Crackerwax

Although I suspect I probably haven’t actually finished the fight, I did complete Halo 3 last night. On Heroic I hasten to add. It was good fun, seemed very short and if I squinted I could almost imagine I was playing Halo. Don’t think the campaign was worth the asking price but I strongly suspect I’ll get more than my money’s worth out of the multiplayer game.

As I say, I don’t think I really have finished the fight and I’ll tell you for why. After the credits roll there’s a cut scene and in this cut scene we see Master Chief being put into stasis by Cortana. As she tucks him up in bed he says ‘Wake me when you need me.’. Hmmm, not if you need me but when you need me.

My suspicion is that Microsoft are planning on offering level downloads, perhaps even making it episodic. Although the only thing possibly acting as a bar to that is that the limited disc space on the majority of Xbox 360s might mean that owning the entire series of these (at the minute, hypothetical) levels/episodes would be limited to Elite owners.

Having thought about it a bit more I suppose Bungie’s recent split from Microsoft might cause a few minor issues too, but with an IP as strong as Halo I don’t think Microsoft will be too keen to let it go unexploited. Instead I suspect they’ll either develop it in-house (unlikely) or farm it out to a trusted third party (likely).

Whoever they decide to let develop it, I’d bet on the end result being downloadable as there’s an infrastructure already in place with Xbox Live. Every purchase then from a retail point of view becomes pure profit as there are no physical retailers, packaging people or distributors to pay. The killer reason though is that the second hand market completely evaporates when we start to talk of things in terms of downloads which are locked to the machine they’re downloaded onto.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 10th, 2007 at 12:25 am and is filed under Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.