Now that Halo: Reach is on store shelves and in the hands of gamers the world over, having enjoyed enormous sales success and critical acclaim, gamers everywhere are asking the same question: what will Bungie do next? Outside the knowledge that whatever game is next for Halo’s former developers will be published by Activision, practically nothing is known about what Bungie working on.
That changes today, with the first tiny morsels of information scattered across the internet in the form of several trademarks and registered domain names, in addition to a job posting on Bungie’s website.
The trademarks and domain-registrations in question are for the words/phrases “New Monarchy,” “Seven Seraphs,” “Osiris,” and “Dead Orbit.” What do they mean? At this point, at least in the context of the game they may be attached to, no one outside of Bungie knows.
That said, the words and phrases are not without meaning in and of themselves, and those meanings may ultimately prove to be revealing. Let’s take a look.
Historically, the New Monarchies were Spain, England, France, and Portugal, but the term New Monarchs is also used by historians to describe rulers who unified their countries and created centralized governments. Moving on, seraphs are the highest order of angel, while Osiris is the Egyptian king and judge of the dead. The last of the phrases, dead orbit, has no specific definition.
A diverse group of references to be sure. In gameplay terms, the notion of a leader uniting a people carries a number of possibilities. Powerful heavenly creatures and the king of the dead would seem to make compelling antagonists for one another. Still, any presumption of what the trademarked names may mean for the game in development is pure conjecture at point (conjecture that we here at Game Rant encourage you to participate in with comments at the end of this post).
At the same time this news has come to light, so too has a job listing on Bungie’s website. The studio is actively scouting for a Senior Mobile Application Programmer with “Comprehensive understanding of at least one current mobile SDK (iOS, Android, Windows Mobile, etc…).” Could this position be related to the trademarks? Does Bungie’s “next big action game universe” have a mobile component? Or is this just for a Bungie.net app?
The job description certainly makes it sound more like the former than the latter. The listing offers this description of the person Bungie is looking for:
It goes on to state:
“You spend your nights browsing the mobile app store, but rather than buying anything you say, ‘I can write that!’”
That is a lot of data. And a lot of users. That there will apparently be some sort of mobile interface for Bungie’s “next gaming universe” is probably as much news as we’re apt to get from the developer for a while.
“Our mobile development team is focused on establishing real time connectivity for millions of users and terabytes of data. Join our team and define the interface of Bungie’s next gaming universe to the world.”
Ranters, what do you make of all this? Any insight into what these names, and the possibility of a mobile interface, may mean for Bungie’s next game? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.
Source: Industry Gamers, Bungie.net
