Gamer Tick: The Promise of the Halo MMOG

Jim Rossignol sees the loss of Ensemble's Halo MMOG as a great opportunity.

You can support this article by Digging it!

Story of the week was the revelation that the canceled 2007 project at now-doomed Halo Wars developer, Ensemble Studios, was a Halo MMOG. Meticulous developer-news site Gamasutra dug up the evidence earlier this week - material which included a ton of original concept art. Those images have now found their way onto a Flickr site, which has been analyzed into conceptual atoms across the breadth of the internet. The most crucial image was a mocked-up screenshot, which looks rather like World Of Warcraft with a Halo skin. A Halo MMOG with skill racks, quest logs and all other junk you'd expect from a standard MMOG.

Of course it's not going to happen, so what's so significant about a canceled game? Why did I punch the air and then look around to make sure no one had seen me when the author sent me his story? Well it's just a little more evidence that Microsoft (who owns Ensemble Studios, and who will be closing it as soon as Halo Wars is finished) is thinking seriously about bring a Halo MMOG to the market. The prototype suggests that they were asking their internal studios to pitch for the project. In fact, the rumors filtering through the industry grapevine had long ago convinced me that such a project was in the offing, and I'd been keenly listening out for any such evidence over the past couple of years. So this leak was proof that I hadn't just been smoking too much carpet underlay: There really had been a Halo MMOG project, even if it was just a protoype.

What's exciting about this for me isn't that it's another Halo game - I'm appreciative of, but ultimately indifferent to, the Halo series - but instead that we've got evidence that there are powerful folks in the industry considering, in the broadest sense, how to bring a science-fiction MMOG to the market. The dominance of the traditional fantasy archetypes among MMOGs - and the conspicuous failure of the one dead-cert licence on the science-fiction world, Star Wars - means that we're left with EVE Online and Tabula Rasa as the choices for science-fiction in a persistent world. And if you want something that takes its action from shooters rather than RPGs, well, the options are slim. First-person shooters on a massive scale have not often been attempted, and there's only one game that has ever really taken up the mantle sci-fi combat universe and tried to marry it with the concept of running around with thousands of people in the same game: Planetside.

There's a good chance that most people reading this column will not even have heard of Sony's shooter MMOG, let alone played it. Nevertheless it had a lot going for it - the game was a similar dropships-and-marines tone of sci-fi to that of the Halo universe. It was not terribly popular, and although it's still running today, it could not arguably be portrayed as a success. It is nothing like traditional level-based MMOGs, being pure PvP and a real-time first-person shooter. In it armies of players fight for control of some islands on an alien world, with vehicular and infantry combat taking place across huge, complex terrain. What hamstrung it was some poor design and a bunch of technical limitations - not to mention a lack of profile.

Nevertheless I believe it makes sense for a Halo MMOG to be launched in roughly the same template as Planetside: a gigantic war, with all the dropships, Warthogs and tanks that we could explode. Halo means spacewar on a grand scale, and a Halo MMOG, like Planetside, would need to be a shooter.

So I was doubly pleased that this Ensemble project, when leaked, was also a canceled project. The evidence of the mocked-up screenshot suggested that Ensemble's team were fully expecting to creating something the shadow of World Of Warcraft, which simply won't do. If we're going to get a Halo MMOG that it needs to focus on what its namesake and inspiration does best: action. Relying on the MMOG model of skill-trees and XP-grinding would ultimately lead to an evolutionary dead end for the genre, and another misfire in the region of science-fiction MMOGs.

All of which ties nicely into that other evidence for a Microsoft MMOG that has cropped up on recent times. I think it's the strongest evidence that Microsoft wants MMOGs to take the action-shooter route: It's called the DonnyBrook project. DonnyBrook is a research project being undertaken by Microsoft, the aim of which is to come up with a suitable network-code system for putting hundreds of people in the same game, all shooting in real time, without the kind of crippling lag that traditionally makes this kind of thing unplayable. An early proof-of-concept demo made using Quake III as base was quite convincing, and this means that the technology for a truly massive shooter is in the pipeline. Combine this technical leap with the Halo world - which is already being fleshed with a library of books and comics, ripening Master Chief's galaxy for more games in the setting - and we suddenly find that we're facing the best possible candidate for content-hungry MMOG in which FPS action is the main event.

The Ensemble project might have been canceled, but I'm betting the idea of a Halo MMOG is one that's far from abandoned. In fact, if MS were to create an MMOG that was more FPS than RPG, it could also be the first to truly span both the DirectX platforms: PC and 360. All of which speculation leads us to believe that if anyone can really move the MMOG world forward, it could well be the team that brings us a Halo MMOG. Come on Microsoft, this one could really make a difference.

Jim Rossignol, author of the recent gamer-culture book This Gaming Life and editor at RockPaperShotgun.com, has been writing about videogames for the past decade. His work has been published by Wired, The BBC, The London Times, PC Gamer, The Escapist, Edge magazine, Gamasutra.com and many others.

TAGS: