If I Were A Halo 2 Vista Developer

[Dole]

2. No Demands. Yes, you want your problem fixed and yes, you want it now. No, you should not demand it. The minute someone demands something of me, as opposed to kindly requesting it, is the minute I stop caring they have a problem.

In theory, as nice and dandy as this sounds in writing, and as benevolent as your aspirations are and as much as I admire your sentiments... You're forgetting that they're not a freelance mod team; these are experienced people getting paid to make a decent (modest terminology) port of an existing game [that was a smash hit for years on X-Box and was a good enough, if not better game, mind you] to a brand-new Windoes OS.

People who already had the game for X-Box want to know that their fifty bucks spent buying the same game over again for a new console is well worth it: if they were promised special user-editable features, they damn well want them. Hell, some people even moved over to the buggy new Vista OS primarily in anticipation of this game's release. Once again, they want to know their expenses weren't in vain.
The fact that half of the features of the map editor they purchased is unusable is advertising under a false pretense, and so those who produced the port are directly and immediately responsible to accede to the demands of the comsumers and are obligated to make amends ASAP, especially considering how many times this game has been delayed and recalled already.

Then add to that the fact that they are being employed by a corporate giant whose aim is to build revenue and attract business for Windows Vista, and then this situation is unexcusable and the complaints are justified. Capitalism, my friends: supply and demand. This is bigger than a bunch of college students budgeting time for some video game mods, this is business. The customer is ALWAYS right.


No, if you were a Halo 2 Vista developer you wouldn't be whining; you'd be glad you had an opportunity to work on this project or that you even had work at all, and you would be striving to get this done to make sure you're signed up for another project in the future. If people are satisfied and the game is successful, likewise your studio will prosper and game companies will recognize you to produce their games and so is your only option to get ahead... otherwise you're dead in the water. The minute you stop caring there's a problem is the minute your ass gets fired.
Besides, how many individual people are there who would actually be so nasty as to address this problem directly to the studio without taking a formal approach? Anything less than that isn't even considered valid communication; on the intermediary level between supplier and consumer, a professional, humble demeanor is implicit.
However, when the tacit, ubiquitous message of an entire community imposes demands, the studio has no option other than to react accordingly.

Don't flout benevolency, don't get too full of yourself in matters of conscience, and don't get yourself carried away by the rants of twelve year olds.

[Con]

Editing Kit does not provide enough in various areas
The CE community is based on the idea that we can express ourselves through this hobby. The Editing Kit has proven to be dissapointing in that it doesn't let us do this.

1. low amount of editable tags
2. low amount of example tags and available resources to work with (textures, shaders, ambient sounds, scenery, gravity lifts, etc)
3. poor documentation on more advanced features of the editing kit (water, glass, gravity lifts)
4. the tutorial references resources that don't exist
5. some parts of the tutorial are wrong; as in they cause errors that the player needs to work around (I heard this occurs before lightmaps are created, and unless they are created before importing into sapien you get a corruped file error, or something along those lines)
6. Demensions not provided (I heard this as well)
7. Exporter doesn't already work with max 9

The editing kit is key here; there's more to map-making than just the level. This new editing kit is not encouraging much from the community in terms of creativity. Those hopeful to make content for h2v have had to take their business elsewhere, along with their potential players.

I really hope this is adressed. The community is one of your best assets. Keep it happy.

The graphics engine?
I am not an expert in this area, but myself and many others have noticed how inefficient the graphics are in Halo 2 for Vista. It uses a lot of resources for little gain. It is not comparable to the standards set by other games.

1. Even with computer specs much higher than the minimum required for the game, players are still have performance issues;
2. The game stutters and performs extremely poorly for a very long time upon loading a SP level (it takes 2GB of ram to fix this issue!)
3. The game is said not to take advantage of Shader Model 3.0
4. We are not provided with very many graphics options in the menu. It would be great to have the options provided in other games these days.
5. Forcing Anisotropic Filtering or other options through things such as the Nvidia Control Panel result in the game performing extremely slowly for something that is not demanding in other engines. The mouse begins to "lag" a lot, or be delayed in its response when this happens (can take up to a second for it to start turning the player after moving the mouse)

Whether or not you would be able to updating the game to fix these issues is beyong me. Good luck?


