Halo 3: saviour of the Xbox 360, too?

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Saturday, 22 September 2007 10:58

Opinion and Analysis

Halo 3 is genuinely one of the biggest entertainment events of all time, set to once again rival blockbuster Hollywood movies for ‘opening weekend’ revenue at the highest levels, showing just how successful Microsoft has become with the Xbox 360. Just a decade ago, Microsoft’s efforts in gaming in the world of PC’s and hardware gaming peripherals such as joysticks, steering wheels and control pads. 10 years later, and Microsoft has only just been pipped at the post for sales of next-gen games consoles by the Nintendo Wii, although it has still sold twice as many PS3’s on a worldwide basis to date.

Halo 3 comes at the start of the year’s most important season: the lead up to and the event of the end of the year. This period of time encompasses the all important Christmas/holiday gift giving season, with Thanksgiving an important milestone for sales pre-Christmas itself in the USA, still the world’s most powerful consumer market.

Halo 3 promises fantastic high-definition graphics, improved gameplay, weapons and team playing styles, the ability to record your gameplay sessions and watch them again later, mini-movie style, great single player and multiplayer modes and what everyone hopes is a satisfying end to the story, one worthy of all the Hollywood style hype that is going on right now.

We can only hope that Microsoft and Bungie have spent as much time carefully crafting a clever and powerful ending to the Halo story, with whatever twist(s) they may or may not wish to employ, as they have designing the new graphics, weapons and gameplay modes.

In the expectation that the storyline will be as good as the gameplay, we will be witnessing the state-of-the-art in interactive movie/game style entertainment. Such a network environment in a virtual world could easily become Microsoft’s own version of a Home or Second Life environment.

Surely Microsoft is investigating this kind of virtual world for Xbox 360 users by now. It could easily be transformed into an educational environment that schoolchildren could log into, for school kids only – or used for other purposes.

Right now running around blowing things up is one of the coolest ways to enjoy this kind of 3D multiplayer environment – but I’m sure Microsoft and others have plans for all kinds of interesting virtual worlds for us to explore in the future.

It might be years before we get truly immersive 3D holographic worlds that look just like real life would as in Star Trek’s Holodeck, but at the rate graphics cards keep improving, processors go seriously multicore, flash memory gets ever larger and more – a 3D holographic version of Halo 17 is surely in our future!

So... can Halo 3 send the Xbox 360 back to the number 1 spot in next-gen console sales worldwide? And what could Sony and Nintendo do to retaliate? Read onto page 2 to find out!