Halo 2 Expansion?

Gamespot has coverage of the appearance on an official Korean Xbox site of a "Halo 2 X-Pack". The possible expansion is another possible way for Bungie and Microsoft to get the heavily foreshadowed ending to fans of the series. From the article: "Such a Halo 2 expansion could be a twofold boon for Microsoft, adding another incentive for gamers to join its online service and squeezing further dollars from the nearly 7 million gamers who already have Halo 2."

Comments

Or...

[Undefined Parameter]

You could believe the blurb, or you could go to Bungie.net and read the latest "What's Update," which deals with this rumor. While not expressly saying so, Frankie (Bungie representative) implies that the rumored disc is the way Bungie/MS will be distributing the next set of downloadable content (bug fixes, cheat fixes, and some new multiplayer levels have all been (expressly) confirmed).

~UP

Clarification

[Undefined Parameter]

Too late, I realized that I left something out of the last sentence; I should have added "to non-Xbox Live subscribers" before the period. Sorry!

~UP

Sounds interesting.

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope it will work with my pirated copy of halo 2 on my modded xbox :)

Halo 2 expansion

[Anonymous Coward]

I have gotten so much enjoyment out of this game since it came out that I'm excited about any plans they have to show me more of this universe. I am also intrigued by rumors that XBOX 360 will allow players to use attributes of a game's sequel in an original game, i.e., double-wielding in the original Halo. That's a brilliant concept that will breathe life into great, old games.

Re:Halo 2 expansion

[Meagermanx]

Actually, I liked the original Halo more. Dual Wielding didn't come in handy most of the time, because you couldn't throw sticky grenades, the most useful weapon in the game (well, at least in multiplayer ;).
Also, the levels and storyline didn't pack as much of a punch. Remember the night level where you first met the fludd? Remember how you were like "What the hell are those little freaks?!?!" Halo 2 didn't have that moody feel. All it's levels were more focused on tactical combat, and the storyline was just rambling and kind of confusing.
The sword is probably the greatest thing about Halo 2, but I'm not sure it quite makes up for nerfing the pistol.
Of course, I like Diablo more than Diablo 2, so don't listen to me. ;)

Re:Halo 2 expansion

[pbranes]

I have to disagree with you on your assesment of halo 1 levels. Remember the last few levels, especially the library? The library has to be the worst level design in history. Then the one right after it was just running through an earlier level in reverse. Its obvious that the game was rushed out the door and level design took a back seat to other matters.

Re:Halo 2 expansion

[Anonymous Coward]

I am also intrigued by rumors that XBOX 360 will allow players to use attributes of a game's sequel in an original game, i.e., double-wielding in the original Halo. That's a brilliant concept that will breathe life into great, old games.

You're trolling, right? That's called "releasing free remakes", and is nothing new at all: for a recent example consider "Half-Life: Source".

Re:Halo 2 expansion

[Mr.Dippy]

I couldn't agree with you more. The library level in Halo 1 almost made me stop playing the game completly. Who's idea was it make the level so goddamn long with repetition out the ass? "Oh wow, another hallway that has the same ditches and corners as the last 50 hallways with 500 enemies coming out the walls. Oh joy!" With that said there was a lot of repetition in the game. That's why I don't understand why people make the game out to be the second coming of Christ for the video game industry. Yes, it has fun multiplayer, yes it has nice graphics and a decent story, but they needed to work on the level design.

Re:Halo 2 expansion

[TheOnlyCoolTim]

It was an amazing FPS for consoles, I guess. On real computers it was just good. The shield concept was a nice innovation, but Halo 2 blew it by having just shields and no health bars or health packs.

"Let's go through all the maps BACKWARDS" was the most ridiculous part.

Tim

Re:Halo 2 expansion

[Rethcir]

Yes. I think the shield dynamic may actually be what makes halo so fun and innovative. You have to establish a rythm and put constant force on your opponents in order to come out with more kills than them. Almost like a good game of basketball.

(Adding the shield to the FPS formula is like adding Antoine Walker to the Celtics!)

Re:Halo 2 expansion

[AlexMax2742]

I only half agree with you on that. Everyone hated the library, but Two Betrayals and The Maw, while being similar to Assault on the Control Room and Pillar of Automn respectively, had totally different tactical situations introduced by the flood. Plus you got to go lots of places where you didn't get to go before.

Keyes, however, didn't feature as much new content as the two I mentioned above, plus I hated the level the first time around anyway, so that plus the Library kinda ruined the first Halo. Plus, the fact that some of my friends insisted that the multiplayer of Halo 1 was superior to the multiplayer of Halo 2 completely baffled me.

Halo 2: The Search for more Money

[Phoenixhunter]

After watching the making of Halo 2 (yep, shelled out extra for the CE) I've come to the realization that Bungie wasn't exactly thrilled about making a sequel. They wanted to do something different (Phoenix) and MS turned around and told them to work on something that would make money (Halo 2). They made it in less than 18 months and it really shows. Despite a larger budget, there just wasn't sufficient internal inspiriation to do much more than make a money maker.

Leaving off an end the way they did only enforces this belief. Would Da Vinci forget about finishing off the Mona Lisa? No, he'd get it done. Now we have an expansion on the way....pump pump pump.

yeah right`

[killercentipedes]

This is bullshit, ill have played H2 and the shortness was the first complaint. You could almost assume this is a ploy of MS. If they get away with expansions for H2 where is it going to stop.

Re:yeah right`

[TotalFusionOne]

Showing off our brain powers I see. MS is not some evil corperation that is trying to take over the world by invading our homes with expansion packs. They're a company, like any other, out to make money. Where will it stop? When they start making games that aren't fun.

Re:yeah right`

[altodarknight]

It is the common belief throughout the halo community that the disk will be distrubuted through OXM (official xbox magazine) for free, or for a $5 - 10 disk from retailers. Remember that all the content on the disk will be avaliable free on xbox live. And people could just use the free 2 month xbox live trials to download the content. The above solution is the doing of bungie, as they want to get the content to all halo 2 owners. Although they are owned by Microsoft, the are still a very community oriented game developer.

Re:yeah right`

[thrift24]

Everyone speaking in French was my first complaint, but it kinda grows on you.

Re:yeah right`

[FlopEJoe]

Well... shortness is one thing but boredom is another. I've only played H1. What I saw was something like four identical library levels, ten nearly identical circular rooms, and playing many, many levels twice because "you have to go back to the beginning but with different monsters." If they're going to cut and paste levels just to pad the game, then I'll take a pass on bigger games.

One born every minute.

[TotalFusionOne]

Anyone who reads the "Weekly update" section of Bungie's website knows what's going on here. The game multiplayer aspect of the game has a few bugs in it, and Bungie has been working for months on ways to fix those bugs without totally ruining gameplay. Why not quietly update their buggy product, give you a few new maps and multiplayer modes, and make YOU carry the costs?
Of course this is going to start a whole bunch of people discussing whether Bungie (or MS) should release products that aren't finished, or are "Buggy." And to those folks I say: Sod off. If we were to wait for every game to be absolutely perfect before shipping, we'd still be stuck waiting for our PS2 Viewtiful Joe demo discs!

Re:One born every minute.

[cgenman]

Plese tell me you're joking.

Many games have been pushed out the door unfinished. The Legacy of Kain is a famous example, as somewhere in the middle of development they realized they weren't going to make it and cut out huge chunks of game, including the ending, several levels, powerups, etc. In that case it was painfully obvious that they didn't finish in time, as their game constantly referred to a different number of things to do than you actually had, there were quite a few bugs, empty areas, etc. This was made all the worse by the fact that the game was really really good, and if they had convinced their publisher to give them 6 more months for content generation they could have had a staggeringly, legendarily good game.

