By Jim Rossignol on July 17th, 2008 at 2:37 pm.
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.
17/07/2008 at 14:44 cyrenic says:
Halo is a triumph of accessibility, but it’s actual gameplay is the height of mediocrity. They’d have to change a lot of the fundamental gameplay for me to even consider playing an MMO version.
Of course the PC version probably won’t come out until 3-4 years after the Xbox version :D.
17/07/2008 at 14:45 Jim Rossignol says:
Have you played World Of Warcraft recently?
17/07/2008 at 14:49 cyrenic says:
Nope, not recently. WotLK’s announcement last year and the focus on arenas as the end all of PvP killed WoW pretty fast for me :P.
17/07/2008 at 14:59 Noc says:
I feel like Jim’s point went completely over your head. So much so that I made that good ‘ole “Whoosh” in real life.
Still, it’s worth a chuckle.
[Edit: though it DOES occur to me that if they're doing a multiplayer FPS, then PC players, simply by virtue of having a more accurate control mechanism, would have something of an advantage over their thumbstick-bound counterparts on the console. I'm not sure how one would go about solving this.]
17/07/2008 at 15:00 Jigglybean says:
Star Wars Galaxies is a rather poor MMOFPS after the huge changes made back in 2005. I remember when trying to shoot an NPC. They would just run off into the distance like something from Benny Hill!
17/07/2008 at 15:00 Bozzley says:
I think I see what you did there :)
17/07/2008 at 15:02 AbyssUK says:
Please god I hope your wrong.. the last thing the gaming community needs is MMO teabagging… honestly
17/07/2008 at 15:04 cyrenic says:
Yeah I figured I was falling into a trap by responding to that, but figured I’d be honest :D. Less than 5 hours a sleep resulting from a newborn doesn’t help my already dull wits.
17/07/2008 at 15:04 Lukasz says:
One of my wishes is too see FPS with hundreds of players fighting on the same map.
I’ll buy xbox just to see that shit.
17/07/2008 at 15:07 Koopa says:
Anyone know if MAG has a commander, like Battlefield games? 128 players per team running without proper leadership could be rather chaotic.
17/07/2008 at 15:12 propanol says:
MMOs are about giving you an immersive, deep experience that keeps you coming back for more. Seeing as Halo has about the depth of a spoon, I don’t think it would be very suited for an MMO conversion.
17/07/2008 at 15:21 Noc says:
Koopa: the beginning of the MAG trailer talked about a “Chain of Command,” so I assume so. But then it launched into a generic pre-rendered scene of future-war that looked more like a benchmark test than gameplay, so I don’t know how seriously to take it.
And Propanol: Like the Warcraft universe, for example. There was all sorts of depth there before WoW came out, wasn’t there?
17/07/2008 at 15:25 Tak says:
Good god. I know they could polish it up and make it smooth, but Halo just isn’t good enough to put hours and hours into like an MMO would call for. It’s good, but not that good when you stack it next to the other shooters out there. It would be a fanboy sell through and through. Also, why isn’t my spell-checker picking up ‘fanboy’, it’s a real word now!
They’d be better off dumping Halo’s conventions and just sticking to the world (which is great as far as shooter worlds go), and doing it properly on the PC first. Thumbsticks are no substitute for a mouse.
17/07/2008 at 15:26 Kestrel says:
COD4 has no backstory to speak of and very effectively balanced RPG lite elements. If Halo devs could take that and apply it as is to a persistent world they’d make a mint. Your standard FPS player doesn’t need lore.
17/07/2008 at 15:26 Gap Gen says:
The hardcore research paper link doesn’t work for us serfs unendowed with Microsoft secure access, by the way.
17/07/2008 at 15:26 spd from Russia says:
Halo on a pc? – crap
17/07/2008 at 15:27 CrashT says:
Is it just me or did they get those videos of Quake 3 in the wrong order, the second one is much more jerky than the first.
17/07/2008 at 15:33 Mattress says:
Halo, depth of spoons?
I thought that both Combat Evolved and Halo3 contained some of the most engaging and engrossing experiences I’ve ever encountered in an action game, especially when playing co-op with a friend. I’d still hold Halo as an example of how adaptive AI can lead to emergent gameplay in otherwise mostly linear environments.
