First Review of Halo

The Halo Guy writes: "Voodoo Extreme has posted the first review of Halo, the new first person shooter from Bungie Software that's an Xbox launch title and will be ported to the Mac and PC later next year. Included are some very cool high resolution Xbox game captures too." I guess buying the bundle will be a little less painful if you get good games with the system.

Promises

And how many people remember Bungie promising over and over that Halo would not become a console game? Or, later, that it would be released for the XBox and (PC or Mac) simultaneously? Oh well. Here's to waiting for the port.

Re:HALO ... or how MS sucks!

Yeah, except that the game was to be released years ago, and it was the Xbox holding up development, not Bungie. The e3 alpha version ran on a 266 with a tnt2. They were doing fine, it was going well, it wasn't "the project that wouldn't die". Oh, well.

Re:HALO ... or how MS sucks!

Suck it up, Bungie. MS stole your soul and your ability to innovate.

Alternatively, MS provided the hard cash and commercial expertise to keep Bungie in business to work on wildly-overambitions projects.

Not everything in life is a conspiracy by Microsoft against the entire world, you know.

Re:HALO ... or how MS sucks!

HALO was planned to be an amazingly, impressive, multiplayer game set inside a virtual online war.

You know, I've followed this game's development pretty rabidly since the first rumors of "Project Blam" started surfacing in 1998. I think you're remembering selectively: Halo was never pitched as a persistant multiplayer-only game. It was always going to have a primary single-player component.

I suspect you're confused because all of the initial demos were of the multiplayer side. At the time, Bungie took pains to explain that this was a result of their internal development schedule, which slotted the engine and multiplayer sections for completion long before the single-player campaign was even demoable, much less finished. (The reasons for this kind of schedule should be pretty self-evident: artists, writers and voice-actors work on different time scales than engineers.)

The big change that did occur around the time of the MS buyout was a shift from third-person to first-person perspective, but I don't see any reason to not take their word that that was a gameplay and control issue brought out by playtesting.

Suck it up, Bungie. MS stole your soul and your ability to innovate.

Christ, grow up, will you?

First of all, in all likelihood, Microsoft saved Bungie from bankruptcy. If you cast your mind back to 1998, Bungie was on the tail end of a very ambitious expansion program that had produced mixed results at best. Myth and Myth II had gotten uniformly excellent reviews, but were far from best-sellers. They were having amply-documented (by themselves, at length, on their website) problems getting their boxes onto store shelves. They had sunk an unknown but presumably significant amount of money into opening up a California office to produce a game (Oni) that at the time of the MS buyout was over a year behind schedule and still slipping, and they had just started development on an insanely ambitious title (Halo) that was, at best, not going to ship for another two years. Add it all up, and you get a company in desperate need of funding, not to mention some marketing muscle.

Second, pissing and moaning about how a finished game diverges, a little or a lot, from whatever rabid speculation some of the designers indulged in while it was still in pre-alpha form only shows how little you understand about the development process. Here's the nutshell version: Shit happens. You start out with a design doc that says the game will have perfect realtime raytraced voxels and will also make you coffee and fetch your slippers. A year later all of your hair is missing because BigHardwareCo's graphics APIs are an undocumented mess, the playtesters insist that they want tea, not coffee, and half of the company's monitors explode during a cutscene in level 10 for no reason that you can determine. You have a finite amount of money to spend, a finite amount of time you can take before the online game sites lose interest in your screenshots, and a finite amount of prozac you can dispense to your engineers. All of those airy promises you made a year ago are now completely irrelevant. You fix the problems that are fixable, remove the parts that can't be done, polish what does work until it shines, and save the fifty great ideas you had to abandon for the sequel. Assuming there is s sequel. Assuming, of course, you ship at all.

Companies do not run on good intentions alone, and designers don't make games for their own amusement: they make them so that other people can see them. (And so they can get paid.) Given a choice between slowly slipping under the waves and suddenly getting a very, very large wad of cash from a company that was also going to market my product like nobody's business, I know what I, and any other adult, would choose in a heartbeat.

Anybody remember Marathon?

I used to have a Macintosh, so when everyone was talking about Duke Nukem and Quake and all that I was left out in the cold, but then Marathon came along. I used to go to my friend's house and play his shoot 'em up games on his PC, so I knew the type, but Marathon just blew them all away. I even snuck a copy to our high school computer lab and setup some network games for us "geeks" while the rest of the class was still working on their assignments. It was the coolest game as far as fluidity of game play and ease of use. If Halo follows in that tradition then it must be pretty good. It's unfortunate though that it's only released on the XBox as of yet, I mean it's a shame that the first release is going to be tainted by the "blue screen of death."

On a side note, Bungie has a cool product page [bungie.com] with a little more info.

Re:Anybody remember Marathon?

Bah. When I first played Marathon, not only was I a die-hard PC gamer, I was a die-hard anti-Mac person. They were toys, pure and simple, in my eyes. You couldn't get anything *real* done, whether it be work or entertainment. But Marathon stood all that on its head. It kicked the crap out of the FPSs available on the PC at the time. Sure, the basic concepts were still run around, shoot, find switches, solve puzzles, etc., but goddamnit it had a STORY! A story so engrossing that, until Half Life, no PC-based FPS could even begin to challenge. That was the first FPS where I really got into the game. Playing a co-op multiplayer game in a dark room with headphones...damn game gets creepy as hell.

As far as your revolution assessment, a FPS capable of scaring the crap out of the average fairly jaded gamer *is* a revolution. If nothing else, it's one hell of an accomplishment. The ability of the game to draw you in, to make it more than a game, that is a very hard and key factor. Look at this very review...even it talks about the importance of Half Life's story elements, and how that makes it the best FPS...until Halo.

And yes, I bought Marathon II for the PC.

Having played the demo...

...I dunno. I thought the controls for the game were pretty painful, but then again I have yet to play a console-based FPS whose controls I find as intuitive as keyboard+mouse.
Granted, I didn't get to take the XBox home and hook it up to my Wega, but graphics didn't even come close to blowing me away.
MS is supposed to be spending half a billion promoting the XBox, right? Ads and demo machines are pretty sparsely dropped, so I guess we know where that money earmarked for advertising found its way to, hmm? Not saying that there's payola going on here, but "better single-player than Half-Life" has more than a tinge of that bought-and-paid-for hyperbole.

lifespan?

I noticed the author said he played through it a few times. If he means fully then this must be some short game. Also console games don't have the same life span as PC games since at the moment, no mods/maps/etc. (although getting closer to this).

So your life span is cut short, and as for the graphics, well, with Unreal 2 and Doom right around the corner, I doubt this will hold the crown for too long in first person shooters.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad to see a kick ass fps on a console's launch and I've noticed Halo since its birth, but for some reason I doubt people will play Halo as long as they did (and still do) Half Life, Quake and Unreal.

Re:Better Review

Cheers, nice review. But...

• "Finally, we have a combat title that actually gives us a taste of what the real thing might be like"

The reviewer needs to go and play Hidden and Dangerous. You crawl on your belly for 20 minutes, then get shot once by a sniper that you can't even see, and just curl up and die. Or, better yet, read "Dulce Et Decorum Est" [utexas.edu]

Also, both reviews seem to imply that you'll simply zip straight through the single player version, but the multiplayer has enough variety to keep you playing. Hmmm, seeing as how your only option (at launch) is a LAN party, you'd better hope all your friends buy Xboxen as well.

I'll definitely be waiting until after Christmas to decide on an Xbox purchase, and I strongly suggest that everyone else considers making the decision to do likewise rather than playing the "how much is the hype affecting me today" game. ;-)

Re:And so it begins

Actually, if you want to hurt Microsoft, buy the box, but don't buy any games. They are selling the box below cost, but hoping to make it up on games. :)

the death of Halo

about a year ago, when first previews with more than just some marketing hype came around, Halo was the next step in FPS gaming.

let's see - it had a persistent, massive-multiplayer online world, a solid storyline driving an amazing outdoor graphics engine. and there were rumours that it was going to be released for windos, Mac and Linux - simultaneously.

then, bungie got bought.

when Halo finally comes to the PC in summer 2002, it will be yet another FPS, as all the really innovative concepts have been removed. the graphics will also be much less amazing given the amount of time that has passed.

all that wouldn't be catastrophic, if it weren't for the fact that 90% of those who were starving for Halo earlier this year have been alienated.
first the Mac and Linux users by bungie being acquired by none else then microsoft. the bungie forums were aflame in Mac users who felt somewhere between sold and raped.
then, all those looking for the "next generation" game were pissed of by waiting about a year longer than was originally said, during which time Halo's graphics and physics engines have dwindled from "revolutionary" to "quite nice".
and finally, everyone looking for the next step in FPS gaming, in the sense of more depth in gameplay than just kill-em-all, will have to look for some other place. sorry, Halo is just another shooter, try again next year.

frankly, selling the game as part of a bundle is, IMHO, the only chance it has to break even. some idiot has systematically destroyed its fanbase, and because of the early marketing offense, almost everyone who'd pay money for Halo *was* a part of the fanbase.

let's hope someone takes that which has been taken out of the game, i.e. all the *really* great parts, such as the persistent world, and makes a game around those.

Stop

Stop. Wait. Pause for breath.

Don't speculate that this is faked up, or a bought review, or that it rocks, or sucks, or is the best thing since sliced Tomato Demon.

Just wait. Wait until you've played it in a store, or your excited friend plays it, or a plethora of reviews from many independent sources are available.

Anything other reaction is just buying the hype, either Microsoft's bought hype or that of the anti-Microsoft crusaders.

Make the decision now to wait until after this Christmas to buy an Xbox. It'll still be there, and it's still be as good or as bad as it is on the day it ships.