I have a load mor eof these, this is just a summarization of a page or so of notes I've been taking on h2v issues. There's still a few more pages I have, maybe I'll post them tomorrow.

[kusanagikei]

First of all props to Nick. I honestly cant stand the whining that some of these forum users have. Nothing but, "I don't have vista", "I can't afford vista", "wtf! this game sucks", "this is a shitty port".

I think that a lot of people need to suck it up about the vista issue. It just is that way. It's also done now, out on vista, the discussion is over. Also, for the people whining, let's see a better port.

I think that regardless of how well any of you think Hired Gun did, they did do an admirable job under the certain restrictions they faced. First of all, I'm sure it wasn't they're idea to run it on vista.

Secondly, I have had no problems with the actual game. Any crashes I received were purely that of vista. While it sucks, I'm gonna have to do what everyone else should do and bite my lip and wait until the issues are resolved.

And lastly, if you think the xbox version is better, feel free to stop playing your vista version and stop bugging everyone on the forums about your personal complaints about the vista version. If all of you would keep the bashing to one thread it might be fine, I can decide to not read it. But people seem insitent of spreading the hate all around as much as they can. Give it a rest.

[Dr Nick]

Ummm, Well, that does make a lot of sense, but the problem is that nobody will remember this. What we need to do is, as the "Bad Forum User" would say, spread the word around the whole website.

Also, though I've only been here a couple of days, I haven't seen any overly disrespectful threads here. The ones I see of people having problems is basically people saying "I have this problem. Does anybody else? And if so, what were your settings/how did you find the problem/etc".

[Nick]

In theory, as nice and dandy as this sounds in writing, and as benevolent as your aspirations are and as much as I admire your sentiments... You're forgetting that they're not a freelance mod team; these are experienced people getting paid to make a decent (modest terminology) port of an existing game [that was a smash hit for years on X-Box and was a good enough, if not better game, mind you] to a brand-new Windoes OS.

Sorry Dole, you are simply wrong. I will explain though, so no worries that you are simply being silenced without logical reasoning.

Who is this freelance mod team you speak of and how is such a comment relevant to treating others with respect? I am not forgetting that the Halo 2 Vista developers are professionals under contract with Microsoft Game Studios to produce a port of a Microsoft property, of which Microsoft retains full control over and makes executive decisions about. Do not assume, thank you.

People who already had the game for X-Box want to know that their fifty bucks spent buying the same game over again for a new console is well worth it: if they were promised special user-editable features, they damn well want them. Hell, some people even moved over to the buggy new Vista OS primarily in anticipation of this game's release. Once again, they want to know their expenses weren't in vain.

You act as if those who purchased the game for the Xbox are somehow special compared to those who did not purchase it for the Xbox; they are not. Such customers should have had the same expectations as every other customer: a port of the Halo 2 game as it was on the Xbox, plus the ability to create custom maps. If they expected more than that, it was their own indiscretion that lead them to make poor assumptions about what they would be receiving for their $50.

The fact that half of the features of the map editor they purchased is unusable is advertising under a false pretense, and so those who produced the port are directly and immediately responsible to accede to the demands of the comsumers and are obligated to make amends ASAP, especially considering how many times this game has been delayed and recalled already.

I would love for you to provide me with an official press release outlining details of features that would be a part of the editing kit that have since been removed without notice prior to the game's release. Just because people assumed it would have the exact same functionality as the Halo 1 editing kit does not mean that was ever promised. A map creation tool was promised and a map creation tool was delivered; I wish it did more but I received what was advertised - something that creates new maps.