Xenogears suffered a similar fate. At the time I was playing it, I felt that it was the best RPG ever made. I still feel that way, almost. It's half of the best RPG ever made. They go into excrutiating detail early on, creating a vast and rich world to really lose yourself in. The gameplay is great, they address all of the issues people talk about hating in standard RPG's... It's truly great. Then, about 50 hours in, they switch to "diarama - o - vision." A static picture appears on the screen, and text scrolls by. For about 10 hours. Occasionally this is broken up by largely unfinished gameplay sequences. I swear, this is the only game I've played on a console that had multiple save points within a single flow of text. It went from the greatest RPG ever made to the worst in the span of one cinematic. Eventually it regains its footing and actually finishes like it started, and the ending is great and satisfying despite some laughably bad voice acting. But by that point the experience is totally ruined.

As a less extreme example, the new KOTOR had an ending that just fell completely flat. It wasn't a content pull like in Legacy of Kane, it wasn't a stick-to-the-eye like Xenogears. It was just a rush job, with a much better and more satisfying ending being yanked for time, replaced by something half-arsed and roundly disappointing.

Unfinished games suck. They suck the enjoyment out of a title and they suck out the potential. In the example of Xenogears, it was pretty clear they just had bitten off something that was far, far too big for any reasonable budget of the time. Any publisher would have done the same, though any publisher should have pushed them to work on the important points of the plot first and shaped the degree of detail in the world that could be achieved realistically.

But Halo 2? We're talking about a guarenteed million seller here. Any publisher would have ponied up the extra 6 months for that, as a good reception for Halo 2 would guarentee another insane sales bonanza for Halo 3. The bloody thing made 200 million in presales. But Microsoft isn't any publisher: Microsoft is a publisher with a system to sell. If Microsoft is really dumping the Xbox for the Ybox this upcoming Christmas, they have a major problem on their hands if their in-house publisher releases a system-selling game for the wrong system. Hence, buggy, unbalanced, or even unfinished, they had to get it out the door. Which is a crying shame really, and will really hurt their Halo 3 sales. The moment they realized that Halo 2 was going to ship either late or unfinished, they should have switched the bungee people over to XBox 2 development right away, and had them work on porting what they had done and finishing what they hadn't done. It would have sold a lot more systems than Halo 3 is now capable of.

Don't be so impatient. No publisher or game development company wants to wait until absolutely every little detail is perfect before putting something in a box, but it should least bloody well be finished. Given the choice between a bad experience now and a perfect experience in 6 months, go with the perfect experience. With so many great games out anything less isn't worth your time.

Re:One born every minute.

[Khuffie]

The game multiplayer aspect of the game has a few bugs in it, and Bungie has been working for months on ways to fix those bugs without totally ruining gameplay. Why not quietly update their buggy product, give you a few new maps and multiplayer modes, and make YOU carry the costs? Of course this is going to start a whole bunch of people discussing whether Bungie (or MS) should release products that aren't finished, or are "Buggy."

Just a point: why do people always assume that Halo 2 was rushed out of the door completely buggy? The game played absolutely fine. The ending was an unfortunate design decision. If you watched the CE DVD, you'd know they had plenty of time from September to launch for bug-testing. The game was delayed from it's August release date to November. It's not like Microsoft was forcing Bungee to come out with the game or suffer death.

And just to emphasize: the multiplayer aspect of the game was completely fine at launch. There were no game destroying bugs. It was fun, it's not like the game crashed every ten minutes, or connections kept on dropping. As with every piece of software, from OS X to Windows to Firefox to Linux, people find bugs and exploit them. Company does everything possible to fix said bugs. Which Bungie is working on.

Re:One born every minute.

[hunterx11]

the multiplayer aspect of the game was completely fine at launch

I would agree that despite the bugs, it was fun and playable, but to make an unqualified statement of that nature is simply untrue. Dummying, no grenade hopping off host, broken teleporters, flag bouncing, sword flying (two kinds), inconsistent elevator physics, reload animations that don't always trigger, being able to jump hundreds of feet into the air, and being able to grab flags through walls are all problems. Now, they aren't all as much of a big deal as people make them out to be, but to say that something is completely fine (emphasis yours) in spite of all these things is not true. Halo 2 would be perfectly acceptable for a PC game, but it isn't They only had one pretty homogenous platform to target (and it manages even to perform inconsistently there).

