"If you bring your sword to bear harm upon us, with claws and fangs, we will exact a toll."
"An organic life contact-purpose humanoid interface created by the Data Interface Thought Entity which supervises this galaxy, that would be me."
I'm Chinese, but I'm not born in China, I'm Singaporean. Which would explain my relative fluency in both English and Mandarin.
Posted by: Homeboyd903
Posted by: SonicJohn
I hope there's an offline/single-player experience to go with the MMO side of things.
I'm trying to envision how this could work. Bear with me here.
Keeping an open world running at all times, providing a "linear-ish" type of single player campaign and giving the Bungie/FPS fans a reason to test these waters will be very difficult to pull off. Here's how I could see it working (or rather, how I'd like to see it work):
> Open world available to everyone playing at the current time. This 'world' is broken up into explorable 'areas' or 'regions' that provide different aspects of the game and the story that is being told.
> Each 'region' is explorable by any player at any time, but once a 'region' is entered, the context or purpose of that particular area is brought to your screen. For instance;
Region "A": Huge explorable area used for general exploration, character/exp building, learning about the storyline through dialogue and findings, etc.. Think Mass Effect's style of real-time world exploration.
Regions "B, C, D, E, F, etc..": These particular areas are where you visit (when available/unlocked) to continue the linear style SP campaign story. As you enter these regions, you will be allowed to play missions you have unlocked that continue the storyline. You would be able to visit/revist these areas whenever they are made available to you based on your progression through the game.
Regions "G-Z": Regions where FPS-style/Multiplayer matches can be held. Real-time battles are occurring here that play-out similar to the typical FPS-style multiplayer matches do in games we play today (Halo, CoD, Killzone, etc..). These particular parts of the world are 'visited' to recreate this style of atmosphere. You'd still have the ability to choose from different 'multiplayer maps' and get matched up with equally skilled players/clans to play normal multiplayer matches with your unique character from the storyline. Offers the same matchmaking search features we see today.
So, basically what I'm getting at is, you'd still have the MMO in a sense that all areas are explorable by all players at the same time. But, based on how you particularly want to experience the game, you can visit different regions of this 'open world' to trigger particular 'modes' of the game to begin.
On a side note, I really hope more and more user created content is launched with this game, not less. Forge is one of my favorite things about Halo and I would love to see this trend of upgrading this feature continue somehow here. Infamous 2 has already announced user-created missions which is something else I would like to see Bungie explore. How this would all fit into an MMO is very tricky but could be expanded upon if they follow a similar model to what I've discussed above.
That's my take on how this type of environment could exist, but more than likely this is a new breed of game we aren't able to grasp at this point. I'm expecting something revolutionary to gaming. (Here we go again!)
:)
Agreed, I have confidence in Bungie that they can strike gold again. Forge 3.0 will be awesome! Except it'll be called something else, probably.