Despite being smaller in scope than your typical AAA title, Disintegration looks to deliver an AAA experience all the same. It’s unique game that combines shooting action with RTS style mechanics, which you can read more about through here. It has quite the pedigree too, as the creator had a big part in creating the megafranchise Halo. And, interestingly, it also echoed much of the original Halo‘s development.
In a lengthy interview with VG24/7, Marcus Lehto broke down a lot of aspects of the game, including its development. He revealed that the game was, at one point, an RTS title and was up and fully running as one. It was intended to be a spiritual successor to Myth, a series that Bungie created before Halo. If that all sounds familiar, it should, as that’s basically the exact same path the original Halo: Combat Evolved took, something not lost on Lehto.
“Well, you know… it was completely unintentional, but it’s eerily similar to how Halo started, yeah,” he said. “We did actually start this game as a real-time tactics game. It was like a spiritual successor to Myth: The Fallen Lords, one of the first games that I actually started working on with Bungie way back in 1996. That’s how Halo started – it was a reskinning of Myth.”
“But when we started this game, we actually did have a functional real-time tactics game up and running,” he continued. We built a prototype with units on the ground similar to some of the forms of some of the units we have in the game now. The units were running around on the map and you were this god camera in the sky and you could select and move units around… it was fun. It was okay, and we actually thought it was pretty cool, but we thought – there’s a million of them out there like that. Why chase the tail of all these other real-time tactics game. But also why make, on the other side of things, a first person shooter that’s like all the other first-person shooters?
“But we love shooters. I love action games and in particular I love action games that give the player a lot of agency and investment in what they’re doing. That’s when we had this idea. I woke up at like three in the morning and I was like ‘Ah! I think we’re gonna try this!’ And that was… we’re gonna take the camera that’s in the sky and turn it into an actual vehicle, this grav-cycle. We’ll put the player into the seat of that vehicle and give them offensive and defensive weapons and allow them, through some new mechanic that we have to invent, to command those units on the ground in a really fluid kind of way.”
It’s interesting to think about, especially considering that connection to Halo. Whether Disintegration will have the same type of impact that franchise did is unlikely, but we can only wait to see when the game releases sometime next year.