Hello, I'm an average end-user. My computer was top-of-the-line back in 03. I was playing the Halo campaign the other day and noticed the strain that was put upon my computer.
Most computers at the time wouldn't have been able to take the strain of rendering twice the load at once. At some points the XBox can't take it; you can see some slowdown in some spots where there is clearly being too much rendered at once.
If you want co-op so badly, go play the XBox. Consoles were meant for multi-player use. The PC was created for just one person.
I think it would be acceptable if the netcode was made to incorperate this. IMO it would make the game better by far, you get bored of the same maps over and over again in multiplayer, and sometimes custom maps aren't enough. There's the problem of balance however. When you play the campaign, there were at times about 10 enemies in the room with you, but you still beat them. Then what happens when you get 8 players in the Co-op server? That's certainly not balanced anymore. If the amount of enemies spawned in the room were done proportionally to the amount of players in the server, it would get pretty laggy really fast. The server could instead adjust the AI's shields and health to something like 400% to make them harder to kill. More vehicles would have to be spawned for the players as well, like the Race gametype. Players would also have to spawn near to the others, not a problem however. The harder-to-kill enemies should keep the group of players tightly packed along the level. Less experienced players will be able to progess faster and catch up to the more experienced ones pinned down at the battefront. That will also keep the more experienced players from blazing ahead. There's also the need for more complex cutscenes. New animations may be needed, or it could work like the following; The host is the only one who performs the important cutscene actions. The other players stand idly by while he does this, and make use of scripts in the map to perform basic actions like entering vehicles, facing directions, and following the host. Something liek this could work, and hopefully they make the h2v netcode able to sync the AI, incase we develop our own Co-op maps.
I DON'T want co-op so badly, but that's still a pretty damn frail reason why they couldn't have done it anyway. I know of other games that have had ahead of their time system requirements (Quake, for one)
For the record, AMD Athlon 64 + ATI Radeon 1600 Pro + 512 MB DDR RAM = mid-range. I'm not speaking from the spoiled richboys that just need to go die point of view.
They should just leave it at co-op on one computer. The major issue why they aren't doing this is that on one computer the game would have to display itself twice, producing extremely low fps on just average computers. In the questions they answered they wanted to make the game compatible with everyone, no matter how crappy their gfx card was(as long as it was able to meet minimum req.) But then......if you had dual 8800s...or even one of the newest cards....co-op wouldn't be a that much of a problem...Someone tell them this -.-
The netcode thing......they should just set it so that dial-up players play amongst themselves....Give them a good reason to upgrade. Optimize gameplay for broadband, its what most people have nowadays anyway. Dial-up is ancient technology....move on!!
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