Bungie and how they left MS

[TLLDOB]

@MonkeyBoyFrancis

…ault. My point is pertinant as Marty owned one 7th of the company and was a scapegoat for extracting profit (by removing a shareholder) something we know Bungie does with great relish like when they got caught manipulating RNG values to encourage MTX uptake. Yeah, because what makes a game good is the gameplay and in the case of Halo its community, not how pretty the game is or how much it sold (unless you are, you know, a shareholder). Production values as well. And nothing promotes community like more copies in gamers hands. Halo 4 wasn’t hard up for community. Neither is 5. Even after 5 and a half years. You know The Witch Queen is still coming next year right? And Lightfall after that. And when is Destiny 3 and 4 releasing? Never from the sounds of it. I’d rather that not be Halos fate.

Why are some people so hung up on never-ending sequels instead of new IP?

[FyreWulff]

Destiny 3 did release.

It got renamed to Beyond Light. They completely restarted the client, if you don’t remember, it required redownloading the whole thing as a patch. Only Activision wanted separated sequels, Bungie always wanted to just have a perpetual game. They made significant changes to the engine that required porting all the content in the game that stuck around for BL to the BL version of the engine.

ps. Lightfall is originally what was Destiny 4 on the Activision calendar.

They don’t need ‘Destiny 3’ as a separate release when they can ships all the engine and other upgrades to the same game anyway. We’re not in the 360 era anymore where you had to fit your entire patch into a 4MB in-RAM shim.

And none of this is secret, Bungie literally told everyone that Beyond Light was originally D3. Turns out you don’t have to follow an out of date Activision contract anymore if Activision is no longer your publisher.

This isn’t the first time they did it either. The update that brought the Taken King expansion to Destiny 1 completely replaced the client, rendering the disc a glorified software key. On the 360 you had to download 3 separate 2GB DLC content packs (named Compatibility Pack 1, 2, etc) to even keep playing the game to get around limitations of the console.

And when is Destiny 3 and 4 releasing? Never from the sounds of it. I’d rather that not be Halos fate.

By the way, you do know that Halo Infinite is Halo going forward for the next ten years right? They aren’t releasing a separate ‘box’ sequel at this time.

Halo Infinite 2 Won't Be Happening, Says 343 Industries

“Halo Infinite is the start of our platform for the future,” he said. “We want Infinite to grow over time, versus going to those numbered titles and having all that segmentation that we had before. It’s really about creating Halo Infinite as the start of the next ten years for Halo and then building that as we go with our fans and community.”

Nobody wants MP playerbase segmentation anymore. Even Activision is trying to prevent it by having all Call of Duty titles going forward be part of the same base Warzone client, they’re just haphazardly pretending they’re all separate box releases still.

And yes, this means Destiny (and Infinite) will eventually drop the Xbox One and PS4 as supported platforms.

[LiamS]

been thinking about it and I think (and hope) that the original xbox studios move away from being a 1 IP team. I know we have already seen this with turn 10, who are heavily working with playground on fable, so much so that the turn 10 studio head says he is the ‘vice president of forza and fable’ on linkedin. There are also some quiet rumblings about the coalition working on something else aside from gears (presumably in addition to whatever work they are doing to assist the initiative, its rumored that they are doing perfect darks multiplayer)

I wonder if 343 has any plans for something distinctly different? I know this is a weird comparison maybe, but I kinda want a halo equivalent of Jedi Fallen Order. No master chief at all, no feeling super powerful or anything. Theres no reason the halo universe couldnt become a mass affect type world, with numerous playable factions spanning different games and genres (beyond halo wars) I kinda want a game were you play as a young member of the covenant, trying to make sense of the world around you, no good vs evil, no painting the covenant as the baddies, just a really cool exploration of the halo universe that we havent seen before. I wouldn’t even call it Halo anything, even though it would be canonically in the halo universe

Studios can be the home to IP without that IP being the only thing they work on, take a look at Naughty Dog for instance, for a long time you could say that they were the uncharted studio, with some other stuff mixed in of course. I think the original xbox studios need to follow a similar path, sure they each have their pillar franchise like naughty dog with uncharted, but theres no reason that they cant make a last of us like naught dog did or some other game in between entries in their pillar franchises.

[Whistler]

Here’s the basic take on it.

Bungie was an acquired team/studio for Halo in the first place. After the success of Halo they realized they wanted to work on something they owned themselves and not MS. So basically those that wanted to stay and work on Halo or be with MS stayed and joined 343. The ones that wanted to leave left with Bungie.

It’s quite simple, you can own IPs, you can own studios, but you don’t own the talent.

As an FYI, MS has seemingly structured their new studio acquisitions such that the whole studio can be separated without closing them if need be.