In the latest episode of the wonderfully named but rarely quite as entertaining Pach Attack, industry analyst Michael Pachter has used the magic words: “Halo Killer”. The chap from Wedbush Morgan claims that Respawn Entertainment, the new development team made up from ex-Infinity Ward coders, is working on something rather big – big enough to apparently dethrone Bungie.
“I don’t accept the premise that ten or more first person shooters only have minor differences,” he said, following up with the notion that all football games involve “the use of a ball”. “Except that we all know basketball is different from soccer, which plays different from football,” he said. Good to know. His point? That Respawn won’t be aiming at the modern warfare time frame for their first game.
“I’ll make a prediction here,” he said, referring to the ex-Infinity guys. “They’re going to make a Halo killer, a game that’s going to compete in the space shooter genre.” How does he come to this conclusion? “The one genre that hasn’t been cloned a lot is the space shooter.” Ah, right. We’ll be keeping an eye out for whatever Jason West and Vince Zampella come up with, let’s hope we hear about this this calendar year.
Picked up by CVG.
hazelam
do people still listen to that arseclown?
tinman9
He seems a nice guy MP but now he is getting on my nerves.
Coming across these days like he has all the answers, and his style is getting very annoying.
Quinlank
The phrase “Halo killer” is a bit of an outdated left over from last generation, when the Halo games could genuinely make a case for being the best first person shooters on the market. Nowadays there is far better around. Halo 3 was good, probably the best, at the time it came out, but not any longer. The fact that Halo 3 is still seemingly more popular than the two Halo games that followed it(Wars and ODST, both of which combined haven’t even sold half of what Halo 3, is that correct?) says to me that it’s a series that is in decline. The gameplay mechanics seem to have advanced very little since the first game for one, and the footage seen of Reach makes it look like yet more of the same(Though the space combat is a good idea, but I’m betting it’s not a large part of the game).
I think perhaps I’ve just grown far more fond of shooters with more solid mechanics behind them, as fps titles where you seem to lightly float ten feet into the air with a press of the jump button and require you to shoot enemies a hundred times to kill them just do not seem fun to me. I’d hesitate to use the words ‘old hat’ maybe, but that’s what popped into my head thinking of Halo, so there you go.