There isn’t enough Halo in our lives, Microsoft reckons; according to Microsoft Game Studios’ Phil Spencer, ‘a more persistent engagement’ may be in order.

“There’s no explicit strategy that says we’re to ship a Halo game every year. One Halo game every three years – which was kind of our old cadence – is probably not frequent enough,” the corporate vice president told IGN.

343 Industries, the internal Microsoft team responsible for all things Halo, “is thinking a lot about how to take this franchise and turn it into something that people feel like they have an ongoing relationship with,” he added. “But it’s not, hey, every 6th November or whatever we have to ship a game and build a production plan around that. We want to do things that make sense as a first party.”

“We definitely think about a more persistent Halo engagement for customers and not going dark for two years, and Live helps obviously with multiplayer to keep people engaged.”

Almost sounds like an MMO of sorts, no?

For the record, an MMO based on the Halo universe was once in development at Halo Wars creator Ensemble Studios. While that didn’t quite work out, it’s a genre that, according to Bungie’s Brian Jarrard, would be challenging but not impossible for Halo to wrap itself around.

http://www.thatvideogameblog.com/2010/09/22/microsoft-pondering-over-a-more-persistent-halo/#comments

Posted: Sep 22, 2010 11:12 pm