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Halo 2 Ready to Ship
Thanks to pdawerks who alerted us to the post on the Bungie site stating that Halo 2 is ready to ship. It's filled with typical Bungie humor. "If you create a clan, do it because you intend to use it, and enjoy the camaraderie that Clan membership brings. We have systems in place to deal with "dead" or unused Clans. Unpleasant, pointy systems that reek of rust and blood and horror. Think Silent Hill meets Autocomplete."
Whilst many will not know, Bungie originally started out life as a Mac developer... until Bungie sold out to MS, in the ultimate act of treason for many Mac users :)
Even still, I hope Halo 2 makes it off the XBox onto the Mac and the PC. The first one was great, and Bungie make great looking games with a great plot.
-- james
That's retarded. While there was a rumor that Halo 2 may be out in Spring of 04 (Or this year...), it was just that, a rumor. Bungie never said anything one way or the other about the rumor. It was back at the e3 2004 Convention that they stated it would release on November 9th: And for the love of bees, it looks like that's what's gonna happen! Be sure of your facts before dissing something, dude.
Like Doom 3, Bungie has never actually announced an official release date until E3 where they stated with certainty a November 9th release date. It seems they will be able to deliver on that.
All other dates were pure speculation by the media. People think the game is pushed back because speculation and rumors prove to not be true.
It's sad how the opinion on a developer can be so easily lowered by incorrect assumptions made by gaming sites and the media.
You need to get out more.
No really! You can go outside and shank someone with a sword right now!
That's like saying Blizzard "doesn't exist" because Vivendi Entertainment owns it. Or Retro Studios (the great company that put together Metroid Prime) "doesn't exist" because Nintendo owns the franchise.
Just because MS buys a developer doesn't necessarily make it bad. Bungie still makes kickass games. There's also a ton of other games that have come directly from MS in-house (MechWarrior, Age of Empires, etc).
I can't speak for everyone, but I think for a lot of people it's the multiplayer experience, not the campaign.
In Halo1, of course, this was limited to split screen and/or system link. The fact that Halo 2 has live support will probably be reason enough for Halo fans to buy the game. Add in some dual-wielding weapons, destructible vehicles, more multiplayer game modes (and maps, naturally)...hard to go wrong.
That doesn't change the fact that it's not for everyone of course, and there's nothing wrong with that.
If you're not into multiplayer FPS, there's not nearly as much there for you. The storyline was pretty good (IMHO), it WAS a fairly linear campaign though. I've heard some rumors about little differences (like, an AI driver while you're gunning on a 'hog), but the single player will still come down to story and creativity in the gameplay. Pretty hard to judge that in advance - I could see it going either way. Maybe they focused almost entirely on multiplayer and the single player campaign will be left behind. Maybe they heard the complaints about the Halo1 campaign being repetitive and linear, and have drastically improved. We'll just have to see.
This post seems to confirm that co-op is back (for the XBox version, at least), that's always a good thing. I wonder if you can do co-op over Live? I have some friends that're hard to get in the same room but we all have Live...
Xentax
You shouldn't verb words.
Umm. No. Jason Jones was and is the main guy behind Bungie and he's still there. He's the driving force behind the story of many (all?) of thier games. Most the original Bungie guys are still there. I can think of one high-profile dude that left to form his own company, but don't feel like digging up the details right now. Should be easy enough to find.
You may not like MS, but don't take it out on Bungie, they are some damn good developers.
They were in a compromising spot some years back where they just could not effectively develop AND publish AND distribute their games -- too many big publishers were doing a better job than they ever could because they had the name recognition and the people and infastructure in place to do so. Bungie was too small. So they decided to merge with a big developer/publisher so they could focus on development instead of having to worry about calling up EB and Gamespot and the rest and trying to convince them to carry their games.
"Hello, this is Bungie and we've got an awesome new game we'd like you to sell."
"Who?"
"Bungie."
"Who?"
compared to
"Hello, this is Microsoft and we have an awesome new game that you will sell. May I put you down for a million copies?"
"Yes, sir! May I have another!"
Great, the MS Office paperclip is runnig the clans now..