Then add to that the fact that they are being employed by a corporate giant whose aim is to build revenue and attract business for Windows Vista, and then this situation is unexcusable and the complaints are justified. Capitalism, my friends: supply and demand. This is bigger than a bunch of college students budgeting time for some video game mods, this is business. The customer is ALWAYS right.

If you think that the Halo 2 developers that browse these forums are some how required to listen to your demands, then you are sorely mistaken. Yes, the customer has a right to demand fixes from the manufacturer for product defects, but that typically must occur through the proper channels (which would be Microsoft's support website), not an unofficial forum. The point of this thread is that if you would like the Halo 2 Vista developers that browse these forums to seriously consider your requests, stop being jerks.

Hmm, you go on to reference college students budgeting to make video game mods? Who is talking about college students selling video game mods? Please keep your posts on topic, thank you.

No, if you were a Halo 2 Vista developer you wouldn't be whining; you'd be glad you had an opportunity to work on this project or that you even had work at all, and you would be striving to get this done to make sure you're signed up for another project in the future. If people are satisfied and the game is successful, likewise your studio will prosper and game companies will recognize you to produce their games and so is your only option to get ahead... otherwise you're dead in the water. The minute you stop caring there's a problem is the minute your ass gets fired.

Who said the Halo 2 Vista developers are whining? If you think I am one, you are mistaken; I am just a logical individual who knows the hardships of software development and the ungratefulness of users, and I am also someone who browses these forums and am tired of reading the same temper tantrums daily.

You make a whole lot of assumptions about the video game business and the studios involved with the Halo 2 port. Hired Gun is an internally formed Microsoft Game Studios team created to port the game. Pi Studios was hired to work on the editing kit and assets (the two new maps). I am pretty sure Hired Gun is not too worried about being hired by someone ... themselves, as they are all Microsoft employees who were shuffled into a new team or newly hired. Pi Studios has worked on four Call of Duty games and Mercenaries 2 for the PS2; I don't think they are too worried about the impact of Halo 2 Vista on their studio. Lastly, Gearbox has gone on to make its own IP after the bumpy ride that was Halo 1 PC.

Really though, it comes down to what I was saying earlier. Microsoft calls the shots on what gets fixed, so nobody is going to get fired unless Microsoft tells them to do something and they do not do it.

Besides, how many individual people are there who would actually be so nasty as to address this problem directly to the studio without taking a formal approach? Anything less than that isn't even considered valid communication; on the intermediary level between supplier and consumer, a professional, humble demeanor is implicit.
However, when the tacit, ubiquitous message of an entire community imposes demands, the studio has no option other than to react accordingly.

I suppose you are missing the entire point, though maybe you have picked up on it over the course of this post. If you want the Halo 2 Vista developers that browse these forums to give your issue more than a glance, be helpful in your description of the issue and avoid being a jerk. Think of them as people with all the right connections and, if they like you, they can maybe help you out; but they are not obligated to like you or to help you out, so treat them with some respect for your benefit and theirs.

Now that we've clarified the difference between official channels to report bugs and unofficial channels the Halo 2 Vista developers browse at their leisure, we can continue on with the thread. Thank you for your participation.

Nick

[YCH]

While I agree that whining won't help the situation, it certainly is, in many cases, warranted when it comes to Halo 2 Vista.

I am generally a patient person when it comes to games and siding developers when it seems reasonable, but Halo 2 Vista, whether due to problems of the Vista OS itself, or the time/budget constraints, or lack of skill on the developers' side, or a combination of all of these and more, is a pretty sorry product when I consider it (and it pains me in a way to say this considering I'm a huge Halo fan and of PC gaming).

Let's see why.