As for MMOFPS’s; Massive Action Game despite it’s title looks a bit bland from the trailer, but you never know… 256 people on a server could be entertaining as long as it doesn’t suffer from battlefield 2 syndrome – an experience I had where I was lost, both in a map and in a steeEP learning curve whilst being hampered by lag…
A Halo MMO though could be interesting as long as it sticks to it’s parent game’s principles of letting the entertainment come from within the players actions and not a constrained environment (which is why I don’t like Halo3 online).
17/07/2008 at 15:40 Jim Rossignol says:
Just to underline this entire discussion: MMO is a technology, not a genre. Don’t get confused about that.
17/07/2008 at 15:42 Alex says:
Imagine that.. a constant chorus of 256 14-year-old American boys squeaking “FAG!!” at the top of their little lungs.. this is the stuff dreams are made of!
17/07/2008 at 15:57 Gap Gen says:
FIX: The paper link works if you remove the ‘s’ from ‘https’. Fixed link:
http://research.microsoft.com/~lorch/papers/iptps2007.pdf
17/07/2008 at 15:58 iainl says:
Now, I’ll start with a disclaimer that I’m doing most of my gaming on a 360 these days, as my PC has been left behind in the dark ages (every time I think about upgrading to play some fancy game, for instance last time Oblivion, it works out cheaper to just grab a console that can handle it).
But anyone who claims Halo lacks either depth or long-term appeal needs to look at the stats for how popular 3 remains on Live, and play through the campaign on the higher difficulties (where actual tactics are needed to get through). The amount of depth achieved through the use of the shield to avoid HL2′s health-management boredom and the ways the different weapon combinations balance out different gameplay styles is phenomenal.
Also, Halo Wars is looking rather spiffy. A version of that with each troop a real person would be great.
But I’m going to go out on a speculative limb, and wonder if the response-sensitive MMO work might be for Bizarre and the PGR series…
17/07/2008 at 15:59 Gap Gen says:
Alex: I dunno, Planetside kinda worked, but I guess it wasn’t Halo branded and so the legions of voice-com teens were less legion.
17/07/2008 at 16:02 Homunculus says:
If we’re talking mumorpeger speculation crystallising around recently emerging factoids…Lucasfilm recently filed patents for something entitled The Old Republic and another for Star Wars The Old Republic, the wording for which describes “Entertainment services provided on-line…interactive computer game software”.
Which may be construed as evidence of development of a Knights of the Old Republic mmo title.
17/07/2008 at 16:06 Dan says:
It could be interesting. It would need both PvE and PvP environments though, and a way of playing one without the other. For me Capture the Flag gets boring regardless of how many people are playing it at the same time (probably gets less interesting as the numbers go up, in fact), although other people seem to be able to play it endlessly. But the idea of an FPS dungeon-style instance is intriguing, and the grind of “kill 10 (whatever-monsters-they-have-in-halo)” would, I imagine, be less dull if you were in first person, playing co-op, against mobs with decent AI.
17/07/2008 at 16:10 Hmm-hmm. says:
Or perhaps: making a certain type of game work in an MMO-type environment requires different technology than that same type of game without the MMO part.
Personally I see MMO as a form of game (if it’s a game at all) which can fit many genres.
17/07/2008 at 16:16 Ian says:
@Noc: With Shadowrun didn’t they have to handicap the PC players so the poor pad-ites could keep up?
17/07/2008 at 16:26 Cooper says:
“why wouldn’t MS try to tap into the Blizzard millions with a cross-platform version?”
I think allusions to MMO games needing to ‘win over’ WoW players need to be banned.
You later point out that MMOs are not a genre, which is exactly my gripe with these kinds of statements. I would happily consider playing a well designed MMOFPS, but you would have to pay me to play WoW.
There are people out there who don’t play MMOs, (or – and whisper this quietly – play something other than WoW (I used to play EVE a bit, and still pine for what SeeD could have been)) who don’t necessarily have any particular aversion to the premise of an MMO. They in themselves represent a potential market.
