How Bungie is Ruining it for Everyone Else

With the release of Halo: Reach roughly six weeks away, I figured it would be prudent to talk a little about Bungie in general, and why everyone seems to think that they're so damn important.  The truth is, Bungie does something that very few studios these days seem to do.

They get it.

They get what makes a game fun, and they get what we as gamers want out of a game.  Now for the sake of brevity (and to avoid flagrant accusations of fanboy-ism), I won't get into the gameplay itself.  But what it really comes down to anyways is community.  Bungie respects and appreciates the people playing their games, and that comes through.  Forge and save films are inherently community-based features.  Bungie is placing a huge amount of trust in the gamers' hands by including features in their games that could possibly be used in ways they haven't even anticipated.

The crazy thing is, it paid off.  Forge has become such a huge hit that it has spawned playlists in Halo 3 that consist entirely of community-made maps.  The countless hundreds of hours that people spent fiddling with ways to place boxes and set pieces in new and totally unintended (for all intents game-breaking) ways has prompted Bungie themselves to incorporate these techniques in Reach, with their inclusion of in-game merging and floating object placement.  Save films have become so wildly popular that even "big name" game editing sites like IGN have included a regular segment featuring save film submissions of funny, unlikely, or just plain awesome Halo 3 kills.  Internet machinima cartoons have taken off now that the technology to record and edit gameplay footage is at every Halo players fingertips.

Through seemingly simple additions like these, Bungie has essentially thrown down the gauntlet to other developers on behalf of us as gamers.  Hey Epic, why don't you guys release a public beta for Gears of War 3?  Wouldn't it be fun to create your own custom Modern Warfare maps?  What game do you know that wouldn't benefit from an ability to record replays and upload them online to share with your friends?  Well now the cat's out of the bag, because thanks to Bungie, we already know that this stuff is ALL POSSIBLE.  Now we expect these things from games these days.  All it takes is a studio that respects their community as much as the community appreciates the games.  Yeah, maybe it's creating more work for studios who are fine sitting in their comfort zone afraid to blur the line between developer and community involvement, but as far as I'm concerned, that's a good thing. The fact is, we've played shooters before.  Hell, we've played GAMES before.  We're getting tired of the same old genre rehashes with different coats of paint.  We'd like the opportunity to screw around and do our own thing with the games we love.  THAT'S what Bungie is doing for us.  THAT'S why they get it, and THAT'S why Halo 3 is still one of the top 5 games played on Xbox Live after 3 years.  Good job, Bungie.  I look forward to you continuing to ruin everything with Halo: Reach.