Doom on Xbox Live, Jackson Making Halo Game

Microsoft is pulling out all the stops in its X06 Keynote today in Barcelona. The announcements are flying fast and furious: Ensemble studios is making a Halo RTS, and Peter Jackson is making a new Halo game (unrelated to Halo 3 or the RTS). The HD-DVD will be $200 in the U.S. with a release aimed at November of this year. They've got a good deal of 360 exclusive content including the next Splinter Cell and GTA IV Episodes, and (initially) Bioshock. Bioshock will also be on Windows, of course. Windows is also the platform on which Microsoft is announcing a new Massively Multiplayer game from Cryptic Studios, a new super-hero MMOG based on Marvel Comics' IP: Marvel Universe Online.

Non FPS Halo games?

[Thansal]

So for a non-initiate into the cult of Bungie, could some one please explain how they plan on making games that consist of sometihng OTHER then Master Chief running around blowing stuff up?

I know that Marathon and Halo are suposedly linked some how.
I know there is supposedly a plot to Halo (I could never actualy sit through one of the games to find out).

Just how could an RTS be made outta the HALO franchise?
And wth is Peter Jackson working on for HALO?

So friken confused.

What about a 360 MMORPG?!?

[elrous0]

Forget about yet another Windows MMORPG (yet another "WoW Killer" no doubt), what about a Xbox 360 MMORPG?!?! Every since Live came online for the original xbox, we've been waiting fore this and so far, zilch. It's the perfect plaform for it to, the built-in speech capabilities would make raiding and teaming-up easy (and no need to find additional software or pay for a teamspeak server, either)

And, don't give me that "FFXI" bullshit, either. That was just a poor port of the PC version ("Wait, I need a USB keyboard to talk, WTF?!?!?!"). If I wanted to return to the year 2000, I'd buy it. But I want a modern, *REAL* MMORPG.

-Eric

Re:"Leak"

[Khuffie]

"So, a Halo exclusive license will only limit Xbox sales. People buy the Xbox to play Halo, get it?"

Erm...you contradict yourself from one sentence to the next.

Re:Marvel MMOG

[snuf23]

If you think COH/COV is a grind fest try out a Korean designed MMO sometime. Seriously checkout Hero Online [netgame.com], it's free and holy cow is it a grind.

COH was my first MMO, played it for about a year, got my level 50 and then moved to WoW. Played WoW for about a year then bought CoV.
I have a love/hate relationship with CoH/CoV, I totally understand what you mean about it being a grind. The game really has almost nothing to it but combat. I think the combat is pretty entertaining but doing mission after mission can be taxing. What I do like about it is that it works well in small doses. I usually play with a friend for an hour or two a night. From logon to mission your are playing in a couple minutes versus the high end of WoW which is very time consuming.
Lately the server population seems to have dried up, especially at the high level (my villain is 41). So the social aspects of the game have pretty much disappeared. CoH was a much livlier place during the first year with tons of players and much more social activity (player run things like costume contests were common). Without the player base you are just left with the mechanics of the game.
Normally I think it would be surprising to see the developer building the Marvel MMO seeing as it stands to be in direct competition with CoH/CoV but I see it as a sign that Cryptic is aware of CoH's decline.
In terms of CoH being slow to level though, you can easily do levels 1-20 in a week which at least gives you a lot of powers and a good idea if you want to keep playing that class. Now once you hit 30 the grind really kicks in and 40-50 is just plain brutal. I think I'm doing about 1 bar of XP every 2 hours at level 41. Just be glad they reduced the debt to less than half of what it used to be. My hero had maxed out debt at lvl 49 - something like a million points.
At this point I'm just waiting for something new. I don't have any desire to go back to WoW. I think MMO developers are waiting on releases because of the Burning Crusade.

Re:And Sony is too expensive?

[powerlord]

The noisy-ness and size of the XBox360 are the main things that kept me from getting it originally (along with my general happiness with the PS2 I got a few years before the XBox's launch).

I'm thinking of biting the bullet and upgrading to HD-TV this year (between the drop in HD-TV prices and TiVo's new HD unit), and the PS3 is starting to look like the perfect option to handle the "GameConsole/DVD/NextGenMedia" portion and round out my new TV stack. Going for the PS3 is an easier choice than a stand-alone Blu-Ray or HD-DVD player. I KNOW the Blu-Ray format is going to be used for the PS3, wether movies come out for it or not, and I expect it should be a decent DVD player also. If the format takes off, great. If it doesn't, yes, it sucks, but the hardware is still usable as a storage media for games (take a look at UMD, yeah, there aren't many UMD movies being planned, but I don't see UMD games for the PSP being phased out any time soon).

Granted the whole TV Stack is probably ~$2500-$3000 whereas my current installation is closer to $1000 (TV, VCR, TiVo+DVD Player, CableBox), but I'm actually excited about the quality difference, and analog TV Phase-out is right around the corner [dtv.gov]. Feb 17th 2009 doesn't seem that far away to me right now, especially since the HDTV acceptance rate has been climbing and is probably primed to really take off this holiday season. Once that rate climbs, there is no reason to assume that consumers won't demand more HD media (including Blu-Ray, HD-DVD, and Consoles supporting HD formats).

Call me a sheep, but I think the pastures (or at least pictures of them), will be greener. :)

Re:Misread

[curecollector]

What I really misread, however, was that the HD-DVD itself would cost $200 (as opposed to the HD-DVD unit). But that can be attributed to sloppy wording.