First, my PC specs (pretty acceptable machine - it's nearly 2 years old so gimme a break :P):

- Athlon X2 64 (2.7GHz)
- nVidia GeForce 7800 GT SLI (w/ latest official drivers at the time of install)
- 2 GB RAM
- Creative X-Fi (w/ latest official drivers at the time of install)
- Windows Vista Business

1) Installation was a headache. First, I tried to install the game but I got some kind of weird error message "Live gaming cannot be initialized..." Had to restart PC to fix this. Weird thing was, it was a fresh boot anyway before I tried to install the game the first time. So once I got installation going, I decided to try Tray and Play. Well now - for some reason the opening video chopped so badly (it flickered black and kept turning my LCD monitor on and off standby) that the game crashed. I then decided to reinstall the game fully before trying to play. Same deal with the opening video but somehow the game survived enough to go to the main menu. Later by elimination I guessed (and correctly so) that the latest official video drivers were the cause of many instabilities, so I installed the 160.03 beta drivers and it worked better. Well, so much for fuss-free gaming. I can say this was one of the most frustrating game installs I've had in years.

2) The online gaming system is inconvenient. The process of signing up for Live Gaming is confusing, as it seemed repetitious and I had to try several times before getting it right. Again, zero score for ease of getting into online gaming if you didn't already have a gamertag. Also, about the only thing I can do is browse servers for a game or create a local game. Luckily, I'm not big on online gaming so this wasn't a huge loss to me.

3) Now comes the big kahuna - the game features and quirks. The general feeling I get from Halo 2 Vista is that it plainly feels crippled, stupid, robbed of greatness and what have you.
a) Auto-aim with the 360 gamepad. FFS give me a break. This forum has some very good posts that illustrate the auto-aim. When it comes to gamepad vs mouse/kb, you can't add auto-aim to only one controller type and think you can "have your cake and eat it." It's unfair and I think any PC gamer who wants to use a gamepad for an FPS should suffer the consequences. Gamepads are horrible for FPS games no question about it; they're only bearable on consoles because of games being built around the their limitations and auto-aim is a byproduct of that.
b) No co-op gameplay on the PC? Argh. Shafted yet again.
c) Generally poor performance and video related bugs. I usually like to run my games at around 60-100 frames per second to maintain the fluidity I like. And to do that on Halo 2, I have to run the game at 800*600 w/4xAA multisampled and supersampled transparency AA (oh lord gotta smooth out the jaggies). And that's if SLI is enabled properly (to do that I have to toggle some video feature, like resolution or AA level to "trick" the game into restarting the video subsystem and detecting the SLI mode - this has to be done after each level or I'll suffer single video card performance). Why 800*600 resolution? Because the game is so fill-rate heavy. I don't know how it sucks up the fill rate like crazy when my 7800GT in SLI is so many times faster than a Geforce3 that's in the Xbox (to be fair, I think my system running Halo 2 vista running at slightly higher resolution with anti-aliasing vs the Xbox version is much smoother latter version but compared to current games the performance is not commensurate with the graphical details). Later in the game, especially in the forest-y levels I have to bump the AA level down a notch to maintain 50fps during firefights. This would all be okay if Halo 2 looked much better than it did. I think it looks bearable, but mostly because the art design still holds up. Technically it's dated as hell.
d) Mouse controls seem a little iffy. It's like there's some acceleration built-in no matter what. It throws my aim off in general, and luckily in single player it's not that big of a deal. In multi-player I'm sure I would be pissed, especially when going up against auto-aim enhanced gamepad wielding bastards. This forum has a few threads about the mouse acceleration issue.
e) Non skippable video intro. Do I have to watch that stupid intro every time I play? Is there no command line option for me to disable it? If it played properly it would still be bearable, but SLI makes the video flicker black every other frame. Okay, so even if this is nVidia's fault, at least give me the option to skip the video intros, eh? I had to resort to replacing the intro videos with empty files renamed with the actual video names.
f) No user save-points slots. What if I wanted to replay a fun previous level without losing my current save-point? Oh I can't. And for no good reason either. In Halo PC at least I could save the previous save point and go back to it later.

I could think of some more reasons to be pissed at the whole situation, but it's late and I need to sleep soon. In short, the only reason I bought this game was because I love the Halo universe and I couldn't wait to play as Master Chief again on a PC with proper mouse and keyboard controls. Hey, it's here finally but boy just count the number of compromises. I still had fun with the single-player campaign, but there's just this nagging feeling that it could have been so much more.

