Bungie Drops Hint at Post-Halo Game

There was no way around it. Sometime at Joseph Staten's talk this morning at GDC Online, titled "Writing the Whirlwind," somebody would ask a question about Bungie's next project. Bungie's writer and design director knew it was coming, too, and had already warned the audience at the beginning of the session that he wouldn't say word one about the developer's plans for its first post-Halo game.



But Staten just couldn't help himself.



After lamenting that Bungie spent ten years creating a mega-universe that players only experienced for six to eight hours at a time (he's only talking about the single-player campaign here, of course), he dropped this wonderfully cryptic springboard for debate: "Wouldn't it be great if we could make a world that was always there for you?"



So, what does that mean? It sounds like Bungie wants to make sure that after it does the heavy lifting with world building, the player then gets the keys to the proverbial kingdom. Could this be a persistent universe without a set beginning and end, where players control the course of the narrative rather than following a set story with a three act structure? Staten offered nothing else, but it was enough to set the speculation machine in motion.