14 DAY TRIAL // One of the biggest releases of 2009 was Halo 3: ODST, the non Master Chief shooter from Bungie that put the player in the combat boots of an Orbital Drop Shock Trooper dispatched to battle the Covenant in the middle on New Mombasa.
Even if the game managed some very good sales, especially for the amount of content it delivered, at least one man who worked on it feels that ODST could have been bigger if Microsoft, the publisher, had handled some aspects of the game out in a better way.
Lars Bakken, the lead designer who worked on ODST, told G4 in an interview that “I'm no PR expert, but it's pretty obvious the game had a series of stumbles; from the naming, to the initial E3 2008 countdown reveal failure, and finally pricing. It would definitely be nice to have a do-over for the game introduction.”
While the whole presentation process for the game could have been improved, the big limiter in sales was probably the fact that it sold for the price of a full Xbox 360 title even if it introduced a small single player campaign, one new multiplayer mode in Firefight and a collection of the multiplayer maps that were previously released by Bungie.
It would have made sense for ODST to actually arrive as three separate pieces of DLC, one with the single player campaign, one with Firefight and the remaining with the maps, all of them priced at around 20 dollars, allowing players to pick and choose which element of the experience they want.
Bungie is still working on the Halo franchise, despite repeatedly saying that it plans to start a new gaming concept. Reach is set to be delivered in 2010 and will serve as a prequel to the entire Halo series with more Master Chief appearances and a promised bundle of interesting backstories.