Infinity Ward and Bungie have certainly achieved their fair share of financial and critical success with the Call of Duty and Halo series, respectively. That's all well and good, but Gearbox Software president Randy Pitchford would like to see those developers branch out.
"I keep waiting to hear what Bungie is going to do that's not Halo," said Pitchford to CVG . "Those guys are amazing, right? They walk on water! And the same with Infinity Ward. It's like, dude I'm totally psyched to get my Call of Duty fix every year, but you guys are amazing! What else have you got? Can you give me something I haven't seen before?"
"The folks that are innovating need to be rewarded so that the folks that are making big bets can take that risk," he added. "It's too big of a risk for Infinity Ward to do anything but what they're doing, because there's too much value and there's really big scope for it."
Sure, the game looks fun, but is it too much to ask for something different?
Gearbox, for its part, has spent the larger half of its existence working on expansion packs, ports of games created by other studios and Brothers in Arms sequels. By contrast, the company right now is working on Borderlands, an original title, along with Aliens: Colonial Marines and a game base around the movie Heat.
It'd certainly be nice to see some variation from successful studios, particularly Bungie. We honestly felt that part of the reason they reclaimed their independance from Microsoft was to at least take a break from the Halo series, but with the announcement of Halo Reach, we suppose that isn't the case... at least not yet.
1 Comments
June 24, 2009
Regarding Infinity Ward - he should know that they only do every other COD game, not every year. The in-between years belong to Treyarch. Personally I think their games have been innovative from a standpoint of story-telling. Bungie, well they did push the envelope in GFX for some time, and I think they, like IW, continue to expand horizons with the MP world.
And what has Randy done lately?
Heat? Based on a 12 year old Hollywood movie?
I think Randy needs to spend less time chatting with journalists and more time trying to come up with an original idea for a game.