Halo MMO would be "challenging" - Bungie
Studio was surprised by Ensemble concepts.
Making an MMO out of the Halo franchise would be a "pretty challenging" undertaking that would involve the creation of a "whole new layer of fiction and new characters that don't currently exist" - and is a subject that has often been the subject of "heated discussions" at Bungie.
That's according to Brian Jarrard, community and PR director at the company, who told GamesIndustry.biz in an interview at the Tokyo Game Show that it would be "hard for me to imagine... not that it couldn't be done."
"I'm not sure," he said. "They are like our lunchtime discussions at the studio. A Halo MMO wasn't something that at the studio we had a lot of purview on. We'd heard rumblings and on paper, if someone says 'Let's take Halo, plus Warcraft, equals dollar signs...'"
He also said that Bungie was surprised by the extent of the concept work done by Ensemble studios that surfaced recently.
"So it was interesting when that whole thing came to light, there was more there than we ever really thought there was. I don't know, we've had a lot of heated discussions - there's a big, vast, rich universe, but then again it's hard for me to imagine.
"Everybody wants to be Master Chief, they all want to be the Spartan. You'd have to create a whole new layer of fiction and new characters that don't currently exist - not that it couldn't be done," he added.
"I don't know if I would want to invest and become a Warthog mechanic in a garage, when all my friends were out there kicking ass on the front lines. I'm sure there's probably enough there to work with where something could of come of it, but I think it would have been pretty challenging."
Check GamesIndustry.biz's full interview with Jarrard for more, or read Eurogamer's own Bungie interview from TGS for the scoop on Halo 3 Recon.