Halo has done incredible things for the Xbox platform and Microsoft are grateful for that, and can’t bottle up their feelings toward their ”awesome partner” any longer it seems.
The corporate giant praises the studio for their ”time polishing gameplay”, that while it may be a year from retail ”the game’s playable.” Their artists are ”unequalled”, triple A ”up and down”.
”Bungie is an awesome partner. They say this a lot, and I believe it, they make the games they want to play,” said Microsoft Game Studios’ Alex Cutting, producer of Halo 3: ODST.
”What’s cool about Halo games is, you can be a year out from their actual street date, and the game’s playable. People are actually playing the game at that point. We can watch people play, and we can get 60 people’s feedback on just one experience in that game and polish that thing and hone it until it’s triple A quality,” Cutting tells VideoGamer.com.
”Not many people can do that. A lot of people who are just getting a game engine off of the ground don’t have the ability to iterate on an experience like that,” he continued. ”Bungie is all about gameplay. They spend more time polishing gameplay than anyone I’ve ever seen.”
”They also have incredible artists. The skies and the environments in that game are in my opinion unequalled. They’re a triple A talent up and down, from design to art to execution, they’re awesome.” Executive Cutting is also charged with making game changing suggestions to developers with Microsoft published titles, but Bungie seems untouchable.
”Everything Bungie puts on the table is awesome,” he said.
”It’s very, very rare that we do that. That’s more of a Microsoft Game Studios issue. But as a first party publisher, we hire triple A dev talent, and we hire them for a reason, which is we trust them to produce the games people want to play. So no, that really actually isn’t an issue.”
Bungie is busy with Halo: Reach right now which is due to release next year, and have most recently completed work on Halo 3: ODST which releases this September 22nd on Xbox 360.
Are Bungie just plain awesome like Microsoft says?