Unless a game is an obvious direct contender for WoW in genre and setting (Warhammer?), it’s a little bit specious to claim that any potential MMO should, or needs, to try and poach WoW players. Not to say that WoW isn’t hegemonic, but to refer to it – just because it is – seems a bit ingenious, and compunds this idea that Blizzard somehow have the MMO market cornered? (Whereas, I hope you’d agree, it’s still very young and underdetermined?)
Anyway, I’m reading to much into it and having a rant into the wind – but the constant referal-back (without any attempt to make the reference relevant) to WoW whenever the MMO acronym comes out gets a bit tedious.
EDIT: Also – on topic – despite looking forward to the possibility of a well-balanced MMOFPS – I don’t think a Halo MMO would convince me, not only because of the voice chat I’ve overheard on my mate’s XBox (and – let’s be honest now – the PC is hardly immune from this) but because It’s not a universe that has ever intrigued me. But, if Bungie get the balance right – make it a game where my piss-poor deathmatch skills don’t matter so much (support roles plskthx)- and don’t fiddle with FPS mechanics too much (anyone else hate the way bullets came out of your shoulder in Stalker because of the RPG ‘accuracy’ element?) I’ll probably give it a go.
17/07/2008 at 16:31 Alex Taldren says:
I’d disagree and consider the MMO to be a genre. An example of “technology” would be a game engine, like the Unreal III or Source engine.
And, even if MMOs weren’t a genre originally, they’ve definitely turned into one by all sharing certain characteristics that games from other genres lack–things like questing, dungeon raids, persistent enviornments that change while the player is offline, etc.
17/07/2008 at 16:39 Alec Meer says:
I think (understandable) objections to Halo’s bunkum plot and characters should be pushed aside – it’s actually a ridiculously suitable setup for a Planetsidelike. Eternal war between man and alien – as simple and as appealing as that.
17/07/2008 at 16:53 The_B says:
So, interplantery racism, eh?
17/07/2008 at 16:57 Cooper says:
Alex:
Yes, but they don’t need to be all like that – that’s the hegemony of WoW that I hate – it’s like Blizzard built the box and developers are scared to wander outisde it.
Alec: Actually, you’re probably right about the setup. I’ve always wished that Enemy Territory QW was somehow persistent – for similar reasons – pretty simplistic backstory, but certainly effective.
EDIT: Actually, that might be it – Halo always seemed to be trying too hard, but never quite pulling it off. At least with the Strogg it was simple. They want to eat people (ok, biomechanically engineer our bodies to add to their army). People didn’t want to be eaten. Gritty, messy war ensued
17/07/2008 at 17:00 The Shed says:
This is really weird; about a year or two ago I remember saying that one of the few big franchises/ FPS’ that would make a good MMO action game would be Halo. And here we are.
17/07/2008 at 17:05 Andrew Wills says:
“There are people out there who don’t play MMOs, who don’t necessarily have any particular aversion to the premise of an MMO.”
You can include me in that statement. I *desperately* want to get involved in a good MMO, but not a single one of the current titles out there appeal to me on any level.
I’m holding out hope for either a Fallout MMO, a Mass Effect MMO, or a decent slighty-in-the-future-MMO-with-a-great-central-plot… erm, MMO.
I even attempted to make an MMO on the HL2 engine once, as nothing appealed to me, so I figured “sod it… I’ll make my own!”.
17/07/2008 at 17:05 Derek K. says:
You guys be nice to Planetside, dammit!
Since the server merge, it’s been hellaciously fun. I kill you all!
17/07/2008 at 17:22 RichPowers says:
PlanetSide died with the BFRs, Derek :(
Why should MMOFPS games exist?
The only answers I can come up with are large-scale teamwork and combined arms warfare. How can you actually make those things happen, since they rarely do on 64-person Battlefield servers? You need a command structure. Okay, so how do you implement a command structure that facilitates teamwork without alienating the 98% of players who inevitably won’t be a part of it? How do you get virtual soldiers to follow orders? Have virtual commissars and courts martial?