Maybe you think that I am holding them to too high a standard (though I doubt it). However, I think a pretty reasonable standard would be Halo 1. After all, Halo 2 wasn't written from scratch, it was based on Halo 1 which was already finished. I found more bugs in the first month of Halo 2 than in the first year of Halo 1. I really do love Halo 2, but that doesn't blind me to the fact that Bungie has really not met up to their previous standards of quality. I hope that the bugfix will ameliorate this, and if so I'll be perfectly contented.

Re:One born every minute.

[blincoln]

Many games have been pushed out the door unfinished. The Legacy of Kain is a famous example, as somewhere in the middle of development they realized they weren't going to make it and cut out huge chunks of game, including the ending, several levels, powerups, etc.

Yes, you can read more about that on my website.

In that case it was painfully obvious that they didn't finish in time, as their game constantly referred to a different number of things to do than you actually had, there were quite a few bugs, empty areas, etc.

I think you are combinining the memory of Soul Reaver with some other game. It never refers to how many different things you need to do. There is only one bug in the entire game that I'm aware of, which is related to a puzzle in Dumah's fortress late in the game, and hardly anyone sees it. There are also no areas in the game that are "empty" unintentionally.

This was made all the worse by the fact that the game was really really good, and if they had convinced their publisher to give them 6 more months for content generation they could have had a staggeringly, legendarily good game.

My understanding is that it would have taken a lot longer than six months, and they'd already delayed the game by about a year. Two of the deleted areas were more or less finished, but their basic design had compatibility issues with the game engine. The last area of the game was not anywhere near completion, AFAIK.

There were about 30 people working on that game, in a very expensive part of the country. If we assume their average salary is $50k (way on the low side), that's another $1.5 million a year to keep the project going even before property and equipment costs. As much as I wish Eidos had the faith in their products to put up that kind of money, I can see why they didn't.

Re:One born every minute.

[TotalFusionOne]

I completely agree. Also, if you remember correctly, when the game was launched the matchmaking system would take up to five minutes to decide who should play with who. It took very quick thinking on Bungies part to get that resolved in less than a week. Which brings me back to my original point: Halo 2 was released with acceptable flaws. It wasn't as buggy as, say, Dakatana when released, but it wasn't released perfect either. And as gamers we should be graceful enough to accept flaws without crying "Foul!"

Re:One born every minute.

[drinkypoo]

As much as I wish Eidos had the faith in their products to put up that kind of money, I can see why they didn't.

Yeah, because it didn't have the big hooters that their typical audience demands.

Re:One born every minute.

[drinkypoo]

This ain't a PC game [yet], it's a console game. Expecting to need to patch a console game to make it work properly (there isn't even a patch out, is there? though they could install one via Live?) is just not acceptable. When I purchase a console game, I expect it to work properly so long as I do not damage the physical media.

Flaws that allow people to cheat on internet games are only "acceptable" when it is possible to extend the system to make it harder for people to cheat. Since you can't do that with console games, those kinds of bugs are unacceptable if the game servers are not updated rapidly.

Personally I am not going to get too emotionally involved in any Live games, since eventually Live, too, shall pass. I'll play Halo 2 on PC when it comes out there. From what I consistently hear, I'm not missing much anyway. Of course, if Halo 2 for PC is as buggy as Halo 1 for PC, I might as well give it a miss.

Re:One born every minute.

[drinkypoo]

I never thought I'd see the day when criticizing something from Microsoft, utilizing a rational argument, would get me modded down so brutally on slashdot. Are the Cubs going to win the world series soon, or what? This is one of the signs of the apocalypse.

Straight from the horse's mouth...

[Wraithfighter]

http://www.bungie.net/News/TopStory.aspx?story=wee klywhatsmar18

"Next week, we're going to have a major announcement about the details of our new maps. Right now, there are some dates, details and ideas out there that are actually wrong, so please take everything you read between now and then with a grain of salt. We can't talk about how and when the new maps will be released, we'll leave that to the smart folks who actually do all the logistical work for this stuff - marketing and PR, but we can tell you this much - our entire plan is designed to make new content available for everybody, those with Xbox Live and those without Xbox Live. We hope in the end, everyone will be satisfied."

If they do do an expansion, it'll probably throw in a few new weapons (we are missing the flamethrower, after all), a new campaign, some rebalancing, and hopefully the ability to dual wield swords!

Yeah, I know its redundant, since one sword is deadly enough, but TWO ENERGY SWORDS!

Re:Straight from the horse's mouth...

[DeanMeister]

Two Energy swords would be as pointless as wielding two rocket launchers. As pointless as two deathstars stuck together. One is fine.

Nope

[Sv-Manowar]

I believe this is just new content and patches for online / multiplayer of Halo 2. New maps, skins, bug fixes and the like.

Halo3 will most likely be released with the Xbox2 or just afterwards

Re:Nope

[Gleapsite]

hence an expansion pack...

Re:Halo 2: The Search for more Money

[altodarknight]

This isn't true, if you watch the Limited Edition DVD and another interview that was released shortly after E3 2002, they started work on halo 2 almost straight after the release of halo 1, which took a little time to work out it was a money train. They said they wanted to tell more of the story. They didn't leave off the end, they couldn't fit it in. They wanted to tell the story as well as possible and to do this, the needed more content than could be created by the release date and could fit on the disk. The expansion isn't really an expansion, it is a way of distributing the downloadable content and game fixes to those who don't have xbox live.

Oh Goody!

[willynate]

Now I can shoot the same four enemies over and over in different repetitive hallways.

Re:Oh Goody!

[Anonymous Coward]

Tsk... It's not four anymore, it's SIX, now:

Elite
Jackal
Grunt
Annoying insect thingy
Brute
Flood

Plus a boss battle against a nerd in a flying wheelchair. Actually, he did pretty well for a disabled alien. Props to the parapalegics!

Re:YASHA

[rufo]

Don't have many friends, do you? Don't have a Live subscription eh?

Halo 2 will be a constant fixture in my/my friends' Xbox for years to come. At least, until Halo 3 comes out :-) Not for the single player campaign (which was good, but nothing truly remarkable), but for the multiplayer, which is (I do firmly believe) the finest console FPS experience made to date (with the arguable exception of Halo 1).

Lastly, according to Bungie, it's not stated but hinted that the Halo X-Pack disk will have the downloadable content that Live subscribers will get for free. This way if you don't subscribe to Live you won't be left out in the cold. You could also sign up for a free trial or borrow a friend's Live account but this will mean you don't have to.

So...

[PhotoBoy]

... will I finally get the ending I paid for or is this just a bunch of multiplayer maps they're thrown together?

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

will I finally get the ending I paid for?

You paid for an ending? Then you're an idiot. Only an idiot buys a game based on the hype instead of reading at least one review before shelling out. And if you'd read a review, you'd have known that the gameplay was great but the story crap.

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not that I was them, but maybe they believed a review from a pretty biased source.

I highly doubt that www.RabidHaloFanboys.OMG or Official Xbox Mag is going to be honest in their reviews, or will the site will link to articles that have fair reviews. If the site does link to a bad/negative review it will probably be because they hate people that don't give their overrated game an instant 10+,.and actually point out the flaws in their beloved game.

That is why I look for low scored reviews, while some places can be quite uninformative and biased(gamefaqs.com), at least they tend to have some honest reviewers that point out the flaws and bad things that the 10++++++ fanboy reviews ignore.

Re:So...

[PhotoBoy]

Only idiots read game reviews. Look at the glowing fault-free reviews IGN and GameSpot gave to all the big games from Christmas like San Andreas, Halo 2, MGS3, Prince of Persia 2, etc.

I stopped believing any games reviewer after every games journalist in the world creamed themselves over MGS2 in their reviews before having to admit some months later that it was a bit shit. I buy games now based solely on demos, movies and screenshots of games, it's far more accurate than trusting a games journalist's review as you get to see the actual game and judge if it's for you. Which is much better than letting some easily swayed hack back from his press junket in Hawaii convince you.

