Halo MMO Cancelled - Details

Ex-Ensemble Studios staffer and current Windstorm Studios founder and president Dusty Monk has told IncGamers about the Halo MMO that was in development at Ensemble prior to the studio's closure.

Monk revealed to IncGamers that, from 2004 to 2007, he spent all of his time working on a project codenamed Titan, which you might know better as the cancelled MMO set in the Halo universe.

"It was going to be the Halo MMO, and it was absolutely going to compete against WoW,"
reminisced Monk.

"You have to remember that Ensemble came from a standpoint of being really good at competing against Blizzard Entertainment," he noted, drawing comparisons between the success of the Warcraft series and the success of the Age of Empires series. "We had a pretty good history of knowing the types of stuff that Blizzard put into their games to make them really successful, and the kinds of things we'd need to put into an MMO to compete against Blizzard."

"Just to give you a couple of examples," Monk elaborated, "we were using a heroic stylised artform. This heroic stylised artform is exactly the artform that you see being used in Star Wars: The Old Republic right now. It's timeless. It doesn't age itself like a game that's built with a
strictly realistic artform does."

"We were developing a cover system. This cover system is in Star Wars: The Old Republic. We had the idea of quests - and like I said, this was between 2004 and 2007, before Warhamer Online had been released - but we had this idea of quests where you could participate and pull them together without having to be on the same team. This would be a public quest that everyone in a particular area could work on. That idea went into Warhammer Online."

Monk also notes that, since Ensemble's closure, a number of Ensemble staffers have since moved to Blizzard - not least of all Greg Street, known to World of Warcraft fans as Ghostcrawler.

"We had all this incredible talent, we had the right people, the right passion, we had a phenomenally successful IP - the Halo IP. We were going back in time for the Halo franchise to broaden the story a little bit, in the exact same way that Star Wars has gone back in time so they can tell a more broad story, and we had a company that had our back when we started and the funding to put together that type of project."

So what happened to the Halo MMO? "There was a bit of a changing of the guard at Microsoft at this time," explains Monk. "Microsoft, from its gaming division, was really changing directions. They were looking really hard at the Nintendo Wii and they were really excited by the numbers that the Wii was turning. This was about the time that Microsoft decided that its Xbox platform and XBLA really needed to go more in the direction of appealing to a more casual, broader audience."

"So part of this changing of the guard at Microsoft came along with the changing of the attitude to this very expensive, very long and very protacted $90 million USD project we were working on, which was Titan. To cut a long story short, Titan was closed down."

Today, though, Monk is still optimistic about the chances the MMO would've had. "Even though a lot of people talk about how you just can't build a WoW killer, I absolutely believe that we could have built an MMO, if Microsoft had maintained their commitment, that if it hadn't been a WoW killer it certainly would've competed."

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Lego Beta Sign Up

Just got this in my mail box !

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Thanks for signing up for our beta testing. Your registration has been successfully saved. If you are chosen to battle the dark forces of Maelstrom in the LEGO Universe Beta test, you will soon receive a key to enter the universe. Good luck!

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APB - All Points Bulletin

APB: All Points Bulletin
An original online game for PC, APB: All Points Bulletin is a city-based community game where players choose between playing the criminals or those out to catch the criminals; carry out or thwart opposed crimes and build up areas of the city you control, all with unprecedented levels of character and vehicle customisation. - This is a fabulous new game from Realtime Worlds. Currently in closed beta due to release in Q3 2010.






These are the system requirements they released for now. !!They can change!!
Minimum
• Windows XP SP2* or Windows Vista
• 2.0+ GHZ Single Core Processor
• 512 Mbytes RAM (Arbeitsspeicher)
• NVIDIA 6200+ or ATI Radeon 9600+ Video Card
Recommended
• 2.4+ GHZ Dual Core Processor
• 1 GBytes RAM
• NVIDIA 7800GTX+ or ATI x1300+ Video Card

Imagine a living, breathing, city but for the first time ever it's online, its streets full of vehicles and thousands of civilians going about their daily life.
Introduce 100 players to this online city. Their mission is to gain fame and fortune, and gain them fast. Many will take to a life of crime, feeding on the city, its people and its businesses. Other players, the Enforcers, will feed on the Criminal players. What will the outcome be?
Many players will achieve celebrity or notoriety for their skills or style. Alliances will be formed, rivalries will be bitter. One thing we do know: every player will be unique. Thanks to cutting-edge technology, players can personalize their looks, clothing, vehicles and music.

Earn money, clothing, guns, and cars as you play.
Experience fast-paced third-person action.
Master different gameplay for each Faction.

Participate in intelligent matchmaking: you play against real people and the better you get, the better your opponents will be.

Work for Contacts, doing directed Missions, or complete open world sandbox activities.
Gain real-life celebrity through in-game displays of your characters, vehicles, music and symbols.
Become a top-ranking player or Clan in leagues that track Kills, Arrests, Mission Success rates, and many other competitive stats.

Each game world – or server – holds up to 100,000 players. These players will be playing on district maps which hold up to 100 players per action districts and 250 players per social districts. Each world has hundreds of these instanced district maps, so although any single action district has a 100-player limit, there is no limit to the number of other players you might encounter. For the individual players who top the leagues, their characters will become famous across the whole world, not just one district. APB is a brand new gaming concept where the players are the game, in a world full of innovative tools and game play.



Welcome to the next evolution of action games into a persistent online space. You're going to love it.
The game is currently in beta and due to launch sometime in 2010. You can apply here to be part of the beta testing community. I have already signed up and as soom as the NDA lifts I'll post some in game shots.