: wow
: I am reading this wrong, or are there going to be at least two non-bungie
: Halo titles?
My first reaction was "ehhh... remember last time Bungie tried running several game projects in several studios at once? I recall one of those titles was a huge time and resource sink (which still turned out a pretty good game) that collapsed the new studio that was developing it, another was suffixed 'too' rather than 'two' by many fans (though I still liked it) and had a pretty fatal installer bug necessitating a complete recall of the product, and another dragged on for years and years and years before finally coming out last of all for the platform it was first debuted on, after having to sell off 20% of the company to one publishing behemoth and the rest of it to The Evil Empire."
Then again, that was a tiny little independent Bungie trying to personally develop three games at once in two of their own studios. This is big huge MS-backed Bungie delegating most of the work to two other established studios (well... Wingnut Interactive is new, but they've got plenty of resources from Wingnut the movie company to handle this. Hell, Massive alone is most of a game engine right there).
And that's where I shifted my opinion from "ehhh..." to "coolness". Despite some story butchering, I was really, really impressed with the LotR movies. Production quality, art and sound and all of it, was astounding. I wasn't very impressed with any of the LotR games, but Wingnut wasn't behind them. King Kong had similarly good artistic flare. I'll be quite exited to see what they can do with Halo, both in movie form and in this new game form.
Halo Wars... we'll have to wait and see. I'm not too familiar with Ensemble. I just hope it's done more Myth style than traditional RTS style. It would be sad to see a (partially) Bungie RTS that's not even as innovative as their last (and first) one.