So without large-scale teamwork and combined arms warfare (interestingly, few RTS games have mastered the latter, at least in terms of coordinated attacks), why should I play a Halo MMO or MAG instead of a regular 32-person FPS? Oh, right, so I can grind for weapons and stuff I can get instantly in other FPS’s :)
17/07/2008 at 17:24 Jamie says:
Replace everything in Planetside with Halo assets and i’ll play it. Non-stop
*get rid of those stupid ass robots though
17/07/2008 at 17:27 The Shed says:
Sorry for the DP. Unless someone has posted before I get this done. (Ok I should have predicted that would happen)
People seem to be assuming here that if it is in fact a Halo MMOFPS, that the gameplay would be exactly the same as the O.G. Halo Trilogy. Seriously. It probably won’t have any similarities. Maybe the old classic grenade system or movement/ vehicle entering system, but it probably won’t have the much of the same actual gameplay. If it does, I’ll be pretty amazed.
@Ian- Yeah, they had to do that. I love both the board and the pad, but both work to totally different ends. Kboard/ mouse gives you responsive, accurate, rapid movement capabilities; where the pad is better for slow, consistent, heavy movement, if done right becoming so much more satisfying (what made the original Halo: CE so damn great, a thing which the sequels lost rapidly). Both are great when apart, but cross-platforming something like that is just not a good call, for the Shadowrun handicap reason.
EDIT: Considering the ‘MAG’ trailer had a bit where it showed a large command screen, that pretty strongly suggests there’s gonna be some kind of command system. At least for one person. If it was for a group of people- that would be sweet.
17/07/2008 at 17:32 Meat Circus says:
Hmmm.
Will it be as shit as Halo 3? I’m not sure I could take that.
17/07/2008 at 17:40 iainl says:
“support roles plskthx”
Halo multiplayer doesn’t have these currently (well, to a large extent, anyway – obviously you’ve got the different weapons to balance) because everyone in the game is running around in that big stonking Mjolnir armour. Everyone is the Master Chief, because he’s the superhero that the single-player campaign requires.
I can only hope that any massive Halo instance won’t be full of them, or it would just be silly – you’ll need some other classes just to make it interesting, if nothing else. Make all human-side players basic Marines, give the grunts better respawn times than the heavy classes to reflect their cannon-fodder nature; there are all sorts of stuff they could do fairly easily.
17/07/2008 at 17:42 James says:
Add me into the “Waiting and wishing for a decent MMO” pile, too. I’ve been peeking into trials and tests of a handful of MMO’s of the last twelve months and have yet to find something that I would be happy to sit down and play for any real space of time, let alone subscribe to.
On the thought of MMOFPS’s, though, isn’t Battlefield Heroes of a similar concept? I mean, I could be reading the previews wrong, but most of the ideas we’re talking about here seem to be present in some form or another there. Feel free to let me know if I’m mistaken, which I more than likely am.
17/07/2008 at 18:03 aiusepsi says:
Some of my fondest gaming memories involve dropships or bombers in Planetside. Massed, planned assaults lifting off from base, the marshalled ranks of troop and tank carriers, orders cascading down from the generals on the command-channels, battles rolling across continents…
The Halo fiction really would work excellently for that sort of thing.
17/07/2008 at 18:16 spirit7 says:
Planetside was genius.
17/07/2008 at 18:42 Duoae says:
@aiusepsi :
Yeah, there was this one continent push were we had a load of tanks, Gals and Reavers. It was great – and we coordinated really well by cutting off vehicle supplies to linked bases and similar stuff.
I actually preferred it closer to launch – where bases were more independent and taking a base seemed harder.
17/07/2008 at 20:03 spirit7 says:
A mate of mine was the first CR5 on his server. It’s astonishing that you could command thousands of people, and they’d obey!
17/07/2008 at 20:17 Subjective Effect says:
A new Planetside has been too long coming. I’ve been grumbling about this for ages now. Why set it in a Halo world? I’d hate that. Something fresh would be much better. There is Huxley of course, and now this MAG for PS3… who needs the XBox?
17/07/2008 at 20:23 bobphile says:
This isn’t a well kept secret but one I haven’t seen reported on.
MS is working on a Halo MMO with Ensemble and Bungie for at least the last 3 years.
http://kotaku.com/gaming/ensemble-studios/ensemble-mmo-167789.php
http://www.edge-online.com/features/ensemble-talks-mmo-plans?page=0,2
17/07/2008 at 20:55 GeorgeR says:
Hrn, then I only wonder what it was that caused them to push back the announcement? If this was actually it…
17/07/2008 at 21:04 wb says:
Not a huge Halo fan. HUGE Marathon fan, though, so I invoke the right of “back in the day” to weigh in here.
