When you’ve been basing all your games for the past ten years around one franchise, at a certain point I’d imagine that you’d like to spread your wings a bit and try something different. With Halo: Reach drawing ever closer, various Bungie employees are starting the hype machine for their next title after Reach, a game that will be set in a brand new universe; “something totally original from Bungie”, in the words of Brian Jarrard, the studio’s Community Director.
It’s been a recurring theme whenever anything Halo crops up: people come out of the woodwork maintaining that Bungie can’t do anything but make sub-par (yet extremely popular and lucrative) shooters set in the same generic sci-fi universe. As an avid Halo fan, my automatic response is to defend these claims but after ten years I’d like the see what else Bungie can make. While their talents for building worlds and back-stories haven’t really come across in the games themselves, those of us who cared to read the Halo novels found that the setting of Halo was a lot more deep and varied than a guy in green armor smearing aliens into paste. I for one would be interested to see Bungie take a stab at a Western-style RPG, but that’s just me.
Now that Bungie is an independent studio it’s no longer tied to Microsoft’s whims, so it’ll be interesting to see where their next title ends up. I’m guessing that they will still be a 360-focused studio, but the thought of Bungie making a PlayStation 3 title has me interested. What do you guys want to see out of Bungie post Reach? Do you think this is actually Bungie’s last Halo game, a claim they’ve made in the past? Sound off!
Source: Kotaku
Hehe maybe they’ll get all nostalgic and make a Mac game (probably not). I remember playing Marathon 2 back in the day and being horrified when I heard they’d been bought up by Microsoft…
I doubt now that they’ve been released from the shackles of Microsoft that they will remain 360 exclusive. My guess could be wrong but I sure hope it goes multiplatform. My biggest interest is what genre it will be. I’d guess an FPS so as long as they create a great game (which, surely, is very likely) with a) a fantastic universe that is fully explored within the game or b) do the same with Halo which sets the premise of the universe and uses mostly good novels to propel their story forward. No doubt Mitch and I will be estatic if they can do both a AND b! Mitch, I say this as I assume you DO enjoy the good novels and would have liked Halo’s in-game story to have been developed upon.
hmmmm, maybe it will be a story ’bout a super soldier guy who beats up evil aliens. ohh and then for the next installment we will make it extremely shitty.
but really hope they do a RPG with a good plot, cause the actual backstory and universe for halo was very indepth, even though I have not read any of the books.
on an unrelated note, women’s curling is so intense.
I believe it was Marcus Lehto who said that Bungie has experience in adventures and RTS’s in addition to FPS’s, so I’m sure Bungie could effectively take on another genre. Personally, I think the Halo series could work fairly well as an RPG, but honestly I’m more excited to see what totally new IP Bungie has in store.
Either way, I’m definitely psyched for Halo Reach.
maybe they’ll make a fun game…
@mitch: it’s too bad that people have to read some books a game was based on to get into the actual story. Halo (so far) doesn’t mean anything to me except shooting cartoony aliens on a planet with a ring around it. After seeing the alpha footage and reading a few posts about the new game, I’m kind of looking forward to the next game.
“Life after Halo: Hasn’t changed”
Julez, you nailed what I think is one of the biggest problems with the Halo series. I’ve read the books and I agree with Mitch that the story is incredible, I just think the games are marred by a lack of vision plus some overall abysmal storytelling. The fact that people don’t KNOW there’s a cool universe and story is actually highly upsetting to me. I don’t know why Bungie ever chose to divorce the narrative from the games, and it will never make sense to me.