What's Next For Bungie

[AgentDenton]

Bungie Studios, the creators of Marathon, Myth and Halo, is apparently working on two new games outside the Halo universe, according to San Jose Mercury Writer Dean Takahashi's latest blog update. While phone calls by IGN to Microsoft and Bungie Studios provided the standard "no comment"-style comment, two outside sources close to the developer said Takahashi's story is old and inaccurate.

The story claims an exploratory game is being developed by Project Lead Jason Jones and Programmer Chris Butcher, while a second team is working on another new game.

Takahashi's material appears in his blog rather than a proper news story. So, while there is no attribution or source to back up the information, it's a blog, a writing form that permits a more casual style. The San Jose Mercury News writer also quotes Peter Moore, Microsoft's vice president of interactive entertainment, as saying he "doesn't know that Bungie has a second team."

Additionally, the news about Pete Parsons, the general manager at Bungie on Halo 2 is old. Parsons was given a farewell party, which was made public by Bungie in early 2006 on its site bungie.net/. Parsons, however, still collects a paycheck from Microsoft.

IGN's sources are confident that a new Halo game is in the works. But it's by an independent studio working with Bungie and it's an MMO, rather than internally created at Bungie. Microsoft also denies it's working on a Halo MMO. Needless to say, Bungie is very secretive on all fronts and any news on a new Halo game -- other than Halo 3 -- is at least a year or two away.

Takahashi has written two books on Microsoft's consoles, "Opening the Xbox: Inside Microsoft's Plan to Unleash an Entertainment Revolution", and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked: The Real Story Behind Microsoft's Next-Generation Video Game Console", both of which has received positive reviews, and is a games and entertainment staff writer for the San Jose Mercury News.

Several Interviews With Bungie Staff


So, what do you guys think of all this? Personally, I hope it's IGN that's wrong and not Takahashi. One, I don't really want to see anyone but Bungie touching the Halo series in anyway, and two, I don't really want to see Microsoft devote even more resources to MMOs (they already have Ensemble, one of their top studios, working on one, and they have a Marvel MMO in the works as well, assuming the two aren't one in the same), that genre needs to go back to being niche. I do want Bungie to move on after Halo 3 though, they're an extremely talented studio and shouldn't be forced into pumping out Halo after Halo. I'd like to see another stab at making an Oni-type game, or a revival of the Myth franchise on Vista.

 

[WhatsHisFace]

My thoughts:

Why would Microsoft be funding Huxley when they could be making a Halo MMO that would end up being the same thing? Halo MMO is false.

When Bungie moved from Redmond back to Chicago, they made note that they could double their size. I think Bungie is making two games. Two upcoming games is true.

Myth reborn would be nice, but Take 2 currently owns the rights, and they've done nothing with it.

I think Bungie might one day be making another strategy game. They haven't made one of those in a while and that's really what the studio was big for until Halo. After Halo 3, they might begin work on one for Vista.

On the Xbox360 side of things, I also think that with the dedication to Project Phoenix, that there are still a lot of people inside Bungie who want to get that done. I'd say there's a possibility that's one of the games.

 

[AgentDenton]

Did we ever get solid info on what Project Phoenix was?

 

[WhatsHisFace]

It was basically a castle siege game. You controlled one soldier in an army, and you would run with your army into battle to siege the castle. It was an awesome idea, a type of mission-based Dynasty Warriors styled more after Enclave with various types of units and *gasp* intelligent AI, but Bungie said they couldn't find a way to make it fun (they couldn't get a full 30 seconds of fun, I guess) so they stopped working on it.

They have the passion for it, but they just can't come up with an idea.

 

[AgentDenton]

A game that was basically "Bungie does Enclave" would be awesome I think. Don't really like the idea of just a castle siege game though. Maybe a huge city siege game, where each level was like Minith Tirith in the Return of the King movie, that could be fun, but not just a castle, too small and short I would think.

 

[WhatsHisFace]

Yeah, you'd need to siege many a castle in order to make that game long.

 

[Horrorfan]

My biggest problem with mmo games is that there is never any scope for offline gaming. I am reluctant to buy an online only game because what if the servers are closed? I would like it to have at least an offline element.


And the problem with Bungie doing another game series is that it's done such a fantastic job with halo, anything else it does is unfortunately always going to be compared unfavourably with halo

 

[Mankar Camoran]

They're doing great with Halo, but they could just as easily be doing great with something else. Blizzard was doing great with RTS games before WoW showed up, Team Ninja was doing great with fighting games before Ninja Gaiden showed up, etc. At the very least, Bungie should be expanding so that they can do Halo and "other things". I don't want Halo 5 to be leading the Xbox720 launch in a few years.

 

[Zenien]

The story is from Dean Takahashi who wrote the two Xbox books. He knows a lot about internal stuff at Microsoft Game Studios so I'd think it is pretty credible.

What's Next For Bungie?
Friday, September 08, 2006

Everybody knows that Halo 3 is well underway at Microsoft’s Bungie unit. But there’s more going on inside the secretive game developer than just that one blockbuster project. Jason Jones, the project lead on the Halo games, and Chris Butcher, the top programmer, are both working on a different game. They are on a small project that is exploring something new beyond the Halo universe. These guys are the cream of the crop in terms of the key talent at Bungie. Without them, neither Halo nor Halo 2 would have happened. Jones took about a year off after the launch of Halo 2, traveling around the world. Now he’s back and is trying to come up with something new.

On top of that, Bungie apparently has another team working on yet another game.

Meanwhile, the whereabouts of Pete Parsons, general manager of Bungie, aren’t known. He is no longer the general manager. He took a sabbatical from Microsoft and has now left the company. I asked Peter Moore about “a second team at Bungie” way back at E3 in May, and Moore said, “I don’t know that Bungie has a second team.”

Halo 3, meanwhile, is well underway and just went through a script rewrite. The game is slated for 2007 still. *****.com recently went out on a limb and talked about how Halo 3 will be the last game in the Halo series and that Microsoft is likely to announce a new non-Halo Bungie game at the X06 event in late September in Barcelona, Spain. ***** says various tidbits suggest that Halo 3 brings the story to its close.

That makes sense since others have told me that Jason Jones is “not a sequel kind of guy” before. I wrote in my latest book that Jones toyed with other games such as a “castle siege” game and another game that involved Minotaurs, a subject of an early Bungie game, but both were canceled. Jones wound up returning to help finish Halo 2 while it was in midstream.

Butcher, meanwhile, was one of the technical heavyweights who offered a lot of feedback to the engineers on how to design the Xbox 360. He was one of the folks, for instance, who argued to double the amount of memory in the system to 512 megabytes.

http://blogs.mercurynews.com/aei/2006/09/whats_next_for_.html

This could be the new big unannounced game that Eric Nylund (Halo novels, Gears of War) is so excited about writing for.

 

[Zenien]

Damn him for convincing Microsoft to go with 512 instead of 256.

 

[Mankar Camoran]

I cant believe that they even considered 256

But yeah, I had forgotten about that Eric Nylund game, I guess that pretty much seals the deal. He mostly does sci-fi, so I guess that's the "setting". I hope it's not just a Halo spin off.

 

[Zenien]

I wish they went with 256.

I'll probably end up picking up whatever else they put out.

 

[Mankar Camoran]

Even if it's Oni 2?

 

[WhatsHisFace]

I wish they went with 256.

I'll probably end up picking up whatever else they put out.

Why, so they'd have textures like the PS3?

 

[WhatsHisFace]

Even if it's Oni 2?

Don't bash Oni. There were a lot of good ideas there.

 

[Mankar Camoran]

I wasn't bashing Oni, I think it was a great game actually (from what I played), I just know that she's mentioned it before as being bad

 

[Zenien]

Why, so they'd have textures like the PS3?

You shut the **** up!

Well when you factor in the OS sizes of both consoles and then the fact the the 360 CPU would have to share that ram with the the XGPU and that the PS3 GPU would have the 256 megs all to itself only having to deal with the PS3 OS overhead, I think their texture budgets would have been about equal.

 

[Mankar Camoran]

I think the OS overhead would go to the PS3's 256 mb CPU Ram, the gpu ram would be untouched. Thank god Microsoft went with 512, and a smaller OS and a transparent, shared Ram system

 

[Zenien]

You shut the **** up!

 

[WhatsHisFace]

Well when you factor in the OS sizes of both consoles and then the fact the the 360 CPU would have to share that ram with the the XGPU and that the PS3 GPU would have the 256 megs all to itself only having to deal with the PS3 OS overhead, I think their texture budgets would have been about equal.

Starbreeze disagrees and I just rhymed!

Besides, the 360 GPU has plenty of onboard RAM.

 

[Mankar Camoran]

What is Starbreeze doing? Enclave 360?

 

[Zenien]

The Darkness.

 

[WhatsHisFace]

And you will all buy it. You **** sucking mother ****ers will get it and you will LOVE it!

 

[Mankar Camoran]

I won't buy it and you can't make me because wolverine "reported" me again and that means I'll never be back here again

 

[WhatsHisFace]

Stop being such a sissy you n'wah.

Wolverine's a loser, too. Screw him.