Back in the day, Bungie managed to balance the fiction *and* the ludology: the ‘thon series has an insanely intricate backstory, all of which had to be read on a series of in-game terminals, teased out of the binary padding in the software and art assets, and pieced together from various willfully obscure Usenet messages. And their gameplay design was hardly limited to “console FPS,” veering as it did from Marathon to Myth to Oni to the original demos of a Mac-based third-person tactical action title called Halo. So I do believe that if anyone can pull this off, it would be Bungie.
Hell, it might even get back to Bungie’s original vision for Halo. (Though I’d have even more faith if they’d hired me back in ’98. Bastards.*)
* I don’t mean that. Really. I love you all. Return my phone call? Please?
The MS paper referenced is pretty interesting, though I’ve only skimmed it: it basically proposes a series of low-bandwidth methods of reducing latency in a many-object shared world. The key insight is a set of heuristics to determine which objects a given player is paying attention to (basically: are they close? Are they in the player’s view cone? Did they interact with the player recently?); a series of interaction types that can be rapidly agreed upon within a peer protocol (which brings up some potential security issues); and hooking objects outside a focus set into a local AI that seeks to create a reasonable set of behaviors between position and activity updates. Obviously, the really interesting stuff is in their source code, but their projections at the end of the paper suggest that an average DSL connection could probably support 250-300 players per area of interest.
However, Microsoft does a lot of interesting research that doesn’t directly tie into their business operations — they’ve become a lot more like the old *nix companies in publishing their research. I wouldn’t take this paper as particularly dispositive of anything, especially given how much trouble game companies have getting over the NIH syndrome.
17/07/2008 at 23:02 Jonathan says:
There really is nothing stand out about the Halo universe. The gameplay is slick, the AI is still one of the best around and they did a fantastic job of streamlining controls for a controller. But I just don’t think there’s enough lore to make anything but a 1000 man death match. Which given the Halo fanbase could be like the inner most circle of hell.
18/07/2008 at 10:55 Funky Badger says:
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.
18/07/2008 at 11:13 Muk1000 says:
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.
18/07/2008 at 11:39 NiceMissMayonnaise says:
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.
18/07/2008 at 11:44 Trickyicky says:
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-.
18/07/2008 at 13:27 xbox360 says:
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
18/07/2008 at 13:29 BottyBotsworth says:
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.
18/07/2008 at 15:44 Bursar says:
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!
18/07/2008 at 15:48 fey says:
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.
18/07/2008 at 16:00 Al3xand3r says:
You don’t read RPS nearly enough:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008/04/15/crimecraft-mmo-unreal-powered-and-free/
18/07/2008 at 16:13 fey says:
lol my bad. Just stumbled upon this article from a story over at Kotaku.
18/07/2008 at 16:20 Jon says:
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.
18/07/2008 at 16:49 Cody says:
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.
18/07/2008 at 19:18 oceancalm says:
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.
19/07/2008 at 13:11 p bro says:
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.
19/07/2008 at 22:35 Red_Breast says:
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.
19/07/2008 at 23:32 Saflo says:
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.
19/07/2008 at 23:58 Saflo says:
And I don’t especially agree, but have been politely informed that that is because I am unintelligent.
20/07/2008 at 04:52 earle117 says:
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.
21/07/2008 at 03:43 Col Bat Guano says:
“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.
21/07/2008 at 07:49 paulrpg says:
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.
21/07/2008 at 08:42 RichPowers says:
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.
27/07/2008 at 19:50 Funky Badger says:
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)
29/07/2008 at 00:37 Surgeon says:
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.
30/07/2008 at 09:35 t2vanden says:
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.
30/07/2008 at 11:52 paulrpg says:
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.
01/08/2008 at 18:46 I WillNotShutUp says:
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.
01/08/2008 at 20:50 t2vanden says:
That is ridiculous, PC has always been better at aiming, control, and accuracy.
20/08/2008 at 10:13 MMO says:
Hope its true
06/10/2009 at 01:39 hlobo says:
You can use these tags:
06/10/2009 at 01:41 hlobo says:
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: