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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."
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.
With the appropriate map, QuakeWorld ran fine with up to 64 players on a machine with less than 128MB of physical RAM, and 2MB of video RAM. So a high number of players shouldn't be an issue in a properly-designed system.
Unless each player is going to have a different skin, you can reuse the same piece of video RAM for a lot of the different player models. Heck, shaders can probably be used to reduce the requirements even further, while enhancing the model's detail level.
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Will it have a real ending?
I think it's utterly disgraceful to suggest that a seasoned development team like Bungie would skimp on plot advancement and wrap up a long-awaited sequel with a shoddy, half-heated cliffhanger in order to meet deadlines - of course Halo 3 will have a re
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
The poster also says that Bungie is working on a map editor and movie maker for the game, so you can send and receive maps and movies via Xbox Live.
If you're anything like me, you play FPS's for the multiplayer action. I really don't care how dark and gritty the next Halo storyline is, because I'm sure it will be just as sub-par as the story from Halo 2. But I really don't care about that, it's all about the multiplayer for me, and a map maker/editor would enhance the experience by a lot.
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 make on Time Splitters (which was really disappointing to me). They've also been talking about how the Xbox 360 will be able to pull music, movies, etc. from a computer. Why not custom skins for the walls and other features in the map?
Although this is pure speculation, It would be awesome if even a limited map editor/maker were created for Halo 3. It looks like Bungie might have realized that most people don't give a rat's rump about the single player campaign, and have focused more on the multiplayer aspect of the game.
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
I distinctly remember reading interviews with Bungie that said that the next game would not be in the Halo franchise . . .
Here's one link. I think that there was also one about it on Gamespot.
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.
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....
This is a sig. Deal with it.
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.
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Geez, I get pwned enough as it is playing 15 other players. Now I'll have 49 players yelling "You suck, grandpa!" -Eric (gamertag:Not_in_the_face_not_in_the_face)
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Most people complained that the ending was not satisfying, not that the game wasn't long enough. It was part of larger complaints about not spending enough time on Earth, and about "having" to play as (and end the game as) the Arbiter.
I think the ending is fine, just like I think the grandparent post is fine...