And what's wrong with paying for a game and expecting it to be finished? Anyone who claims that Halo 2 was finished as intended when it was released is not living in reality. I paid for a complete game, I didn't get that.

fixing the graphics?

[Harlockjds]

are they going to fix the nasty texture and graphics pop in? i hadn't seen scenes get drawn during gameplay like that since the c64.

Re:Halo 2: The Search for more Money

[The-Bus]

Made it in less than 18 months?

Halo 2 was in the making for at least two years, no?

A vehicle for the ending?

[Pluvius]

That would be stupid. It would just prove that Bungie/Microsoft rushed Halo 2 out the door. Why would they want to give their critics more ammo?

Rob

You sir have given me a new lifepurpose.

[Anonymous Coward]

To kill Alexis Bledel while wielding two energy swords in Halo 2+

Call me a purist . . .

[Red_Icculus]

I own a copy of Halo 2, but I would rather play DOOM any day. Let me explain. The Halo series has pretty graphics, but the game speed is so slow. I became horribly bored at how slow everything crawled compared my FPS of choice on a 200 mhz pentium system. The first person shooter has been re-hashed so many times. Multiplayer was a great innovation, but let's see something new more novel gameplay that performs as well as their FPS predecessors. I think the gaming companies are just seeing how much more they can squeeze from the money tree with variations on a theme. In the mean time, I am going to stick to my copy of DOOM.

Re:Call me a purist . . .

[drxray]

I'd say the slowness WAS the novelty of Halo. It made it accessible to console players and non-FPS gamers (while putting off experienced players). The vehicles were also nice - you can't play VCTF in Doom...

Re:Call me a purist . . .

[ThankfulJosh]

Vehicle boarding.
Sticky nades.
Nade chain reactions.
The best AI in any game ever.
Unbelievable normal mapping (walk around the MP map Zanzibar for 5 minutes!)
Great MP level design.
A story that actually makes you use your brain a little.
The skulls (see HighImpactHalo.org)

And if you didn't have to use creativity and strategy to get through even the first level, you haven't played the real game - Legendary.

Re:Call me a purist . . .

[theVP]

You're not a purist, you're just someone who thinks that a game controller is just as precise and easy to use as the mouse/keyboard combo. In which case you would be wrong. Halo 2 is slow for a REASON.

Re:Halo 2: The Search for more Money

[SetupWeasel]

Now we have leet-speak grammar nazis? Only on Slashdot!

My Roomate Disappears.

[Threatis]

Great, Another reason for my roomate to not come out of his room for three weeks.

Re:Halo 2: The Search for more Money

[jdubois79]

Just a little aside, Da Vinci was notorious for never finishing projects. The mono Lisa is one of some 11* paintings that he finished in his ENTIRE LIFE.

*If I remember my history correctly. College was way too long ago.

And everyone who runs out and buys it...

[Winterblink]

... just further affirms to the game industry that it's totally ok to half-ass the ending to a game so it can be shuffled out the door early. Don't help them set the precedence that they can make more money by selling the finishing touches later that should have been included in the first place.

Not compatible with dial-up or satellite

[tepples]

This way if you don't subscribe to Live you won't be left out in the cold. You could also sign up for a free trial

Since when is MSN Broadband offering a free trial?

Re:YASHA

[LoonieMiami]

Yeah, M$' marketing.....just look at where Windows is, and it's only marketing cuz we know the product sucks.

Think about it for a second.

[DeanMeister]

This "expansion pack" can't possibly be the ending to Halo 2, as that would render a Halo 3 useless. Unless the expansion ALSO had a crappy ending. My guess is that this "X-Pack" is some multiplayer maps they're going to make available. Don't count on anymore story until Halo 3.

Re:Think about it for a second.

[no_nukes]

nah, its definetly not going to be anything single player oriented. Maps, and cheat fixes are my guess. this 'xpack' thing is just so people who dont use live can get the goods. plus i'm sure microsoft wants to use halo3 to compete with ps3, and for launch with xbox2. or xenon. or whatever.