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Inside Bungie - Living The Spartan Life
Straight from the latest issue of Edge, a great feature all about the life inside Bungie studios. The article gets into a good bit of detail on the mindset of this insular part of Microsoft's development network. Interviewed developers discuss what it is like working for Microsoft, and how hard it is not to be hard on themselves. Specifically, the developers have some surprisingly harsh criticism of their own opus - Halo 2. From the article, comments by technical lead Chris Butcher: "One of the things that stuns me when I think about it, and I can't believe this is true - we had [no time to polish] for Halo 2. Take that polish period and completely get rid of it. We miscalculated, we screwed up, we came down to the wire and we just lost all of that. So Halo 2 is far less than it could and should be in many ways because of that. It kills me to think of it. Even the multiplayer experience for Halo 2 is a pale shadow of what it could and should have been if we had gotten the timing of our schedule right. It's astounding to me. I f***ing cannot play Halo 2 multiplayer. I cannot do it. And that's why I know Halo 3 is going to be so much better."
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I liked the first half of Halo 1. The parts where you could jump on a jeep (whatever) and a guy would climb in and drive, or gun, or whatever you didn't do. It really felt like a war game where there was some tactics and such.
The last half completely dropped that and was boring.
Halo 2... I never bothered with it. My nephews played it, and I heard a little on the web about it, but not much. So I left it alone.
I'm hoping Halo 3 really DOES have the 'polish time' they need to make it right and fun in single player. (I don't give a rat's ass about multi, despite liking the 'work together' stuff with the NPCs.) I'm not really holding my breath, though.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Show me a developer that's ever completely happy with the finished game and I'll show you a director that's completely happy with the final theatrical cut of his film.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Halo 2 is still one of the most played and most stable games. And one of the best looking for its generation. This is just marketing to try to hype up expectation for Halo 3. Halo 2 is not perfect, no game is. But to say there isn't any polish on it is just a flat out lie.
Sorry, forgot to mention one more important thing. The PC gamer market may be small percentage wise, but that segment drives just about the entire market.
Think of it this way: Most people don't drive expensive high-tech vehicles. Those vehicles are only a very small part of the vehicle market. However, just about ALL of the tech in the vehicle you DO drive started out on those vehicles.
So we may be (relatively) small in numbers, but we created the market, and we're still the driving force behind it.
Think of it another way: Why does the Halo franchise exist? Simply because the console market had had FPS envy for over a decade. It took that long for consoles to be able to do FPS's well enough to be viable.
And last, just another point about the impact of PC Gamers on the industry. WoW is a juggernaut in the industry. And it's PC only. Not just a hiccup. Not just a blip on the radar. It's huge, it's massive, it's changed the gaming market across the board. All this from a _subset_ of 1/6th of the console market.
We're a LOT more important than you give credit for.
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