The well-known shooter franchise “Halo” now has an online spin-off on PC.
343 Industries, who continued the “Halo” series after Bungie, have now announced the new project Halo Online in a FAQ. It is currently in Closed Beta in Russia and is a free-to-play multiplayer title. The game is based on the modified engine that was also used for “Halo 3”. Halo Online is PC-exclusive and designed to run on lower-end systems. There are no plans to bring the game to Xbox. It is tailored for the PC and the Russian market.
At the moment, they are trying to learn as much as possible from the Closed Beta. The aim of the game is to attract as many Russian players to the Halo franchise as possible. If they were to theoretically bring the game to other markets at some point, it would have to be adjusted accordingly.
The game is being developed by Saber Active, who worked on the HD-remastered version of Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo: The Master Chief Collection. It is being published by a Moscow-based publisher.
The game does not have a campaign mode and also no official release date: Spring 2015 is mentioned.
Mein MMO says: The PC market has developed completely differently in Asia than here. While the former “arcades” closed down here, they have developed into internet cafes in Asia, serving as a kind of “club” or even “substitute siblings” for youths. Most people at home do not have or only have very weak PCs. This is reflected in the gaming market, among other things: On the one hand, western blockbuster titles cannot appear there as they would simply overwhelm the PCs. On the other hand, multiplayer games, and especially MMOs, are in much higher demand than here. This also leads to some strange phenomena; for example, extremely old MMO games like Lineage are incredibly popular in Korea. In Russia, military MMOs or shooters like World of Tanks are particularly popular.
However, as experience shows, these are rarely the types of titles we would expect; instead, they are usually highly instanced games that have little to do with the big franchise names. In Asia, there is also a shooter version of Call of Duty, an MMO version of Borderlands is also in development. It could be that Halo Online fits into this pattern.
