In a move that will wreak havoc at Bungie, founder Jason Jones has announced he has quit Bungie and will no longer be working on any projects, including the forth coming Destiny, a game he has been credited as being the creative force behind.
Jones said in a very terse press statement:
"My time with Bungie has come to an end. As I look back on my career, I've made some good games but at this stage of my life I've had a gutsful of being the chief Overlord at Bungie, and I need to find some new air to breathe. Farewell, and see you beyond the stars"
The internet has been rife with skuttlebut this morning with some Bungie forums suggesting Jones had cracked under the pressure of making Destiny, a game which possibly had the highest expectations for any game in recent history.
Some telling details have emerged on twitter about this issue. Marty O'Donnell, a long time Bungie stalwart tweeted "Sorry I stole your lunch Jason" while Frank O'Connor from rival studio, 343 Industries tweeted, "good luck with your re-invention of Tetris"
No other Bungie employees have made any public comment at this stage.
Destiny is expected to be released on 1 April 2014.
"The success of Judgment’s story comes down to the clever use of familiar storytelling techniques. It begins at the end, with Kilo Squad under arrest and facing a military tribunal for an unspecified crime. Discovering the how and why they arrived here is exciting because you’re involved in every moment leading up to the arrest. Cutscenes are mercifully few and far between, leaving us to dig into the details during playable flashback sequences. This is where Gears of War bottles lightning again.
Kilo’s testimonies do a terrific job of involving us in a story that unfolds simultaneously with gameplay. Characters observe and comment on their environment in the moment, while sporadic narration explains the motivation for their inevitable crime. The Gears of War fiction desperately needed clarity to compensate for its depth, and Judgment gives thoughtful consideration to its audience. The constant context kept me interested, aware, and engaged every step of the way. For the first time, a Gears of War story is as important as its third-person action." Kotaku appears to find the declassified missions a bit of a chore:
"If we look at the narrative, Judgment tried to do something curious. The testimonies are broken down to smaller levels, most of which give the player the opportunity to tell the "declassified" version of what really went down. So, you can either choose to play the level vanilla, or you can choose to play it with special circumstances. Think stuff like, finish the level in X minutes, only use certain weapons, fight even more vicious enemies.
In their ideal form, these declassified missions present an opportunity for the player to add some spice to the basic Gears of War setup of shooting enemies with your lancer until they stop moving. It's a shame, then, that half the time it felt like some of the challenges addedannoyances instead of making things more compelling. I loved missions that would force me to get out of my comfort zone, like going through a level pistols-only, or adding an ambush where there previously was none.
And then there were levels that experimented with visual obfuscation. One level in particular I can only describe as running through fun house mirrors at a carnival while high. When levels like that came up, I'd pass on going declassified, even if it cost me "stars." See, you're graded on your performance, filling up a three-star bar depending on what you do. Declassified missions fill the bar up faster, though in these cases, it wasn't worth it." Giant Bomb likes the new throw a grenade technique:
"Most of the enemies are guys that you've seen before, from bloodmounts to lambent versions of various creatures, and you'll fight them with the same basic arsenal. There are a few new weapons, like the Marksa, a semi-automatic rifle with a good scope that makes for a lighter, friendlier gun in medium-range sniping situations. The biggest gameplay change is a control change that makes weapon-switching more like Halo or Call of Duty. Instead of using the D-pad to switch between four different weapons, you can now hold two, and tapping the Y button swaps between them. Grenades are now dedicated to the left bumper, rather than being something you have to select before you can use. This change may come down to personal preference, but playing Gears this way makes me wish it was like this all along. Grenades become a lot more useful when you can just toss one out at will instead of having to stop shooting just to switch over to your grenades. It's a nice change that some people will probably hate."
Game Informer wussed out, sighting some problem with Sim City. Hello! There's an epic campaign to be played. Just review that!
This video is actually kinda amusing - it's pure promo for Gears of War: Judgement but the ad libbing as Dywane, a rest home based retiree and Kumail play the new game is quite good.
The Asklon Logo in Halo 3: ODST, Bungie’s Early Destiny Tease Hidden in Plain Sight
Bungie was already playing the long game in Halo 3: ODST. Years before Destiny became its own massive sci-fi universe, little hints of that next project were sitting quietly inside New Mombasa, waiting for players to notice them.
One of the best-known examples is the “Destiny Awaits” teaser found in Halo 3: ODST. At the time, it looked like another bit of Bungie background dressing. Later, once Destiny had been revealed, it became one of those lovely “oh, they knew exactly what they were doing” moments.
The Asklon logo in Halo 3: ODST, one of those tiny Bungie details that became much more interesting once Destiny stepped out of the shadows.
Bungie Loved Hiding the Next Thing Inside the Current Thing
This is classic Bungie behaviour. The studio has always enjoyed leaving breadcrumbs, symbols, logos, and strange little references where players may or may not find them. Halo was full of that energy, from Marathon nods to obscure signage, background jokes, and tiny environmental details that looked like set dressing until fans started pulling them apart.
The Asklon logo fits that tradition perfectly. In the original context of ODST, it could pass as an in-universe brand, city signage, or a throwaway background texture. But once Destiny became public, that little triangle mark started to feel much more deliberate.
Lore note: ODST is already a game about walking through a city full of fragments, signs, clues, and half-told stories. Hiding a future Bungie universe inside that visual noise is very on-brand.
What Makes the Asklon Detail So Good
The fun of the Asklon logo is that it does not scream for attention. It is not Master Chief turning to the camera and saying, “Please buy our next franchise.” It is quiet. It looks like it belongs to the city. It feels like a normal piece of corporate or transport branding in Bungie’s version of the future.
That is exactly why it works. The best Easter eggs do not stop the story dead. They sit inside the world naturally enough that most players walk straight past them. Then, later, someone notices the pattern and the whole thing suddenly clicks.
ODST was the perfect game for this kind of tease because New Mombasa is already dense with signage, urban debris, corporate branding, and quiet environmental storytelling. The player is not charging through bright heroic battlefields. They are wandering through a wounded city at night, reading the leftovers.
Is the Infinity Reference About Halo 4?
The reference to “Infinity” probably had plenty of Halo fans thinking about the UNSC Infinity from Halo 4. Fair enough. Halo fans see one familiar word and immediately start connecting pins on the conspiracy board.
But this is probably not about Halo 4’s ship. Bungie did not make Halo 4, and by the time that game arrived, Halo had moved into 343 Industries’ hands. In this context, “infinity” feels more like a broader spacefaring idea: going beyond Earth, beyond the stars, beyond the Halo universe, and toward whatever Bungie was preparing next.
That makes the detail cleaner, not weaker. It reads less like a direct Halo 4 reference and more like a sly little signpost pointing away from Halo altogether.
Destiny Was Already Waiting
The best part is how tidy the phrase “Destiny Awaits” turned out to be. At first glance, it sounds like generic sci-fi advertising. Put it beside the later reveal of Destiny, the Traveler, and Bungie’s next big universe, and suddenly it becomes a wink from the studio’s future self.
That is why this small ODST detail still has charm. It captures Bungie at a transition point. Halo was still the world everyone associated with the studio, but Destiny was already forming somewhere behind the curtain. The Asklon logo is not just a random symbol. It is a little piece of that handover, tucked into the streets of New Mombasa before anyone outside Bungie fully understood what it meant.
Halo 3: ODST was about aftermath, mystery, and finding meaning in the wreckage. Somehow, that also made it the perfect place to hide a glimpse of Bungie’s next universe.
Destiny Concept Art: Atlantis Station and the Beauty of Bungie’s Ruined Future
Here’s another piece of concept art from Destiny, apparently titled Atlantis Station. It has that classic Bungie mood: a ruined structure, a dead industrial silence, and one cold blue light burning inside like something still has power, purpose, or teeth.
The whole image feels abandoned, but not empty. That is the trick. Destiny’s best concept art rarely looks like a simple ruin. It looks like a place where history has stopped breathing, but something underneath the surface is still awake.
Atlantis Station feels like one of Destiny’s lost thresholds: half ruin, half warning, with that strange blue light asking players to come closer.
The Blue Light Is Doing All the Work
That blue light is the detail that makes the image work. Without it, Atlantis Station might simply read as another ruined futuristic building. With it, the whole scene changes. Suddenly the structure is not just derelict. It is active. Watched. Possibly inhabited. Possibly worse.
Bungie has always understood the power of a single glowing point in a dead landscape. Halo used distant lights, sealed doors, alien corridors, and impossible Forerunner geometry to suggest that ancient places still had systems running long after their builders were gone. Destiny carries that same instinct into a different kind of myth.
Here, the light suggests that Atlantis Station still has a secret. It might be a generator. It might be a beacon. It might be a machine intelligence. It might be nothing more than atmosphere. But good concept art does not need to answer everything. It only needs to make the viewer lean in.
Design note: The image works because it creates a question. The building is ruined, but the light says the story is not over.
Bungie and the Romance of the Dead Facility
There is a very specific kind of Bungie location: the dead facility that does not feel dead enough. Atlantis Station fits that lineage perfectly. It is built around absence, decay, silence, and the suspicion that something important happened here before the player arrived.
That idea is central to Destiny’s world design. The setting is not just “the future.” It is the future after the future collapsed. The Golden Age left behind architecture, machines, stations, bunkers, colonies, laboratories, and impossible fragments of ambition. The player moves through those remains like an armed archaeologist with a resurrection problem.
Atlantis Station, even in this single image, feels like part of that mood. It is not shiny space opera. It is not clean hero fantasy. It is a broken place with traces of human reach still visible in the bones.
What Lurks at Atlantis Station?
The original question still lands: what lurks at Atlantis Station?
That is exactly the kind of question Destiny concept art was designed to provoke. Is this a forgotten human site from the Golden Age? A station touched by something alien? A place abandoned during the Collapse? A research outpost that should have stayed buried? A waypoint on the edge of a much larger mystery?
The image gives us no clean answer, and that is part of its appeal. Bungie’s sci-fi worlds often work best when they feel bigger than the immediate story. You are not just looking at a building. You are looking at the edge of a lost system, a buried mission, or a disaster report nobody survived long enough to file.
That blue glow could be an invitation. It could be a warning. In Destiny terms, those are usually the same thing.
Why the Image Feels Like Destiny
Destiny’s visual identity is built on contrast. Ancient and futuristic. Sacred and mechanical. Human and alien. Beautiful and broken. Atlantis Station sits neatly inside that language. The structure looks industrial and functional, but the mood is almost haunted.
The ruin gives it weight. The light gives it mystery. The empty foreground gives it scale. The whole scene seems to be waiting for a Guardian to step into frame, Ghost hovering nearby, rifle raised, asking whether anyone else thinks this place looks a little too quiet.
That is the sweet spot for Destiny art. It does not just show you a location. It suggests a mission. You can almost hear the objective marker appearing.
Lore note: Destiny’s ruins matter because they are never just scenery. They are evidence. Every broken station, buried facility, and glowing doorway points back to a civilization that reached too far and paid for it.
Mega Bloks has revealed some new Halo toys in their official line up. They are completely new toys that are apparently a part of the ONI REAP-X subdivision which has never been mentioned in Halo lore before...
"The Office of Naval Intelligence, commonly referred to as ONI, is the intelligence service branch of the UNSC. While ONI serves various functions and operates under a multitude of subdivisions, the existence of the Reverse Engineering and Prototyping–Xenotechnology department, acronym REAP-X, is unknown outside the ONI division. Working under the ONI umbrella, REAP-X develops concepts, technologies and applications that are often field tested by ONI via other military branch deployments.
The REAP-X department evolved from smaller splinter groups created during the Human-Covenant War and helped funnel weapons and shield technology to human forces via Misriah and other firms as the war came to a close. Its big breakthrough however, was a Forerunner slipspace engine discovery that created the basis for the engineering concepts that helped complete the Infinity project. With unlimited resources, funding and attention from top brass the department houses many variants of never before seen military vehicles developed for special missions."
We're light on real details but I'll speculate maybe the VTOL was cut from the campaign of Halo 4?
Created in collaboration with DK Publishing, we are proud to announce Halo 4: The Essential Visual Guide, a companion to the world of Halo 4.
Featuring detailed, annotated artwork, Halo 4: The Essential Visual Guide fleshes out this broad universe with a vast collection of facts from the first installment of Halo’s Reclaimer Saga. Fiction fans will love immersing themselves in the perilous world of Halo 4 with detailed sections about the characters, factions, weapons, vehicles, equipment, armor, ships and locations.
Halo 4: The Essential Visual Guide engrosses readers in the rich lore with in-depth profiles focusing on the roles and significance of the many things which inhabit the vast, mysterious and dangerous Halo Universe.
When Judgment ships
with a second, unlockable mini campaign set in the GOW3 time period.
Maybe People Can Fly realized that having a prequel was not
exactly the coolest thing to do for a franchise 3 games in.
They mixed up the Judgement
campaign with optional missions, flash backs to give the campaign a bit of
novelty. One thing they kept secret until the game’s release was that having
completed the campaign, a second campaign called 'Aftermath' is playable if the player
has done enough diligence during the first campaign.
That’s a nice way of mixing it up.
Aftermath takes place at the end of GoW 3 when Baird, Cole, and
Carmine set out to track down reinforcements before the COG invade Azura.
Aftermath is set at a two game play length.
Aftermath can be unlocked by completing each level of
Judgement with style and panache. More head shots or fancier execution
finishers will grant players ‘stars’ and the more stars you get, the more of
Aftermath becomes available.
Gears of War: Judgment’s lead level designer Jim Brown said “We wanted to do something that added
context to the game, so you had that beginning part, but then this ties
everything together with the main trilogy as well.”
“So you’ll see when you go in there some people you
recognize, some places, maybe even some enemies and then see how the two
storylines weave together in the context of the whole. Obviously, we don’t want
to give away too many spoilers in how it’s going to end or what you’re going to
see.
“But the basic gist of it is that when they’re at the fort,
Marcus sends Barrett and Cole off to find supplies and reinforcements, and then
he goes off to Azura. Then at the very end they show up with helicopters. This
is where they went and what they did on that mission.”
Sparth’s Halo 4 Requiem Concept Art: Forerunner Scale, Ancient Machinery, and the Strange Beauty of 343’s First Halo World
Sparth, known to his mum as Nicolas Bouvier, released three pieces of concept artwork he created for Requiem, the Forerunner shield world at the centre of Halo 4.
That is worth pausing on, because Requiem had a hard job. It was not just another alien location. It was the first major Halo world built under 343 Industries for a mainline campaign, and it had to tell players very quickly that Halo had changed hands without losing the sense of awe that made the series work in the first place.
Sparth was one of the key artists in that transition. He joined Microsoft to work on Halo in 2009 and contributed concept art across the 343 era, including Halo 4, Halo 5, and Halo Infinite. His wider career includes work across major games and his Structura art books, which helps explain why his Halo work often feels so architectural, precise, and obsessed with massive shapes placed against tiny human scale. :contentReference[oaicite:0]{index=0}
Sparth’s Requiem concept art captures what Halo 4 needed most: a Forerunner world that felt ancient, mechanical, beautiful, and slightly impossible.
Requiem Had to Feel Like Halo, But Not Like Another Ring
Requiem is not Installation 04. It is not another Halo ring with forests, cliffs, beaches, and ominous underground doors. It is a shield world, a buried Forerunner structure with its own inner landscapes, artificial horizons, impossible machinery, and ancient secrets folded into the terrain.
That difference matters. Halo 4 needed a setting that felt familiar enough to belong in the franchise, but strange enough to tell players that this was a new phase of the story. Requiem allowed 343 to keep the Halo formula of open vistas, alien structures, and ancient threat, while pushing the visual design toward sharper Forerunner geometry and a more engineered sense of wonder.
Sparth’s strength is scale. His Halo work often places enormous architectural forms against tiny human or vehicle silhouettes, making the world feel too big to fully understand. That is exactly what Forerunner design should do. It should not look like a human civilisation with smoother walls. It should feel like a machine-age cathedral built by beings who thought in planetary systems.
Design note: Requiem works when it makes the player feel like an intruder inside a machine too old and too large to care that humans have arrived.
This is the kind of Halo vista that lets the environment do the storytelling: scale first, explanation later.
The Sparth Look: Clean Shapes, Huge Worlds, Small Humans
Sparth’s art has a very particular energy. It is clean without feeling sterile. Large without becoming empty. Futuristic without losing atmosphere. His compositions often use huge masses, sharp lighting, and simple readable shapes to make science-fiction worlds feel designed rather than merely decorated.
That suited Halo 4 because Requiem had to carry a lot of narrative weight. It had to house the Didact. It had to expand the Forerunner presence. It had to make the Prometheans feel like they came from a different design tradition than the Covenant. It had to convince players that Master Chief had woken up inside a world older than the war he thought he understood.
These images are not busy in the usual concept-art way. They do not scream with surface clutter. They use silhouette, space, and mood. That restraint helps sell the Forerunner identity. The more controlled the shapes become, the more alien the whole place feels.
Requiem as a Forerunner Stage
Requiem’s job in Halo 4 is not only to look cool. It is the stage on which 343 reintroduces the Forerunners as active, dangerous, and emotionally loaded mythic forces. In the original trilogy, Forerunner structures were mostly ruins, weapons, or mysteries. Halo 4 brings that ancient history closer to the present.
That means the world itself has to feel awake. Not merely abandoned. Not simply buried. Requiem needs to feel as if its systems are still thinking, shifting, opening, sealing, and reacting. The environment becomes part of the threat.
The concept art reflects that. The structures do not look like static ruins. They look like components of a larger machine. Even the landscape feels engineered, as if geology and architecture have been forced into the same language.
Requiem’s concept art turns the shield world into a living stage for Forerunner machinery, mystery, and Halo 4’s heavier mythic direction.
Why This Art Matters to Halo 4
Halo 4 asked players to accept a lot at once. A new studio. A new emotional focus on Chief and Cortana. A new enemy faction. A stronger Forerunner storyline. A new visual treatment for old ideas. Concept art like this helped define the bridge between what Halo had been and what Halo 4 wanted to become.
The Requiem pieces work because they do not throw away Halo’s visual soul. There is still the old feeling of standing at the edge of something vast. There is still the mixture of military science fiction and ancient mystery. There is still the sense that the player is small, armed, and probably about to make a very bad decision inside a structure nobody fully understands.
But the mood is sharper. The Forerunner forms are cleaner, more angular, more monumental. The world looks less like a ruin discovered by accident and more like a sealed machine waking up.
That is the real value of Sparth’s Requiem art. It does not just show Halo 4 locations. It shows the visual argument of the game: Halo can move forward, deepen its ancient mythology, and still make a single figure in armour look tiny beneath the weight of impossible architecture.
, a companion to the world of Halo 4.
