Another reflection of the slowly dying PC gaming market, I think. Microsoft may have bottomless pockets, but Microsoft Game Studios still has budget numbers to meet, and it's hard to justify keeping a large development team -- with some very prestigious members, who therefore earn higher salaries -- on staff when it can generate only so much revenue.
Considering they were working on an MMO... and a Halo one at that... I'm not sure that this is necessarily a reflection on the PC market. Any studio that is expensive to run that's part of a larger organization could really run into this, regardless of their target market.
a Halo MMO? that would never work, there would only be 4 classes(spartan, hunter, elite and Jackal sniper), and only one would be on the humans side, and the weapon classes would be pretty limited i think
probably why it got axed lol. Anyways the little trailer they had for this new Halo game looks pretty interesting. I guess its supposed to be some sort of Halo 3 expansion pack or something. Can't really think of any other reason why they would brand it with the Halo 3 name.
Age of Empires 3 has sold more then 2 million copies, that's great numbers. As far as I know that number doesn't include the expansion packs. Honestly I don't know what's going on with MGS, they seem to be getting smaller and smaller budgets each year, or have decided to invest in timed third party exclusives instead of first/second party exclusives.
An MMO doesn't mean it has to be an RPG. Of course, from the concept art it looks like it was, which is indeed a little silly.
Ensemble were expecting rather more than that, AOE3 sales were disappointing. For my part, as a fan of AOE/AOK/AOM, I couldn't have cared less about AOE3. Muskets? Railroads? Colonisation of the Americas? Fuck off, I'll stick with my Trebuchets.
MMOFPS, not MMORPG. Look at something like Star Wars: Battlefront or Battlefield: Bad Company with a couple hundred real people fighting one another, or the upcoming Huxley for an example. I'm sure with a bit of imagination one could come up with many different players classes for each side in the Halo Universe, you don't have to stick to the characters seen in the existing game, and you can give different specialities to individual classes (sniper and demolition and melee Spartans for instance). You could even play the Flood.
Sure, those are great numbers ... but Age of Empires 3 came out, what, three years ago? PC game sales haven't exactly been stellar since then.
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Halo as a MMOFPS would be fantastic. Some years ago I played this MMO-FPS game, Planetside. It's still around today in fact. The game was painfully mediocre in ALMOST EVERY WAY. Terrain, environments, skills, weapons, world objectives... But despite the fact that 90% of the game was pretty shitty, it was AMAZING in the one way that's most important. MMO combat. Being part of a gigantic firefight, 50, 100, 150, 200 people all laying siege onto a base, snipers, people driving vehicles, flying ships, gunners in turrents, ordinary grunts, all of them fellow players, in real WAR FPS showdown. Not some pussy-ass 5 on 5 or 10 on 10 "deathmatch", this was real war. We're talking real starship trooper type stuff here. It was with a doubt more chaotic war-like fun than any FPS game had ever delivered for me. The idea of a Halo MMO-FPS, with an IP that would actually get TONS of people to sign up, an IP that would require a GOOD budget to actually make the game around the FP combat a good game, sends me into convulsions thinking about how awesome it would be.
Console games can barely handle 32 player servers. We're going to see that new stupidly named "Massive Action Game" on the PS3 try to do 100 players but we'll see if that actually pans out. The big problem is communication. Even with 24 players, DICE couldn't figure out how to do team wide communication in Battlefield Bad Company because of lag. And even if they could work it out, imagine 99 other Halo 3 players in a single room. It would be a chorus of 13 year olds calling you a nigger or a fag. Fun times.
I don't see how it's really any different from any other MMO... you don't need 99 people in a room, nor would it be productive.