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Halo 2 Sells 5 Million Units
A witty GameIndustry.biz writer: "Avid gamers clock up 28 million hours shooting each other in the face on Live". They have word that Halo 2 has surpassed 5 million units sold through. The sequel beat the record achieved by the original game, which took 2 years to achieve.
"It took the first one two years because it sucked."
Uh, I don't know about you, but I don't think Halo sucked at all. It added ton of features that influenced FPSes for years to come:
* First game to incorporate lifelike, accurate AI in open battle scenes. Half-Life accomplished this in tight spaces, but most routines involved paths with very tight corners. They've evolved it even further in Halo 2: watch as AI takes cover under the boxes you just blasted.
* First game to include a bevy of pixel shaders correctly. Yes, the corridors were repetitive, but they sure looked purty.
* First game to get console FPS controls perfectly. Goldeneye came in a close second, and would've worked if you weren't using button for moving the sight up and down. Every console FPS I've seen since Halo (besides Metroid) has its controls.
Not really. As far as I know they lose a couple of hundred US dollars on every Xbox system sold. They'll make back the development cost of the game, but they'll still be losing money overall, until every buyer buys a few dozen full-price games to go with the system.
Now getting a monopoly on operating systems, using that to gain a monopoly on office suites, and a good share of the server market (etc., etc.). Now that's a licence to print money, at least as soon as companies are allowed to purchase countries. It's also a good way to subsidise a loss-leader[1] to get a foothold in the games console market.
[1] Well, it's doing better than the Game Cube, although I'm sure I'm about to get assaulted by a Nintendo fanboy for daring to suggest the 'Cube is in 3rd.
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20 GOTO 10
2 thoughts:
-a mouse becomes like a puppet, turn your wrist-head left, and your puppet turns left. HIGH potential for intuitiveness after an initial comfort-level is met. most people's problem with pc 1stp's are with using the KEYBOARD.
-an analog stick is bound in it's maximum rotation, creating a paradox between speed and precision. a mouse (esp optical) has no reasonable bounds on the distance or speed you move it.
you forget how easy it is to create an account on counter strike. On halo2 you need a whole new xbox live account which is paid for. AND counter strikes online play is a free service. All you have to do is buy the game, which runs about 20 bucks now anyway. But even at that, you can go to any internet cafe and set it up with such ease.
If it wasn't for C, we would be stuck using BASI, PASAL and OBOL.
While lots of people buy games for features, features don't necessarily mean fun. Halo might be a noteworthy step forward in FPSers, but it doesn't mean it doesn't suck.
As to the specific features; the AI was interesting, but didn't do anything for me. I certainly felt more challenged by the grossly unbalanced power lavels ("let's empty multiple assault rifle clips into a single mid-grade bad-guy"), than super-clever AI. It may be an important milestone, but it didn't make the game fun for me.
The graphics were quite nice. The graphics are also quite nice in Doom 3, but similarlly repetative. Ultimately it's not the technology; it's how you use it. I find World of Warcraft way more fun to look at than EverQuest 2, but EQ2 has the technically superior graphics engine. Doom 3 has a stunning lighting model, but fails to be as creepy and compelling as parts of Half-Life 2.
As to the controls, they weren't some brand new thing. I'd been using identical or effectively identical controls in other console FPSes before the X-Box was released. What Halo got right was more subtle; I can't even put my finger on it. Halo felt right, while I was certainly slower than a mouse, I didn't feel gimpy like I do in every other console FPS. They balanced something about the inputs just right and they deserve recognition for that.
Mind you, I hold nothing against Halo 2; the game looks really good and has lots of cool ideas. It may be good enough to sell me my very own X-Box.
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We could capture a whole shitload of flags.
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Like a lot of your complaints, it seems like you don't know how to play Halo very well. No harm in that, but it does nullify some of your points.
The Assault Rifle is a piece of junk against targets like the Elite (though it is very useful against some later enemies) - the Covenant are most vulnerable to Covenant weapons, which is what you were 'supposed' to use. The power levels aren't unbalanced (though the odds are certainly against you) - you chose the wrong tool for that situation.
Because of this I assume you didn't play the Legendary difficulty level, which is where you really see the AI at work. It really almost turns into a different game as the difficulty ramps up.
That balance you are talking about is the control innovation the original poster was talking about. Among other subtle things, Halo slows down your aiming speed when the reticle is over an enemy. That is what modern console FPS games are copying now.
Through its refinement, Halo also showed the world the 'correct way' to set up the controls, so it became the standard even if it wasn't the first use of such controls. That counts as an innovation, too, IMO. (And I would argue some of its elements were new - not a lot of games had a dedicated grenade or melee button before Halo!)
Regardless of specifics, new features in a game usually aren't widely copied unless the game is fun enough to notice and show these off. That is the case with Halo1: imperfect as it may be, it doesn't suck. Not even remotely. The game was fun for a lot of people, and to insist otherwise is just nonsense. A game doesn't get to be as loved as Halo1 is by millions of people if it isn't fun to them. It just didn't click with you (maybe because you didn't know how to play well - but that could just be the result).
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. -- Francis Bacon