NEWS - Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Bungie Hopes to Knock COD4 Off Top Spot
Halo 3 hasnt been top of the pops on Major Nelsons Xbox Live activity charts for a little while now, but Bungie plans to fight back.
"We have a lot of awesome new content coming up. Were not walking away from Halo 3," Bungies community lead Brian Jarrard told Eurogamer last week at GDC.
"We have a group of people at the studio that are just focused on keeping the game going strong for the foreseeable future, so I think well continue to evolve and I expect there to be a back-and-forth [between us and COD4] for a while."
Jarrard also said the developer will tweak playlists to help maintain variety and incentivise players to return. And then of course theres the Legendary Map Pack, which is due out this spring.
User-created content could also do with a spring-clean, as Jarrard acknowledged. "The problem were dealing with now is theres just too much content," he said. "For a new person that just wants to find something fun that somebody else made, we dont feel very good about the way weve done that.
"We are looking at it. Thats the great thing about the web - its totally fluid. We have people now that are working on different ways to potentially grade and aggregate and sort content, and its definitely something that I think is important for the feature to really get a foothold and contribute to Halo 3s lifespan. It has to be something thats accessible."
As for Call of Duty 4, Jarrard said that it "did a really good job about rewarding the player with perks and these little carrots that are a really powerful incentive to keep playing the game".
"A lot of us are Call of Duty fans. Its great for the ecosystem and for the platform that we have this competition, right? With Halo 2 we were in a unique situation where we had a monopoly for three straight years, and we really havent seen a decline in the Halo 3 numbers, but Call of Dutys doing really well."
Which doesnt sound much like fighting talk to us, but then, hey, theyve already finished the fight.
Look out for more from Bungie later this week.
Source: http://www.eurogamer.net/