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Halo for the PC and Mac
smelialichu writes "According to this news article, Halo is finally on its way to the PC and Mac. Gearbox is handling the PC version, and Westlak Interactive is working on the Mac version, but it won't be released untill next summer. The official announcement says "Halo for PC is expected to be available in summer 2003. The Macintosh version is also expected to be available in 2003. Additional information regarding game content, features and enhancements will be announced at a later date." We can only assume they have some cool new features up their sleeves, maybe we'll be seeing Halo with even better graphics, optimized for the new Radeon? Anyway, this is certainly a huge relief to many gamers who thought they may never see Halo on their home PC's."
Sad thing is, by the time Halo hits shelves, unless they do some enhancement, it will be Old News, and the Next Big Thing will be here.
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
A lot of people have complained about how Halo was transformed over several years into several very different games. They like to blame Microsoft for this.
That would be a mistake, I'm afraid.
I read an interview with one of the Halo team members not too long ago where he explained that the team willingly threw out what they had on several occasions to start over anew because they came up with a better way of doing things.
Few people seem to know Halo started out as an RTS! The warthog (jeep) was something they were playing around with for some time as an extension of that project, and they had so much fun with it, they ended up creating an entire game around it. A 3rd person shooter.
Then, they threw that out and went for first person.
And abandoned the whole "We'll simulate the entire surfance of Halo and let you wander around doing what you wish, ala Morrowind" idea.
These were THEIR decisions.
The one negative aspect of Halo you can blame Microsoft for is the fact they imposed time constraints on the team. Halo needed to be ready and thoroughly bug tested by November 2001. They didn't have all the time they needed to make all the levels as nice as they could have been, and that is why there is some pretty awful repetition.
Give credit and blame where they are due, but don't blame Microsoft for every damn thing you don't like about Halo, or why feature X that was described in 1999 didn't make it into the Golden Master copy 2 years later.
Maybe MS is trying to get the PC gamers to play the nearly 2 year old version of Halo, and if they like it they'll need to buy an Xbox to enjoy Halo 2.
Either way, I don't think it'll affect Xbox sales negatively at all. If people were going to buy Xbox for Halo, they would have done it in the 2 years before the PC version came out...
Much like they half-assed the ports of IE to other systems.
Although that definitely used to be the case (IE 4.5 for Mac - let along Office 4.2.1 (!) ), the Mac versions of MS programs are now all written by a specific sub-unit of MS, the Macintosh Business Unit, and are generally considered best-of-breed. In other words, they are not direct ports, but are (re-)written specifically with the Mac in mind.
The Mac versions of Office and IE are considered by many to be better and more standards compliant that the Windows versions.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
When I first played Halo (on a friend's xbox), it was fun, enjoyable and all that good stuff. It had the ability to amuse me for a couple hours or so, but got old after a couple weeks. If they are planning on doing a 75% recycle (25% new content/features), I do not think Halo will be anything close to what Half-Life was to the PC FPS community. Their only chance to make Halo a massive hit on the PC is to make sure it has extensive mod support and good communication with the mod developers. Gearbox did a great job with Opposing Forces, Blue Shift, and Half-life PS2, so they have that in their favor, but in general console to PC conversions generally seem lacking. GTA3 is a good example of this: I had never played GTA3 before when the PC version came out. According everyone I talked to, it had sweet graphics, awesome gameplay, the interesting music feature, etc. However, once I started playing it I was sorely dissappointed, especially by the graphics and gameplay. I was never a big fan of GTA1 or 2 since the gameplay was way too simple, but I figured they had solved this problem with 3 but I was wrong (though it was greatly improved). The graphics sucked, period. Sorry, after playing Sacrifice (came out in 2000), GTA looks like crap, and the post-rendering filters are just a cheap way of covering up how low poly everything is, along with the lowres textures. Halo has graphics on its side, but my question is whether it's gameplay with retain that 'console' quality. PC games are often more complex than console games these days since there are less limitations in certain respects. I just hope Halo does not follow the direct-port route, since that would be a waste.
"What can a thoughtful man hope for mankind on Earth, given the experience of the past million years? Nothing." -Bokonon
Sure. Halo isn't pushing many more polys than Quake 3 but it is quality and not quantity, my friend. Quake 3 (and derivatves thereof) don't take advantage of programable shaders and therefore can't do some of the incredible effects you see in Halo.
My favorite effect is the ice reflection. That cannot be done in software in real-time. The best Quake 3 can do is put a nice texture on it. Halo actually reflects and distorts the environment. The lighting effects also add a lot more depth to the environment.
Halo is the direction everyone is going. Programmable shaders are going to do for games what 3D acceleration did for games years ago. It is the next big thing and if you don't believe me then look at the Doom 3 project.
As for X-box's Celeron chip, X-box has a BUS that is more games oriented so it doesn't need a huge on-board catch.
It would be particularly cool if Xboxers and PCers could play together in the same game, but I doubt it'll happen that way.
My deviantArt site
well, it wasn't that it was going to be difficult or take a long time... It's that M$ wanted to MILK the game for everything they could so they could get people to by their X-Box..
Now we get the announcement that the PC/Mac version will be another 12 months away. Odd that a game which was originally developed for the PC/Mac should take so long to reach it's original target platform.
Such a delay can be interpretted in many ways and unless hanging around on the hbo servers making a nuisance until questions are answered actually has an effect, we'll probably never know precisely why the timeline looks like it does.
My personal rumour mill suggests that moving the project to the XBox opened out the graphic capabilities and closed down the outright flexibility of the game. Given any console controller, there is a limit to the number of controls and options you can present to a player. A mouse is actually the perfect tool for directing strategy on a map. Keyboards allow for many 'fast' commands and more complex controls. So the first thing you cull when moving to a console is the complexity of the interface between player and game.
PC/Macs also offer a more established platform for excessive memory usage, something which tends to be tight on a console. So the next thing to bin on a console is enormous worlds loading in the background as you cross 'tile' boundaries.
So Halo is another year away. And no Linux version either. Lets hope that the restrictions that the console version imposed are loosened/removed from the PC/Mac version. And lets hope that some of the more exotic ideas that originally made Halo sound like the next generation of gaming actually make it back in.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
I think the backlash (at least from my point of view) really centres around Halo on the Xbox for a number of reasons.
Firstly, it is one of only about 2 or 3 games I could ever see myself buying an Xbox for. I made the same mistake, buying a PS2 exclusively for Gran Turismo 3 - the game totally lived up to my expectations, but in the end I had my fun with it and sold it on, at a loss - you can only play one game for so long.
Secondly.. PC people are especially pissed that Microsoft effectively stole Halo away from us. We waited and we waited (I can still remeber flicking through a PC magazine some 3 or 4 years ago) and then we heard the news that it would be an exclusive for Microsofts new console.. and I was determined not to waste my money on an Xbox, but rather wait for it to come to the PC.
Thirdly.. you pretty much hit the nail on the head in your post (unless it was an accident) - you only mention Halo. Its the game that got your friends interested, and its the game you spend the evenings playing. I too have played Halo on the Xbox many times and I love the game.. but I dislike the Xbox, and I hate trying to play an FPS on a joypad! Bleugh!
At least we have a date.. I can wait those 12 months.
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
Don't the editors ever think to add maybe even two or three words to describe even the category of a random proper noun that some of us might not have heard of?