Following the latest sneak peek at Halo creator Bungie's next project, 'MMO' is once again the acronym on everyone's lips.
We also got a quick look at the bare bones of some sort of map for the game, which could well be the start of one large open-world rather than contained levels.
Of course, speculation about Bungie lining up a big MMO announcement is just that, but we have had a level of chatter about the prospect that's reached the point of farce.
Hints towards an MMO go as far back as October last year and carried through to 2011, with reports of confirmation and denial coming from every direction apparently just to confuse us all.
Going on the classic "no smoke without a fire" principle, let's assume for the sake of debate that Bungie's next project is of the MMO bent. Could Bungie be the one to finally put cracks in World of Warcraft's dominance?
Of course, with the Bungie project being a multiplatform title, we'd be talking about significantly different beasts, but if the former Halo dev can pull off an MMO powerhouse and make it a success on console, the effects would have all the more impact.
But is it even a notion worth considering? If taking on a series as established as World of Warcraft is near impossible, doing it on console could be considered nothing short of lunacy.
There's another twist though, and that is that Bungie is now under Activision's roof, as is Blizzard. Would the publisher even let the two go head-to-head, or could we see Blizzard work with Bungie in order to make Activision the MMO ruler across all platforms?
Comments
7 comments so far...
blugrunt92 on 11 Aug '11 said:
Would hate if Bungie made an MMO. Would not buy it.
FinalBillybong on 11 Aug '11 said:
I have no idea what's coming but I'm really looking forward to it......
dannyhulse on 11 Aug '11 said:
Blizzard is threatening it's own genre dominance, there is growing dissent from the WoW community,
On Bungie though, I wonder of Activision would allow another of their games to pose a significant risk to WoW, especially considering that they don't own Bungie, so probably won't see all of the money that game makes them, I don't know what the financial agreement between them are though, so it's just conjecture.
JOHNKARA on 11 Aug '11 said:
Not an MMO, please Bungie, not an MMO!!
Masked_Bunny on 11 Aug '11 said:
WHY would a bungie mmo threaten blizzards WoW?
Ominous on 12 Aug '11 said:
From what I've seen, for a studio to change it's main design direction and jump to a different genre is very hard and risky. That is why I'd assume Bungie's next game will either be another FPS title or have a strong FPS element built into it. From the way they show their new project and the dev tools I saw them use in the vid I'd also speculate that it'll be a large scope game. If I had to guess I'd say it's either an FPS/RTS hybrid or an MMO style FPS, with emphasis on vehicles. These are all speculations though. Their new project, however, will a) probably not be in direct competition with any Blizzard game b) even if it is competing in any way with WoW ( for example ), it will not be more successfull. Halo had the exclusive platform thing going for it, which made it dear to a lot of people, something they don't have anymore. In any case, I can say that, like the Halo games, whatever the new project is, it will be a really good and high quality franchise.
I'm interested to hear more.
TOKEN on 12 Aug '11 said:
i hope its a scifi shooter(not like borderlands)maybe like the movie DUNE and i think anyone who can make a mmo work on a console then Bungie can do it and if succeding on consoles it could threaten WOW.