and then you have huge Battlefield-style fights with a few hundred people taking part.
But if I had to go kill Flood for hours so I can use a better assault rifle while worrying about getting ganked, I would never even start playing.
I’m sure I read somewhere that this was basically how the code in Halo3 worked anway, I could be wrong but I’m sure I read it… prolly in the bungie archives somewhere.
I totally agree with you Cody, a Halo MMO would have to offer something different and refreshing from the current norm of having to endure hours of grinding to have fun.
Halo was not originally a MMOFPS. From the stuff shown before the MS buyout there wasn’t even a hint of multiplayer.
As for some story. I’m not sure how a story for a MMO would fit into the Halo story. But believe me. Halo has story. I have 5 novels, 1 graphic novel and a couple of comics on my bookshelf which, at some point, will be joined by a 6th novel and 2 more comics if Marvel ever sort it out.
A rebuttal would be that if Halo needed several novels to make its story unique and interesting, it is because Bungie failed miserably at telling it on their own.
And I don’t especially agree, but have been politely informed that that is because I am unintelligent.
Homunculus, they announced the KotOR MMO already, so speculation is kinda pointless
Also, to the people saying that Halo started out as an MMOFPS, it didn’t, it started out as a RTS, then became a 3rd Person Shooter, then finally morphed into the FPS that we now know it as.
And in my opinion, a Halo MMOFPS would be cool, despite what people are saying (look deeper than just what they say in cut scenes!) there is quite a bit of backstory, especially with the Forerunners and all. But yeah, grinding would be sort of lame, and I don’t think leveling would be that great, but they could still offer advancement by rankings, armour, and weapons, and possibly titles or whatever. No need for leveling < (^_^)>. And they could make it so both PvP and PvE could be used to rank up to a certain point, then, in order to go beyond that thresh hold, you would need to do both aspects of the game.
“Given the propensity of publishers to rely on proven intellectual properties it’s hard to see that MS would launch an MMOFPS – a currently unproven genre – on anything less than its most solid title. The Halo world is already being massively fictionalised and fleshed with books and comics, ripe for more games set in the same world, especially the content-hungry MMO.”
I’d say the opposite would be true. The LAST game MS would try an unproven technology on would be Halo. If the MMOFPS tech doesn’t work as intended on a Halo title, people would freak and the Halo franchise would be severely diminished.
As to those who suggest that Halo books and graphic novels show the lack of a story in the game, I say Halo (for good or bad) is the type game that would interest people enough to write multiple novels within its universe. I think people need to acknowledge what an amazing thing has happened with Halo — it was originally published as an interactive video game which then became popular and interesting enough to make people want to write books about it. I’m not aware of too many video game titles which have done the same.
I’ve never fully understood the venom directed at the game. If it’s not your cup of tea, fine; leave it a that. Why people must then go on and take every opportunity to bash the game is a mystery to me. I guess it’s a “popularity breeds contempt” type of thing.
Ok, i played planetside back in ‘03 till bfr’s were released and even a while after that. The reason it worked:
PVP only, everyone i killed was another person, the ONLY ai that was in the game was from automatic turrets which shot when you got in range, which is perfectly resonable however if you were to add in ai facitons… Itll complicate things to say the least.
Ranking system: The ranking system, while it took a while to hit max level was very well done, you leveled up while playing the game which was to take over bases and to kill people. Because it was that which made the game fun in the first place, it worked REALLY well.
REALLY good net code: I remember the battles were we had 150 of our guys vs 150 vs 150 in a 1km square area… That kind of net code is what made it survive, very little lag, servers almost up 100% of the time
Storyline: lets be honest it was terrible, but the gameplay was immense and in an MMOFPS that youve played for a long time you dont care about the storyline but its the gameplay that wins it
Although, what killed planetside: the BFR’s, and wow came out, they were trying to attract customers and keep old ones but instead they just unbalanced it to hell
Halo mmo? It can be done, although it shouldnt. As we are all aware of halo has got a horrible name from the 13-14 year old kids who do nothing but sit on live and think they are amazing from getting kills, ie the X-Box generation as i call them the ones who havnt played pc games, the same ones who say controller > keyboard/mouse. Also i believe that alot of them would go humans cause they wanna be master chief unbalancing sides. Also I dont really see what halo could offer in terms of gameplay. I mean sure they could do a planetside clone but i dont see that going down well… If they did it like bf2/halo they would have done nothing new and itll just be like people have said with a 250 man teabag orgy.
The technology behind the serverside code is incredible, it’s gonna be one of my studies at university.
Everyone played PlanetSide until the BFRs, it seems. I still can’t get over how SOE fucked that game up.
The certification system is the best level-up scheme of any MMO I’ve played. Battle rank offered versatility, not innate advantages. You could easily kill a BR20 as a BR5 if you were skilled enough. All levels had access to the same weapons.
Indeed, the game encouraged teamplay by rewarding base captures, squad formation, and antiaircraft kills with generous XP bonuses.
