News: Halo 2 Hands On - Hands Off What Works?

[ev98]

Yesterday, HBO announced that one of the teams participating in the Halo 2/Mountain Dew contest had detailed their experiences with a build of the upcoming game. While some changes mentioned in this writeup are good, logical choices for Bungie to make, others I'm mildly concerned about. To this extent, I've written an article about the changes so far.

Readers should be responsible, however, for the fact that the build mentioned is still in beta, post-beta or development. As such, the changes mentioned are likely not final and are subject to tweaking before the game's release. (The fact that I've written this article ties in with my belief that pre-release games should not remain hidden forever; rather, they should be documented for historical and evolutionary purposes.)

To that extent: go and read.

- Read

[funkmon]

Until I read the last paragraph, you seemed to have a negative attitude towards Halo 2. As if you were saying "I really hope this works out well, because it doesn't sound too good." Why such an implied negative attitude?

[ev98]

I'm legitimately concerned about the changes being made to the game. Yes, I know I should trust Bungie as a developer to make the best damn games around, but look what happened to Seamus Blackley.

Remember "Trespasser"? Seamus' life was basically turned around because everyone inherently trusted that his game would be the best one out there. AMD showed it off in the hopes that it would sell K6's (much like nVIDIA showed off Halo in the early days, and Microsoft showed off the announce trailer in STUNNING DIGITAL WINDOWS MEDIA 9 to whore their player.)

If you haven't read "Opening the Xbox" (one of my favourites, BTW) it's at least worth considering. At one point there were 10K+ active bugs in Halo Xbox. Jason Jones shipped the game when there were no major showstoppers -- just some "minor" bugs/glitches. It is nearly a miracle that Halo plays as well as it does. Bungie pulled it off once. Can they do it again? I sincerely hope so.

Because if they can't, and it's due to some stupid gameplay decision (for example, a bad implementation of boosting or jacking vehicles, or crummy logic surrounding them) then I will be sincerely disappointed.

And that is why my attitude's so "negative" -- I don't really look at it that way though. I prefer cynic; pessimist; whatever: because that way if I'm truly and completely wrong, it's better than having really high hopes (and any Halo fan who lacks any sort of hope for Halo 2 isn't a fan at all.)