- elmicker
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I'm seriously losing faith in bungie as a maker of quality games. They seem to be turning quickly into a whore, with microsoft being the pimp. The feeling's been building up for quite a few months now, and frankly, i just have to rant about it.
* Lack of community interaction.
No longer do we have bungie employees interacting with the b.net community to the extent they used to. Other than maybe N0F in the optimatch, and the occasional answer from KP, we get nothing. What about Frankie and Sketch? Frankie only posts when told to by someone on MSN, and sketch has disappeared from the face of the earth, apparantly now limiting his posting to unnofficial subcommunities, as demonstrated during the shutdown of HaloGEN, with his response being posted on HBO, rather than here, where there were 3 pages of questions about it left totally unanswered. In fact, i'm fairly sure Marty has racked up more posts on the public forums than sketch and frankie put together, and those two are paid to interact with us.
* Halo turned into a money-whoring franchise
So, cheap, rushed Halo games that leave you feeling unsatisfied i can live with. But cheap sequels, spin-offs and likely-to-be-crap films, no. My first thought at the halo movie was "-blam!- yeah!!", then of course, the studios have their mucky hands in on it, so it's going to be a mass-market piece of crap. Might as well have given directorship to Uwe Boll.
We have a new halo portal, that works with about 5% of phones, most of which are just the crap 2-year old ones the american phone companies dole out, and costs an absolute fortune to get what is basically nothing. Commercial -blam!- on a stick, in every way.
We have almost-confirmed reports of a Halo RTS. Two things about this, obviously we've now seen the death of "You'll hear it from us as soon as the announcement is made", and plus, the whole idea is absolute tossery. Seriously. Halo is a first person shooter. Halo is meant to be an immersive, action-packed, fast paced game with an amazing storyline, only 1 of those applies to RTSs, and it ain't action packed, storyline-filled shooty shooty.
Also, we have rumours of the halo franchise being passed on to other studios. Just... No. It'll ruin it beyond any recovery. Other companies aren't bungie, they don't have bungie's flair, they don't have bungie's creativity or just damned coolness. This will just end with Halo, which had the potential to be one of the greatest game series of all time, turning into a laughing stock as we hit final fantasy levels of films, sequels and spin-offs galore. Just think; "Halo 13: the dirge of the ugly grunt!", or "Halo: The Movie: The Game: Directed by Peter Jackson's assistant's assistant!"
And yes, i'm going to get shouted down by "smarter" people than me, and yes they're going to spout the same old crap about bungie "being a business above all else", but we have to wonder, is bungie really bungie? Or should it just be renamed "Microsoft's -blam!-; formerly known as 'Those guys who made halo'"
[Edited on 9/27/2006]