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Games - Lots of lots of Halo Game Content

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It's no secret, sequels kill. On the business end, sequels just make sense; gamers want them and investors can have faith that a follow up to a successful game will be equally successful. Sequels get green lit on a regular basis, but how often is too often?

Last week Phil Spencer, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft Game Studios, told IGN that, "There's no explicit strategy that says we're to ship a Halo game every year. I will say I think one Halo game every three years -- which was kind of our old cadence "€œ is probably not frequent enough."

Spencer goes on to explain that the issue is staying relevant, staying on the mind of gamers. They want gamers engaged to their brand and their games, but at the same time, they need time to ship a quality product. Spencer cites Activision as being successful in this regard with Call of Duty. Activision has maintained the quality in Call of Duty game every year by breaking up the development of the titles in to two studios. Treyarch and Infinity Ward. But could the world handle a Halo every year?

Halo games have always been monumental releases, The original Halo defined what we'd come to expect from a console shooter and Halo 2 expanded the multiplayer component by ridiculous degrees leaving the plot at a serious cliff hanger. Halo 3 concluded the plot and left us with a definitive version of Halo's multiplayer. Halo: Reach was an awesome game that improved multiplayer, but plot wise it simply expanded on cliff notes we already had.

Tackling the Halo universe for a yearly release will be a difficult endeavor. As gamers we want to play as Master Chief, he's an all encompassing force, but we certainly don't want to be desensitized to his persona. On the other hand, who else could we play as that could be equally compelling? How many games can we play, like ODST and Reach, where we know the characters are screwed. If I were Microsoft I'd stick to Master Chief, but how much Master Chief is too much.