Halo 3 Rumours Surface

Eurogamer has a run-down on the current bevy of Halo 3 rumours circulating the internets. Interesting stuff, if there is any truth to them. From the article: "We're told that Bungie is 'attempting to maintain an online co-operative component for the campaign supporting more than two players at once,' and that Halo 3 'will have a multiplayer mode which pits players against bots in scenarios that are directly connected to the story of the game.' They're aiming to support more than fifty players on Xbox Live for certain maps, too."

Comments

50 players?

[dannyitc]

I don't know about anyone else, but as an avid Halo 2 player I find even the big team battles with 16 players to be a bit much. On the moderate sized maps it seems to be overcrowded and the larger maps have too much open space for my tastes. I can't even imagine the maps necessary for a 50 player battle.

Re:Good Luck

[YellowCyclone]

how many times do ppl forget that consoles don't run like regular OS' they don't have 1000 diff tasks to run, like windows does, just playing the game....512 ram is beastly for the next gen

Re:FPS on a console? Been done, and better.

[JorDan Clock]

Nice opinion.

I didn't like GoldenEye all that much. I hated the auto-aim with a passion. Personally, I didn't even think the overall game was that great. Especially for a console FPS.

In my opinion, Halo is a great console FPS. The people that talk about how console FPS's lack a mouse and keyboard should be looking at what matters about the game, like the actual gameplay and content, not the interface. I think Halo and Halo 2 were great games (albeit Halo 2 wasn't as great as hype would lead one to believe, pre-release) and shouldn't be shunned because they lack a mouse and keyboard interface.

GoldenEye used a controller and made up for the lack of mouse and keyboard by making the auto-aim rediculously easy. Halo doesn't make up for that. You aim, not the game.

Re:Map Editor?

[DJCouchyCouch]

Because the Xbox 360 will come with 20GB HD, I think people should be able to create fairly large maps, at least bigger than the ones you can take on Time Splitters (which was really disappointing to me)

Singleplayer levels have the advantage of streaming all their data when the game needs it. So you can make huge maps as long as one section fits in ram. Multiplayer levels typically need to have everything loaded in ram at the start, so of course they'll be smaller. And TS3 had to fit within the PS2 memory limits, so it's no surprise as to why the maps were tiny.

If there is a Halo3 map editor, of course it'll have larger maps than Timesplitters simply because the XBOX 360 has gobs and gobs more ram.

Ubisoft's upcoming FarCry Instincts for XBOX has a map editor, and it looks pretty good.

DJCC

Re:FPS on a console? Been done, and better.

[DoktorSeven]

The people that talk about how console FPS's lack a mouse and keyboard should be looking at what matters about the game, like the actual gameplay and content, not the interface.

The interface directly affects the gameplay, though. How you play something is as much the gameplay as what's actually going on with the game. Analog sticks are simply counter-intuitive to FPS control -- at least to me -- since the way one moves the stick seems at odds with the concept of aiming a weapon. The analog control is nearly always far too sensitive to effectively aim something quickly and precisely enough, while a mouse can be as precise or quick as one needs.

As I said, though, this is my experience. I have had this same discussion with others, and they have concluded that I just suck at analog controllers....

Re:Good Luck

[Short Circuit]

Well, QuakeWorld servers only sent clients data on entities that are nearby. But the protocol is such that you can have huge numbers of entities constantly moving, and it's not much of an issue, even over 33.6kbps dial-up. (We hadn't exactly hit 56k at the time...the V.90 standard hadn't been finalized, and modems were constantly being marketed as "v.90/KFlex" or "v.90/X2", meaning they supported either the KFlex or X2 standard, neither of which turned out to be completely compatible what we know today as v.90. So 33.6kbps was the least common denominator between the two.)

The Quake engine didn't (and doesn't) support large, open areas well, anyway. On a P75, you could comfortably have areas the equivalent of about 50 yards, cubed. More than that, and traversing the BSP tree for the map became something developers didn't like to think about.

No, the biggest concern in QW when it came to supporting a minimum number of players was the number of starting positions. If there weren't enough multiplayer start positions, telegragging, or the killing of a player by being in the way when another player spawned, became a severe issue. The most notable example in memory for me was an occasion when I accidentally tried to spawn 15 bots in a map with only one start position; it was intended to be a single player map, and the the start position became the source of a veritable fountain of gibs.

The stock Quake server, when running in dedicated mode, supported 16 players. Before the Reaper bot, very few community map developers had any way of getting more than four to six players in a test map at one time, so they developed their maps with that as a target. As a result, there were very few DM maps that comfortably supported more than eight players, and, last I checked, less than a hundred maps designed for as many as 16 players. I remember less than ten maps that could support QuakeWorld's maximum of 64 players. And in practice, even id's server rarely got that many players.