Some ”changing of the guard” at Microsoft Game Studios altered their priorities, after seeing the major success of the Nintendo Wii.
That’s right the Nintendo Wii is why the world is Halo MMO-less. ”We had all this incredible talent, we had the right people, the right passion, we had a phenomenally successful IP - the Halo IP,” recalled Monk, speaking with IncGamers in an interview.
”We were going back in time for the Halo franchise to broaden the story a little bit, in the exact same way that Star Wars has gone back in time so they can tell a more broad story, and we had a company that had our back when we started and the funding to put together that type of project.” Around $90m was the predicted overall cost of the MMO.
The Ensemble crew never got a chance to burn that sort of cash though because their Microsoft sugar daddy decided that casual gaming was the new hotness.
”There was a bit of a changing of the guard at Microsoft at this time,” explains Monk. ”Microsoft, from its gaming division, was really changing directions.”
”They were looking really hard at the Nintendo Wii and they were really excited by the numbers that the Wii was turning. This was about the time that Microsoft decided that its Xbox platform and XBLA really needed to go more in the direction of appealing to a more casual, broader audience.”
”So part of this changing of the guard at Microsoft came along with the changing of the attitude to this very expensive, very long and very protracted $90 million USD project we were working on, which was Titan. To cut a long story short, Titan was closed down.”
It would have taken on Blizzard and their monstrously success World of Warcraft believes Monk, saying that Ensemble new some of that secret sauce formula Blizz used.
”Even though a lot of people talk about how you just can’t build a WoW killer, I absolutely believe that we could have built an MMO, if Microsoft had maintained their commitment, that if it hadn’t been a WoW killer it certainly would’ve competed,” he continued.
Of course the world will never know for sure now. The only other big time MMO project out there with the vision and fiscal backing that could give World of Warcraft a serious run for subscriptions would have to be BioWare’s Star Wars The Old Republic. Disagree?
Some ex-Ensemble developers have been snapped up by Blizzard, like Greg Street, who’s known among the WoW community as ‘Ghostcrawler’.
