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No Online Co-Op For Halo 3 At Launch
CVG has the disappointing news, originally reported in the pages of EGM, that online co-op play will not be available when Halo 3 launches this September. In the game the second player would play the part of the Arbiter character, but fans will only be able to complete the campaign cooperatively via LAN or split-screen. Bungie stated the possibility still exists online co-op could be patched in at a later date, but significant hurdles stand in the way of the feature: "'We're not dumb,' says Bungie's Frank O'Conner. 'We know that people want it and we're trying to make it happen. I think the biggest problem for us for online co-op is that we have a situation where you can be in a Warthog with five troops, almost a mile away from the other player. That's a significant challenge. And there's lots of design things you could do to prevent that from happening, but they would make it not feel like Halo anymore. If we can make it happen in a way that works well, we will - and if it works badly, we won't.'"
Well better to not have it at all then it be half assed and read the endless whining that will occur on forums as a result.
when are they going to learn?! that is the single most interesting thing about online HALO play, I was super disapointed when Halo2 didnt have it... good grief! who cares if your are a mile away , it works just fine for Counterstrike, or any other FPS...
I enjoyed the Halo SP campaigns because they gave a sense of "one man vs. the universe". Playing it co-op with some whiny kid would not add to my experience.
I'm quite certain that the vast majority of people who purchase this game will play it online against other players in death match or capture the flag games. Although online co-op is a nice feature, it's hardly necessary for the vast majority of the people who purchase it. Hell, this franchise is so about online play that the single player campaign could probably be considered optional.
"This just in: Online Co-op play WILL be available on the PC version released in 2 years. The graphics will be the same, but it'll have, uh, a few new maps!"
Exclusively available on WindowsRG
They have been promising this since before 2 came out, just one of the many places where they dropped the ball on 2.
I don't understand why they can't just do they same thing they do in LAN Co-op.. when one player reaches a certain spot it "transports" the other player automatically to that point. That "felt like Halo" enough for 1 and 2...
Sounds more like poor excuses to me. Halo is flirting with solidifying itself as a source of undelivered promises. In-game "vaporware", one might speculate.
That'll be the $30 add-on you buy after the game's been out for a year.
It would seem that I will not be buying Halo 3 on release. Maybe if enough people don't buy it at the beginning, it will spark some interest in Bungie to do it sooner than later. GoW has online co-op and it works really well. Microsoft should get Bungie and Epic to talk and maybe some knowledge will help make this happen sooner.
And I really wanted to play co-op with some kid telling me in his whiney voice how much smaller my anatomy is then his...
Besides, co-op is not as much fun when you can't see your friend falling off the couch laughing after assasinating you in the middle of a firefight =D
-
Stupid friend....
Umm... why is the situation so different in Halo 3 as opposed to how things were in Halo 2? You can play co-op via split-screen in Halo 2, and the exact same issue is still there (players moving far distances away from each other), yet they somehow handled it just fine: when one user is getting way further ahead on the map, the game will just teleport the lagging-behind player forward to the other player. Why wouldn't this be possible when playing over the internet? Why will we be able to play over LAN but not Xbox Live? Especially considering one can just set up Hamachi or similar software to create a simple VPN over the net anyways... This really feels to me like we're not getting the full story here.
really it isn't that big of a deal. I mean, come on, much like the 7th harry potter book being leaked onto the net, I don't think this is going to impact the success of the game very much...would it be nice to have co-op over live? Hell yes, if done right it would be awesome.
would it be a travesty to do it improperly? Yes it would be. I would MUCH rather they spent time on polishing and tweaking the game rather than continually pounding away at a stone with a toothpick.
Living With a Nerd
It could be based on how level geometry is loaded, and how enemies and such are loaded. It could be engine limitations.
Really the only game I have ever played where you can be on the other side of the physical game world is crackdown. Then again considering how a game is able to recover from the "host" leaving it seems like 2 players could move apart and load separate areas and trade only data that is relevant to the other client. However something about the way the game could have change.
IN the last 2 you were usually confined along a path with some stuff. Most of the wide open areas were arenas almost with 1 way in and one way out. There was not set distance between both players, but when one hit a check
point, or a load point the player in the previous area was teleported up to the new point. Both things kept it so that only one area was loaded at any given time.
Now if the game is much more open and you have more room to run around it could be that the system of keeping the players together would be less effective, or possibly down right frustrating. Still this might not be as technical as it would be a gameplay related issue.
However the fact that it works over a lan would suggest to me that the issue is bandwidth and latency related. Possibly coordinating the in game AI could cause trouble, possibly the physics, ect ect.
Who knows. Feel free to correct me if I said anything too stupid.
You mad
Since Halo 1 was released on the PC, I've been reading interviews with the Halo dev team guys saying that network Co-Op is going to have to wait a while because their networking code can't handle it. As I recall the explanation was that you get a lot of functionality very easily when you are assured that both players are on the same system.
Each of those articles also had intense speculation that network Co-Op is 'right around the corner'. First for Halo 1, then for Halo 2. I'm probably willing to say that this is the journalist putting words in their mouth, but after 4+ years of hearing the same thing I won't believe it until it ships.
You are awash in a sea of fiercely stated opinions. Obvious exits are: 'File->Quit', 'Reply', and 'Page Down'.
It seems like a disturbing number of new releases have had their online play options severely curtailed or omitted entirely. Witness Tony Hawk (PS3), Metroid Prime 3 (Wii), and now Halo 3 (360) - and I'm sure there are a bunch I'm forgetting. Surely all these companies can't be having trouble putting together workable online play for their latest titles?
First rule of trauma: Bleeding always stops.
I don't understand how online co-op play has significantly different challenges from splitscreen and lan play. I mean in theory can't you have 1 player in a warthog and another player a mile away in both of those modes? If not, then just apply the same restriction that prevents it from happening in those modes to the online co-op.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
I really don't see how it can't be done...I mean we have a massive game say like world of warcraft with thousands of people playing at once and a large group of people playing together able to do this. I mean I'm sure it's not too much of a stretch to see it happen. I mean I'd hate to suggest it but I would pull a valve and push the game back to make sure that nothing is left behind to make it anything other than a stellar game.I mean I had no problem waiting for Half Life 2 because it was simply well worth the wait.
We came,we saw, we kicked it's ass!
Apples to oranges
Minimal collision detection
AI is far more simplistic
Time based actions
client side positioning(You can teleport yourself around in the game, till you get caught atleast)
Are there any physics in WoW?
Those are the major differences i can think of off the top of my head.
You mad
Seriously, where have the computer nerds gone?
It's stated explicitly that LAN Co-op will be in the game. Given programs such as Warp Pipe for the Gamecube, how hard is it really going to be to simulate a LAN over the internet and enjoy online co-op in all of it's potentially bugged out glory?
I guarantee you someone's going to program and finish such an application, possibly before the game even comes out. It's just a matter of convincing two Xbox 360s that they're on a LAN together, and praying you don't lag like crazy.
Thunderclone: ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE! ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE!
First, let me say that I'm a huge Halo fan; $130 special Legendary Edition Halo 3 pre-order huge. Co-op in Halo 1 & 2 is one of my favorite features, right behind multiplayer versus matches, but I can honestly say that online co-op is not a must-have for me, its just a nice extra.
There are plenty of technical why this could be a problem, the primary reason is one of scale. In online multiplayer, games are limited to 16 players max -- some of the larger Halo battles in campaign mode have included many times that number (think of the flood) -- creating network code that can support that number of entities in a small space in a fast-paced FPS is no easy task. The fact that it *is* supported over LAN is a huge clue that this is the primary difficulty -- obviously the networking system supports it, but the WAN latency is probably probably killing it. When the play becomes lagged its no longer accurate and not worth doing, IMHO.
As alluded to in the article, you can do some design things to avoid those situations, but then you start to damage the things that Make the game what it is in the first place.
This is from a leaked EGM issue written over a month ago. Online co-op has been in and out of Halo 3 for a while, and it just so happens that at the time of the issue (a month ago), it was out. Maybe there's hope.
...The 360's super awesome shared memory feature. Sure, let's pack this baby full of hi-res textures-- hey waitaminit, why don't we have room anymore for these important game mechanics?
Let's face it: Halo 3 HAD to look pretty, no matter what. If it didn't look like pure eye candy, Microsoft would never hear the end of it. Something's gotta give.
I had one requirement for Halo 3 (and XBox360 purchase): I had to be able to play with my buddy, with whom I started the series. He now lives an untenable distance away. So, I don't need the game, nor their console, nor their pay-to-play Live service, I guess.
Are you kidding me? Halo: Combat Evolved for X-Box sold over 5 million copies and it didn't even have online play. Sure, people played it over LAN, but the guy on the street knew it for its sweet co-op.
Halo 2 sold over 6 million copies. When Halo 2 was released, there were less than 2 million subscriptions to X-Box Live... In fact, X-Box Live just reached 6 million subscriptions in March 2007. Obviously more than a few people weren't playing Halo online and I doubt that those who were ignored co-op.
