IndustryGamers - Informing the Games Industry

Halo MMO Could Have Been WoW Killer, says Ex-Ensemble Developer

Posted April 13, 2010 by David Radd

It's well known that prior to being closed Ensemble Studios was working on a Halo MMO codenamed Titan. The former project lead Dusty Monk today gave more details about the canceled project.

"It was going to be the Halo MMO, and it was absolutely going to compete against WoW," said Monk to Inc Gamers [thanks Edge]. "You have to remember that Ensemble came from a standpoint of being really good at competing against Blizzard Entertainment [with Age of Empires]. We had a pretty good history of knowing the types of stuff that Blizzard put into their games to make them really successful, and the kinds of things we'd need to put into an MMO to compete against Blizzard."

"Just to give you a couple of examples," Monk elaborated, "we were using a heroic stylized artform. This heroic stylised artform is exactly the artform that you see being used in Star Wars: The Old Republic right now. It's timeless. It doesn't age itself like a game that's built with a strictly realistic artform does. We were developing a cover system. This cover system is in Star Wars: The Old Republic. We had the idea of quests - and like I said, this was between 2004 and 2007, before Warhamer Online had been released - but we had this idea of quests where you could participate and pull them together without having to be on the same team. This would be a public quest that everyone in a particular area could work on. That idea went into Warhammer Online."

Monk added that since Ensemble's closure, some of the scattered staff have gone to Blizzard, including Greg Street. "We had all this incredible talent, we had the right people, the right passion, we had a phenomenally successful IP - the Halo IP,” described Monk. “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."

While the pieces seemed to be in place, it turns out that Titan's cancelation had more to do with corporate politics than anything else. "There was a bit of a changing of the guard at Microsoft at this time," explained 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 project we were working on, which was Titan. To cut a long story short, Titan was closed down."

Still, Monk really liked the chances Titan had, if it had ever been completed. "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,” concluded Monk.

David Radd has worked as a gaming journalist since 2004 at sites such as GamerFeed, Gigex and GameDaily Biz.