MLG And Bungie: What I Wish Would Happen

A few years back, I remember reading MLG wanted to develop its own game. An MLG branded shooter, one they could tweak to their exacting specifications.

Don’t know whatever came of it. I guess nothing. I’m guessing they decided that financially it wasn’t feasible and their efforts and money would be better spent cozying up to an established game developer.

At the time, I was firmly entrenched in Halo 2, playing five or six nights a week with my “team,” as we’d decided to take our shot at all the punk kids and play in an MLG event. That went about as well as it sounds like it would. Three rounds and out, two of those in the loser’s bracket.

A 30-year-old with a wife, children of his own, a full-time job and a mortgage is going to have a tough time competing with 18-year-olds who play the same game 10, 14 hours a day. You don’t have the reflexes or the time.

But it doesn’t feel like all that training was time wasted. For one, it was nice to get back to doing something competitively. It’s been awhile since intramural soccer and flag football. Playing at an MLG event was awesome. Intimidating, humbling, but a good time.

While we were training for MLG Dallas ’06, the thing that would’ve been the most helpful to us was an MLG playlist in Halo 2 matchmaking. No more would we be looking for teams to scrim. We’d have had stiff competition every night. It would’ve made training so much easier, at least from a logistical standpoint.

What’s more, that’s all we ever played even when we weren’t training. My community of gamers on 2o2p played nothing but MLG Customs, every night for the better part of two years. That style of play created a community within a community, one of rivalries and participation and an almost universal increasing skill level.

Flash forward to 2008. Bungie has embraced MLG, going so far as to replace the Team Hardcore playlist with an official MLG playlist. Couple of years too late for me, but still nice to see. It’s nice to see Bungie embracing that part of its community, but more than that, it seems to indicate Bungie might be embracing an opportunity.

Though there are two other games on the Pro Circuit – Gears of War and Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 – to my mind, MLG is synonymous with Halo. It’s the flagship game, has the most participation, gets the most press, etc. It’s the one highlighted when you click the MLG link on ESPN.com. There’s money in this. There is positive publicity for gaming in this. There is geek legitimacy in this.

But here we are. The Fight is Finished. Microsoft owns the Halo IP. Bungie doesn’t want to do more Halo games, or at least not Halo 4. But that leaves some wiggle room.

Say what you want about the greatness or mediocrity of the Halo single player campaigns, the thing that gave the franchise legs was its multiplayer component. Hell, many people still think Halo CE was one of the best FPS’s ever made, and there’s not much conjecture about when you’re just talking console shooters. And, if what I’ve heard is true, the MP feature of Halo: CE was an afterthought. Just something almost thrown together and slapped on the disk.

So why not go the route of Unreal Tourament or, dare I say it, Shadowrun? I’m not comparing those games to Halo – Unreal because at its best, it must be played on a PC, and Shadowrun because it flatly doesn’t.

Imagine, if you will, a new Halo multiplayer game once a year.

First, Bungie doesn’t have to create a new engine. It’s already there. Second, they’re not making a campaign, so they don’t have to worry about story, astounding amounts of new geometry, music, sound fx or art. Thirdly, the manpower required to make new maps and do playtesting is quite a bit smaller than that for a full-featured game.

Hell, they could even go the route of Blizzard and World of Warcraft. That game’s engine is the same as it was when it debuted four years ago (four?!). The designers left the graphics deliberately cartoony so that they would not become “dated” visually. The same thing could be said of Halo. It’s animated, exaggerated pseudo-realistic visual style doesn’t age that quickly. If you have a look that resists aging, or at least does it slowly, that gives you time to polish your gameplay.

So Bungie is working on new intellectual properties. So Microsoft still basically owns Halo. Why not use a trimmed down Halo MP to generate cash to pay for the development of the new games?

Maybe they are doing this already. Maybe Bungie feels it put in enough work on the front end to be able to buddy up with MLG and give the league its own playlist. It isn’t as though the developer has bailed on Halo 3.

In a recent interview on Next Generation with CJ Cowan, Halo 3’s cinematics director, Cowan said, “We’re certainly looking at sustaining the success of Halo 3, making sure that people who are happily playing Halo 3 every day have new stuff to look forward to.”

New maps are great, but why not take it a step further? Why not continue to tweak the game, try to perfect it? Tweak the physics. Try new gametypes. Make new guns. Halo 3 isn’t perfect. Far from it. It may or may not be as good as its predecessors. Time will tell. But what’s certain is that people are fickle, impatient and obsessed with “new.” We want a new game.

Hell, we want a new sci-fi game with a level of play equal to or greater than that of the Halo franchise. Knock Halo 3 if you like, but the fact is that Bungie’s past success might have created a situation where the third game was beaten up because it was not the paradigm shifting game it was supposed to be, despite all the advancements and new features. Any new Halo game faces more scrutiny than any other multiplayer game on the market. And yet, Bungie may not make the next great shooter.

Who else is going to do it? The only other studio with the chops is Infinity Ward. Again, before you start screaming at me, we’re talking consoles here. Halo is king of console FPS. Without Halo, there would be no CoD4. CoD4, while fun, doesn’t offer the same things to a professional gaming in the way Halo 3 does. The level of customization just isn’t there. Halo 3 represents the best opportunity for gaming to become sport.

Bungie is in a unique position in this equation. They make the court. They make the ball. Imagine the opportunity to own all the fields and all the stadiums in the NFL. Imagine that you came up with football and licensed it to a league. That’s what Bungie is to MLG.

In the end, the MLG playlist on Halo 3, while it might not cater to the casual gamer, provides something no other game has: a chance for an everyday guy to become, or aspire to become, a professional. In a sense, spending an evening playing that playlist is like spending an evening in the local rec basketball league. You’re playing by the same rules as the pros. Same court. Same ball. Same dreams.

Why turn your back on that? Why not commit to it. Be the bridge to mainstream gaming legitimacy. Become the sport. Or at the very least, carry on your tradition. Give us the next great console shooter.

And, please, try not to take four years.