14 DAY TRIAL // During a panel session that took place at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, a representative from developer Bungie has confirmed that the new video game the company is working on is indeed a “massively multiplayer action game.”
David Aldridge is a lead network engineer at Bungie and has talked about the challenges of developing a stable network connection for such a large scale project.
His talk was actually titled “I Shot You First: Networking the Gameplay of Halo: Reach” and the network engineer said that the new Bungie game would not be “WoW in space.”
It's not clear whether the team at Bungie is asking for any help from the developers at Blizzard, who are also part of Activision and have managed to make World of Warcraft the most successful MMO based on subscriptions in the world of gaming.
For some weeks rumors had been circling around the gaming world about Bungie and their MMO project, fueled by statements from the company about their desire to create a persistent world for their plans to play in.
The new MMO is the first game that Bungie is working on since they have entered a ten-year-long deal with publisher Activision, and it's not clear whether the developer will devote its future to the launch and then the support of the project or whether there are other smaller teams that are also developing other games.
Bungie is best known for creating the Halo universe and the character of Master Chief, and it seems that the first ideas about putting together an MMO project appeared in 2010 or 2009 when the company said that it was interested in creating a Halo-based world for competitive gamers.
Considering Bungie's profile and their past history, it's probably pretty safe to say that the new MMO will have a science fiction theme, making it somewhat of a rarity in the market.