Bungie has been known for doing co-op since Marathon. Co-op is an integral part of the Halo package, and it never would've become Microsoft's "Killer App" without it. Never. Halo is legendary not only for its versus play, but for the fact that it breathed new life into co-op (something that was being put on the back-burner due to developers' boners for online deathmatches). Without co-op, Halo would not be considered a classic game.
So before you lump "vast majority" in with yourself, take a step back and realize how integral co-op has been to Halo's (and the X-Box as a whole's) success.
I can't say it's the case for Tony Hawks or Metroid as I don't know enough about them, but the problems with it in Halo 3 and various other games that have had to take chunks out their multiplayer plans is to do with the massive maps you get in multiplayer games nowadays.
Many people in response to this story are asking why you can't just teleport the player like in the local coop modes, well, that's actually the problem not the solution. A system can only hold a limited amount of a games assets (terrain, textures, player models and so forth) ready in memory at any one time, on a local coop match the system has the assetts for both players locations in memory and that's just fine for teleporting, because when player B teleports to player A, player B's section of the screen can just use the same assets in memory as player A's, across a relatively slow network like the internet however this option to share memory isn't feasible.
It's not an impossible problem to solve by any means, if player A is telling player B where they are and/or vice versa then player B's system can keep track better, but this takes a lot longer to implement and test, hence why Bungie probably can't get it ready for launch. There are other solutions of course, you could say have a setup where player B is shown a teleportation animation whilst the system loads the required data, but that tends to be tacky and ruins the gameplay a fair bit.
Some might ask why it works okay in other games, well, even in games like Gears you're not allowed to stray far from your team mate at all, so it's the case there that both players are forced to progress at such a similar speed through the game, that should player A need to load new world data, player B will need to also, so by simply keeping the players close you're basically forcing each system to have the same data in memory, so that when the players do need to warp together, player B doesn't have to fetch hardly any, if any data at all that it didn't already have loaded. Of course, this option is available to Bungie too, but is it really worth completely changing their storyline, likely for the worse just to do this right now when they could keep a much better storyline and just do coop another way later?
It seems to be a combination of the storyline requiring the players to be well apart and the massive size of maps in games nowadays compared to the relatively small amount of memory available to consoles. Memory is less important for consoles of course, because they're much more streamlined for transferring game-like data between subsystems than PCs which have to be rather more generic but it's still a bottleneck at the end of the day, one which would cause a noticeable pause to the player if suddenly they had to dump the current few hundred megabytes of assets and load some more instead, as opposed to streaming it as in say games like Saints Row. You might ask why Crackdown doesn't have this problem, it's basically again a game design issue, there's no situation where player B would ever be warped to player A other than say, when you die and so forth and have to move to a spawn point, but it's okay for the pause in the game to load new assets in this situation because the player is busy respawning! Outside that, players just run to each other so the game only needs to stream data slowly, which is like say, loading a few hundred mb of assets over the period of maybe 5minutes that it takes to reach each other vs. trying to load a few hundred mb instantly when a player teleports half way round the world.
It really shouldn't be due to engine limitations when you can play split screen on the same system. I assume they are going to deal with checkpoints the same way they did in 1 and 2 and teleport the player lagging behind to the location of the leading player. Why can't this be done over Live?
Your assuming that its going to have teleportation again.
Teleportation worked because of the linear nature of the games, a lateral movement within the game would never cause a level load, only movement towards or away from the goal would advance you past a point where a new chunk of data would be loaded. If the game is no longer as linear, then the teleport system could be troublesome, if not down right frustrating. Imagine if the brutes have semi fortified a block in a city and you ran into it. You can't find a way in and if you fall back and flank it they will just move and defend against you attack. You and your buddy then split up. he remains at the original point of attack and keeps them occupied while the other player goes possibly with a few marines or elites, with the goal of attacking on a weaker flank, forcing them to split forces. However the fight is taking place near the edge of a map cell. As you make the flank, suddenly your buddy who was attacking is teleported to you.
You also have issues with things like precedence, if 2 people run in opposite directions who will get teleported to who? When you have a linear game like the first 2 you teleport the person farthest from the goal to the person whio is going towards the goal, when the game is less linear that doesn't work as well.
With split screen you could trade data between 2 instances because it doesn't leave the system so it can remain rather fast.
On your typical gamer ethernet setup, you have 2 boxes connected directly or in a very small temporary lan, then again even a slightly congested lan will give you more bandwidth and better latency than most internet connections.
Because it works in splitscreen and Lan but not internet, it leads me to believe that this is a bandwidth and latency issue.
The only thing that will really tell if this is true is if tunneling programs allow 2 people to play coop by tricking there boxes into thinking they are on a lan.
You mad
You missed the big one - WoW has centralized dedicated game servers, Halo 3 doesn't.
:)
Obviously, though, this reinforces your point
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
What's the problem.....
Something doesn't gell here. Create a VPN between you and your buddy via the internet...
How would the 360 know it's not a LAN???
Anyone??
I do it all the time with "Lan" based PC games.....
They should have the online Co-op mode borrow the technique that MMORPGs use and have a server keep track of the players and send the appropriate info to each of them as they progress. Since cost could be an issue, perhaps they could offer that feature to Gold members only (another can of worms I suppose). Or they could have one player's machine act as the server/host but that could cause quite a performance hit.
DEAD DEAD DEAD DELETE ME
Disclaimer: IANAGamesProgrammer but i do know a thing or two about randomness in games (see: doom demo format, every "random" event is based on the actions of the player). MY first play-throughs of the first two halos were coop, as were doom2, duke3d, quake1, quake2. (imagine my horror when half life DIDNT have a coop mode!).
Halo is a player-driven game, non-scripted events react to the player. If they lob a grenade at a bunch of enemies they may return fire or scatter. These reactions are probably decided upon by a random number generator somewhere. So. on both systems the initial setup of the game is the same. the monster positions and default movements around the map are the same. so why transmit the details of all that across the network? so long as the player's timestamps are synced the game will be in sync.
firstly, non critical actions dont need to be synced. if player A fires a shotgun at a wall the exact down-to-the-last-pellet blast pattern does not need to be replicated on player B's machine. sure the DAMAGE done by the shotgun blast needs to be synced but dont waste bandwidth making it LOOK identical as the only downside would be the odd occasion where player A says "ooh it made a smiley face" and player B says "you're either blind or full of shit". This also can apply to physical objects, if you blow up a bookshelf and paper goes flying does every single fluttering sheet need to follow the exact same path on each client? i expect not, so long as they're non-blocking and essentially just a visual effect. Half life did this to a certain extent with functions like "create a bunch of splintering wood chunks here" rather than creating and syncing every shard.
so, back to the grenade scenario, instead of sending the grenade and all the resulting movements why not tag a timestamp and random seed to the grenade "throw" event. the player on system 1 throws the grenade, the player on system 2 recieves the events and because their maps are (up until that moment) "naturally" in sync, so long as the responses of the monsters, ai and physics to the grenade event fire according to it's random seed the outcome will be the same.
Now obviously if there's latency and both players lob grenades at the same time at the same enemy hoarde there will be conflict issues. So you need some kind of range based system which knows if the players actions and effects are overlapping to a degree where a subset of local entities NEED to be kept in sync. This might be as simple as checking JUST the xyz origin coords of all the effected entities and any discrepancy results in a forced sync (like how in some networked racing games someone's car will magically jump a few feet over).
just my 2 cents, and probably a little naive when it comes down to keeping things in sync when there's a zillion flood coming at you and fourteen plasma grenades go off at once.
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
I hate all that whining about all that whining in forums. Whining is what forums are for, so stop whining!
Right. Because the quality of a game is dependent entirely on its Internet co-op capabilities. Single player, on-line deathmatch, Local co-op and LAN co-op are insignificant features that no-one wants.
Right. Because in the real world, technical limitations just vanish when people want something and yell really loud.
No. I think it's clearly impossible that a successful game would lead to another game being developed. Really, what were you thinking?
In the late 90s, Valve pulled it off for a limited number of players on a small map. Half-Life 1 and its mods had low enough lag for fast action and at least halfway decent physics.
Since that time, computers have grown a lot more powerful. I think it is time for some company to pull off an action MMORPG on the same level of speed and realism. Auto Assault had it to some extent, at least the driving had a passable degree of simulation in it (it could have been better, but that seemed to be sloppy modelling rather than network limitations).
Maybe someone can comment on Planetside? I have not tried it yet, but it is supposed to be a MMORPG-FPS. I wonder how well these guys have handled the task of creating a fast-paced game for lots of players.
C - the footgun of programming languages
I have to remind myself that people don't always read my attempt at humor the same way I do. Chalk it up to the perils of drunk slashdotting, however...
Online Co-op is not some insignificant feature, either. It's not as if implementing online co-op is like solving the remaining Hilbert problems, its a feature that already exists in many successful games, and it exists on a scale similar to what would work in a Halo-type game. News flash: physics and calculus are also "hard".
I'll restate it and maybe it will become clearer: Halo 2 was (by Bungie's own admission) mediocre in far too many places, yet it made a ton of money and is essentially the franchise for Microsoft. Would I need to extrapolate the Pavlovian mechanic any further? I'm sure you're smart enough to follow me.
Bungie has been given precious, "ship when it's done" treatment from Microsoft from the get-go on Halo 3, yet they can't manage to touch all the bases? I honestly thought Bungie was better than that, and I've never heard a developer scream "uncle" quite like this.
Without having actually played the single player/co-op campaign, I don't think anyone can say if co-op on the scale of Halo 3 has been done before. Even going a little beyond what has been done before could prove to be an unsatisfactory experience given limitations on bandwidth and latency. Just because something is on a similar scale doesn't mean that's achievable e.g. propelling a warship at high speed through water. Thanks to a number of factors, including resistance from the water, going from 20 knots to 24 knots doesn't require a relatively straightforward 20% increase in power; it requires a 100% increase for a lot of ships. Going from 30 to 34 looks like a smaller percentage increase in power would be required but it's going to be around 100% again, dwarfing 20-24 in absolute terms. Not a big jump in scale, but a massive jump in difficulty.
From what I have heard about Halo 3 co-op in comparison to say GoW co-op, players are going to cover a larger area, scripting is more complex and there are going to be more (and more complex) AI entities to keep in sync. If GoW was pushing the 360 close to what could be done over the net, it's possible that Halo 3 could currently be going beyond that.
Sure, there were bits that were mediocre, but there was a lot more that they were justifiably proud of. Implying that all (or a majority) of Halo fans are idiots who will buy anything is just trolling and to suggest that inadequacies in Halo 2 will lead to inadequacies in Halo 3 is foolish given their stated desire to improve what was unpopular and their actions in going so far as to release a multiplayer beta to help with that process.
They never promised on-line co-op and they haven't said it won't be provided. All we know is that a month ago, they were finding it difficult to get in working satisfactorily and would prefer to deliver a satisfying experience with the rest of the product than add in an unsatisfactory and unreliable element that people would just whine about.
The only people I see screaming are the whiners on forums like this who are throwing a hissy fit that they might not get everything exactly the way they want it, regardless of the technical challenges involved, their utter lack of knowledge about the game and therefore the difficulty it would pose, the absence of any actual announcement by Bungie and any sort of grip on reality at all. You'd think it was Diakatana for all the whinging going on.
Again, I'm not implying anything of the sort, Herr Populist, I'm implying Bungie could have a particular disdain for their audience which makes it easy to pull things like this. This is evident in their blithe, "we won't do it if it's too hard", dismissal of the feature. This kind of disdain is common in many successful businesses. If you haven't experienced it, well, consider yourself naive.
to suggest that inadequacies in Halo 2 will lead to inadequacies in Halo 3 is foolish given their stated desire to improve what was unpopularOh, well since they said they wanted to improve it, that settles it. This only proves my point further. Google this issue and you'll find, overwhelmingly, it's unpopular as all hell, and the game hasn't even been released yet. Stated intent vs. results? Give me a break.
You'd think it was Diakatana for all the whinging going on. Last time I checked your commentary on my gripes has far exceeded the length of my, well...gripes. Be careful complaining about the complainers, young man, lest you become a complainer. Are you familiar with the term "projection" as it relates to psychology? If you could care less about this feature, why are you even at this topic? I think you knew what you were going to find here.A rather baseless accusation given their level of invovlement with their fans, the services they provide on their site, the weekly updates to keep everyone up to date on progress, the multiplayer beta, etc.
They never said anything of the sort. A month ago they said they were working on it, but there were challenges involved. If they couldn't get it working satisfactorily, they wouldn't include it, the implication being that if they could get it working satisfactorily, they would include it. You make it sound like they couldn't e bothered when in fact they've been working very hard at it and won't settle for a semi-functional, not very satisfactory implementation - the very opposite of your accusation. In fact, if you read the Ars Technica journal entry on the subject, you'll find the devs making comments to that effect and reporting that the problems they mentioned have been largely overcome.
Of course I finished that sentence by talking about the actions they were taking to back up their words, so really, what was the point in that rather glib response?
You think Halo 3 is unpopular? That's a joke. People who complain are always going to generate more noise than people who are happy. The major news sites seem pretty excited about it and you can bet that sales will be huge when it's released.
Though my comments were based on reasoned arguments, rather than baseless whining.
Incidentally, given that you ignored the first part of my post, where I pointed out the potential difficulties, I assume that you now agree that it is a non-trivial task and we won't be able to say with any certainty how difficult it would be until we see the final game?