Buyer's Remorse - An open letter to the devs of H2V

[Terin]

The Halo 2 port was not a sequel to the Halo 1 port. It was a completely different port by completely different people, who probably will end up porting Halo 3, if it does get ported at all. They should learn from their mistakes, then.

[Rob Oplawar]

Just because it was someone else who made the mistakes doesn't mean you shouldn't learn from them. What, are they gonna say "I knew HCE made those mistakes at first, but I haven't made those mistakes yet"? Or better, "I didn't know about Halo CE or the mistakes they made or what the fans love about it". Come on, either they knew and still screwed up in spite of that, or they didn't do the obvious research into the obvious candidate for a pre-made fanbase and went ahead and screwed up without doing the research.

OK, let's be fair, I've worked on a couple of big software projects now, and it's about as far from easy as it can get, especially if you're working to port code that someone else wrote. BUT: that's no excuse. These things are hard. This is the way it works. You can't release a shitty product and say "oh, but it would have been really hard to make it better" because then your competitors go release a brilliant product and say "it was really fucking hard but we, you know, worked on it."

edit: not saying they didn't work hard on this, I'm just saying that when you work hard and your product still sucks, you've got to either work harder or your product is going to suck, and no matter how hard you worked on it, it's open to fair criticism.

[p0lar_bear]

The only reason Halo 2 was ported to PC is because they needed a guinea pig for G4WL. They picked Halo 2 apparently in hopes that the smash-hit Xbox title would also attract more users to the Vista OS as well. After all, the subject of H2PC was hot for quite a while, and they needed something to help sell their OS besides a prettier interface and Office 2007.

It worked, until people found out just how bad H2V was.

[Deihmos]

Microsoft does not need a game to sell their OS. It sells it self since it comes with basically all new computers. I think Halo 2 was basically used as a guinea pig for Games for Windows Live and I hope they realize that this kind of tier system just wouldn't work. It works on the Xbox because it's either you have Gold or you cannot play online and there isn't much ways to finance the service on a console.

This is not the case with computers as you can easily make money PC through advertisements etc. The service can be really good but changes needs to be made. They can have a massive community of gamers with an ad based website. It needs to be free with maybe a fee just for cross platform play and and multiplayer achievements. Then you will see many developers using the service.

The next GWL title will be out soon and I cannot wait to see what they do with it. Hopefully htey learn from their mistakes but i wouldn't count on it.

[p0lar_bear]

Microsoft does not need a game to sell their OS.

They don't need it now, though at Vista's launch they probably wanted all the support they could get.

All I know is that they ported Halo 2 for their own benefit. When it came to light that they fucked it up, and the game was broken, instead of fixing it, they decided it's time to move on, and hope that their next projects will work better.

[supersniper]

I have noticed that once again because of Microsoft Halo 2 was ruined. Not entirely the same situation with H2X but still Halo 2 for Xbox could've been way better if bungie had more time. And now Halo 2 PC is messed up because Microsoft guinea pigged it as Deihmos has stated.

[soloblast]

The question is, where do we go from here? It's a pity no one can make some unofficial patch for the game, like the way others did for other games which were previously effectively unplayable.

And hey, about the way Microsoft handles games, I'm just going to go ahead and quote Games for Windows: The Official Magazine (Previously known as Computer Gaming World), supposedly Microsoft's officially-sanctioned magazine for PC games: "I'm just gonna come out and say this: Microsoft sucks at handling first-party PC games." -- Ryan Scott, Reviews Editor, GFW: TOM.

[halo2windows]

I was basically to lazy to read it all, but I get your point

[Phobias]

^ the above post should have been followed by a post saying "OMG WHAT A BUMP" or "NICE 2MONTH BUMP

[jcap]

^ the above post should have been followed by a post saying "OMG YOU CAN'T BUMP A STICKY" or "HOW ABOUT YOUR CONTRIBUTE SOMETHING USEFUL TO THE THREAD"