Tag Archives: titan

Sony has said that more than 500 comics will be made available at launch when the PSP Comic Store goes live in December.

Big names like Marvel, 2000AD and IDW have signed on so far along with Insomnia, iVerse and Titan.

At least with digital comics, you don’t have to worry about keeping them safe in mylar sleeves.

More through Eurogamer.

On Joystiq. Titan showed Fat Princess in the PS Blog Lounge at GDC yesterday, but Steph didn’t turn up till late and we can’t see too much about it elsewhere.

For shame. No specific date as yet.

Ensemble’s Halo MMO, codenamed both Titan and Orion – was to be the developer’s “new focus” beyond Halo Wars, according to this Gamasutra article on the firm’s closure.

A new campus was even being built to house development for the game, but work was was halted when Microsoft finally reach a decision to close the studio.

Apparently, work started on the game as early as 1998, “when a designer named Ian Fischer started pitching a sci-fi MMO. He loved the genre, and felt it was under-served,” according to that piece.

The game first came to light in September last year, when art was leaked online.

Speaking to Shacknews, Ensemble tech boss Dave Pottinger has outlined the background for the firm’s canned MMO, and revealed that the game was green-lit and had staffed up to 40 employees before is was axed in an exec changeover.

From the interview:

What were the circumstances behind the Halo MMO?

Pottinger: Ensemble has been wanting to make an MMO for a long time. That was in production for a long time. The Halo IP was a great IP to launch an MMO with. Microsoft… hasn’t had the best track record with those.

And we worked on it for a long time–we had staffed up an almost-40 person team. And then there was some reorganization at Microsoft, and the new bosses thought it wasn’t the best idea anymore. It had actually been green-lit, and then it got cancelled after that.

So you guys were feeling good about it?

Pottinger: Yeah, we were happy with it. It was a long road to go, and we had proved the gameplay we wanted to prove.

It actually turned out–we ended up reusing a lot of the people. We had hired people who were excited about making a Halo game, and we used them on Phoenix–Phoenix is the Halo Wars codename. And a lot of that stuff that we picked up was able to be reused. So we didn’t lose everything. It wasn’t all wasted.

From the screenshots that were leaked, it seemed very World of Warcraft-esque. Was that your model?

Pottinger: Yeah. It’s a popular one.

Was the concept such that there were Covenant and UNSC factions, in the same way that WoW has Horde and Alliance?

Pottinger: It was more broken up than that. The Covenant weren’t quite the Covenant yet.

That idea of that sort of stylized approach to Halo was something that we were very interested in, in terms of the art. Some of the art that leaked out wasn’t art that was actually in the game, so people were a little more torqued than they needed to be.

But it felt very Halo–we had a combat demo that felt like a very action-oriented MMO, but still had that MMO depth. So it was very analogous to the RTS that we worked on.

So you didn’t have plans to go for a more FPS-style game.

Pottinger: It was definitely more of a classic MMO, but it still had that very action feel. Definitely more actiony than WoW.

Speaking to GI at TGS, Bungie PR boss Brian Jarrard has claimed that Bungie only had a vague idea anyone was working on a Halo MMO, and that creating one would be “pretty challenging” thanks to the necessary creation of “a whole new layer of fiction” in the Halo universe.

“They are like our lunchtime discussions at the studio,” he said. “A Halo MMO wasn’t something that at the studio we had a lot of preview on. We’d heard rumblings and on paper, if someone says ‘Let’s take Halo, plus Warcraft, equals dollar signs…’

“So it was interesting when that whole thing came to light, there was more there than we ever really thought there was. I don’t know, we’ve had a lot of heated discussions – there’s a big, vast, rich universe, but then again it’s hard for me to imagine.

“Everybody wants to be Master Chief, they all want to be the Spartan. You’d have to create a whole new layer of fiction and new characters that don’t currently exist – not that it couldn’t be done,” he added.

“I don’t know if I would want to invest and become a Warthog mechanic in a garage, when all my friends were out there kicking ass on the front lines. I’m sure there’s probably enough there to work with where something could of come of it, but I think it would have been pretty challenging.”

More through the link.

We’ve just been dropped a link to this Flickr set, which appears to be a ton of concept imagery to something called Titan, apparently an “Ensemble Games prototype; 2005-2007.”

Yep, this would appear to be the canned Ensemble Halo MMO Gama broke earlier.

Fill your boots.

According to this CVG report, Titan’s to release a World of Warcraft graphic novel in the UK and Ireland.

It’s releasing on September 26, and follows the story of a shipwrecked human captured by an orc shaman.

Gripping. You will buy it.

According to this CVG report, LucasArts is planning both a novel and graphic novel to accompany The Force Unleashed.

Titan’s doing the comic. Both books will be available on August 22.