Halo novels: Halo has millions of avid/enthusiastic/rabid fans. A percentage of these will buy novels with the word “Halo” written on the front. Therefore these novels exist. They exist outside of any artistic imperitive (which isn’t to say they don’t have merit, but they were born from econimoics, c.f. all spin-off novels evah)
To be honest, PS is still pretty damn good. It manages to draw me back time and time again.
I must admit, I hated the BFR’s when they were released too, and all SOE’s reasons for doing so. But there aren’t that many kicking about compared to initially, and they aren’t that hard to take down.
I just re-subbed a few weeks ago, and whilst Werner is occasionally dead since the US server merge, there’s still nothing that compares to the scale. Been in quite a few massive battles on Gemini, less so on Werner unfortunately.
PS was the first and last game that gave me that “epic” feel.
Hopefully this new technology can expand on that even further. Fingers crossed for Galaxyside.
I liked the clever mix of fps and rpg in Mass Effect. Maybe taking that and adding more MMO and action multiplayer fighter elements could work real well.
Mass Effect is a third person shooter not an fps >.> However masseffect might be more fesable. There would still be problems about latency due to mass amounts of people but youll get that anywhere.
hey Noc last time i checked games like shadow run that are cross platform online with xbox and pc nobody plays pc because they arent accurate enough to shoot aiming with a controller easily owns a mouse. So you got it backwards dude. Try to jump shoot and turn while throwing a grenade and crouch when you land on a pc its too sluggish.
That is ridiculous, PC has always been better at aiming, control, and accuracy.
Hope its true
You can use these tags:
Ok, i played planetside back in ‘03 till bfr’s were released and even a while after that. The reason it worked:
PVP only, everyone i killed was another person, the ONLY ai that was in the game was from automatic turrets which shot when you got in range, which is perfectly resonable however if you were to add in ai facitons… Itll complicate things to say the least.
Ranking system: The ranking system, while it took a while to hit max level was very well done, you leveled up while playing the game which was to take over bases and to kill people. Because it was that which made the game fun in the first place, it worked REALLY well.
REALLY good net code: I remember the battles were we had 150 of our guys vs 150 vs 150 in a 1km square area… That kind of net code is what made it survive, very little lag, servers almost up 100% of the time
Storyline: lets be honest it was terrible, but the gameplay was immense and in an MMOFPS that youve played for a long time you dont care about the storyline but its the gameplay that wins it
Although, what killed planetside: the BFR’s, and wow came out, they were trying to attract customers and keep old ones but instead they just unbalanced it to hell
hey Noc last time i checked games like shadow run that are cross platform online with xbox and pc nobody plays pc because they arent accurate enough to shoot aiming with a controller easily owns a mouse. So you got it backwards dude. Try to jump Funky Badger says: July 18, 2008 at 10:55 amHalo 3 != Good
The bits with vechicles were good but the rest of the gameplay was/is meh. Nopt as visceral as GoW, not as tactical as Rainbow Six, not as daft as Stranglehold (to pick three console peers). Very much a last generation shooter.
Not to mention the risible storyline and dreadful characters.
Halo mmo? It can be done, although it shouldnt. As we are all aware of halo has got a horrible name from the 13-14 year old kids who do nothing but sit on live and think they are amazing from getting kills, ie the X-Box generation as i call them the ones who havnt played pc games, the same ones who say controller > keyboard/mouse. Also i believe that alot of them would go humans cause they wanna be master chief unbalancing sides. Also I dont really see what halo could offer in terms of gameplay. I mean sure they could do a planetside clone but i dont see that going down well… If they did it like bf2/halo they would have done nothing new and itll just be like people have said with a 250 man teabag orgy.
The technology behind the serverside code is incredible, it’s gonna be one of my studies at university.
The existence of a Halo MMO is an ongoing rumour, but how likely is it?
It’s a safe bet that if anyone was going to be able to pull off a successful MMOFPS, it would be Bungie and Microsoft with a version of Halo. Of course it might just be on 360, but why wouldn’t MS try to tap into the Blizzard millions with a cross-platform version? This is more than wishful thinking: the clues are out there. No, they really are.
Why do we think there’s going to be a Halo MMO? Well, MS have said that their next game is not going to be a game starring Master Chief, that alone should set some lateral-thinking bells ringing. LOTR director Peter Jackson is, apparently, overseeing a game based in the Halo universe at his Wingnut Interactive studio in New Zealand, and some have tipped his commitment to make “filmic games” to be part of an MMO spearhead. I’m unconvinced by that- filmic says “single player” to me.
But there are some other clues that are littered around the internet. A number of these are rather spurious, and amount to little more than speculation. But the idea that consoles would do MMOs where text-input wasn’t really necessary (ie a shooter where the partying was handle by an augmented FPS interface) is a potent one.
More concretely, however, there’s DonnyBrook. That’s the codename for Microsoft’s MMOFPS research project. This hardcore research paper is what we’ve got from that so far. In short, it’s the maths of how to make an MMO action game work when things start to get really busy. This alone suggests that Microsoft are rather interested in the technology that will found an MMOFPS.
The concept is explained in a little more detail in this video interview with MS’s Jacob Lorch: