By John Walker on September 3rd, 2009.
TF2 has recently suffered a plague of some of cheating. Rather than cheating to win matches, players have been cheating to gain in-game items, using “external idling applications”. The drops came at random, so people hung around on specifically designed servers until they’d collected what they were after. (I think.) Valve have announced this Will Not Do, and anyone who has accrued items this way will find they have vanished from their inventory. And this is the their gentle, generous response.
By Jim Rossignol on November 17th, 2008.
Shacknews have posted up an extract from an interview with Ensemble’s Dave Pottinger in which he talks about the cancelled Halo MMO. It turns out the model was very much “World Of Halocraft”, as people had suggested.
Shack: So you didn’t have plans to go for a more FPS-style game.
Dave Pottinger: It was definitely more of a classic MMO, but it still had that very action feel. Definitely more actiony than WoW.
By Jim Rossignol on September 23rd, 2008.
[Click for full image] UPDATE: Full Flickr set here.
Gamasutra have unearthed evidence that the Ensemble Studios project that was cancelled during 2007 was in fact a Halo MMO. The evidence includes several pieces of prototype art, with one mocked up screen (above).
The title seems to have been in development in 2006 and some of 2007 — though it’s by no means clear that it was the only MMO-related title in development at the studio at that time.
What is clear, however, is that Ensemble’s Bruce Shelley mentioned in a June 2008 blog post that they “…set up three prototype teams out of the staff of a major project that we cancelled. After six months of very interesting work, we have now stopped two of those prototypes, with one getting more time to demonstrate the value of its concept.”
Seems I was right about a Halo MMO being in development, but my timing sucks… It also means that a Halo MMO could well now be in development at another studio. Let’s try and guess!
By Jim Rossignol on July 17th, 2008.
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.
Read the rest of this entry »
By Kieron Gillen on September 13th, 2007.
I’ve been traveling for the last week, and between playing Puzzle Quest, reviewing games which I’m NDA-ed up to the journo gills about, drinking heavily, and and getting crushing existential dread with Alec when walking across a bridge in Vancouver, I picked up some comics. And one of them is relevant to the blog, so I’ll write something about it. Yes.
It features this bloke. And since there’s two incarnations of it out, it’s a bloody PC Game.
It’s Halo: Uprising, it’s by Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev and it has a review hidden around here, somewhere. See if you can find it.