[Nick]

While I agree that whining won't help the situation, it certainly is, in many cases, warranted when it comes to Halo 2 Vista.

I think you are missing the point in general here, give my reply to Dole a read. Basically, I am certainly not saying that you should not complain about problems with the game, I am simply saying that people need to have a better approach to it.

This is an unofficial forum, which means that anything complained about here does not necessarily get passed along to the proper individuals responsible for fixing it. However, I can tell you right now that if I were a Halo 2 Vista developer (and there are a few registered here that browse the forums, if you didn't know), I would be far more likely to log bugs reported and pass them along to the proper people if they were brought up in a mature, descriptive, and generally constructive way.

Nick

[YCH]

I think you are missing the point in general here, give my reply to Dole a read. Basically, I am certainly not saying that you should not complain about problems with the game, I am simply saying that people need to have a better approach to it.

This is an unofficial forum, which means that anything complained about here does not necessarily get passed along to the proper individuals responsible for fixing it. However, I can tell you right now that if I were a Halo 2 Vista developer (and there are a few registered here that browse the forums, if you didn't know), I would be far more likely to log bugs reported and pass them along to the proper people if they were brought up in a mature, descriptive, and generally constructive way.

Nick

I suppose, but it would also help if I didn't feel so much as being equivalently given the finger or shat on in terms of buying a game from a consumer's experience standpoint. Some of these things are massive oversights that whoever's fault it is needs to be fired. I can stomach a few bugs here and there but I've faced enough showstopping bugs, stupid "features" and lack of flexibility that the only thing that kept me going is my general literacy with technical/computer stuff and my love for Halo. I mean, I was so excited about this game's release that I pre-ordered the game and went off work a little early to pick it up on the first day of release, only to spend 2 hours getting it to run somewhat properly. Only after a week or two of continuous testing and tweaking do I have it running as best as it can under the current circumstances.

If the two PC ports of the Halo games are any indication, Halo 3 will probably suffer an underwhelming port as well. Seriously, think about it: Halo is about as big as they come in the current gaming industry and with the number of problems and plain lack of polish and fanfare with the PC release, you would think this is a B title or something. Is this really all Microsoft and co can muster for it's most valuable gaming title on its belt? Is this the best they can do for the platform that the company built their base on? Maybe the PC platform is really the middle child of gaming now.

Well, I hope my previous post was at least somewhat descriptive of the problems I had with the game while giving me the chance to rant.

[DaneO'Roo]

Well, the way I see it, all the complaints and flames have been well merited, based on the stagering amount of flaws, unescesary shit/screw ups in the game.

But I understand about being more passive about it. I realise HG and such aren't to blame. It's the decision makers I'm concerned with.

[jahrain]

Nick of all people calling us jerks for insulting and disrespectful posts? I feel disrespected and insulted , wait what was this thread about again? Oh yeah, saying 'please and thank you' and "asking nicely" for bugs and issues to be resolved and addressed. This is sad to say the least .

Anyways, If I were a halo 2 vista developer, I would have pushed for more quality assurance before release. Also, I would try to address issues as they were posted or give acknowledgment that these issues are being noted or worked on rather than staying freakishly quiet about it regardless of the negative or disrespectful tone from users, as they are customers. It would no doubtfully change the tone of these users and put them at ease to know that they are being heard and replied to from a developer. I would also realize that this is the internets and I would empathize the frustration users may be experiencing and rather see them take it out on the internet rather than on their baby sister or wife. I guess this is because I don't consider myself an arrogant person and I'm not afraid to be open or honest. But probably won't be allowed to say such if microsoft doesn't officially announce or release what is allowed to be said or address first. But I would at least try to show that I care the best I can to try and change the tone of an angry community.

I think the growing negativity here is because of the eerie silence from bungie, microsoft, pie, and hired gun on the game. Yes there is some interaction happening on these forums with the developers, but some people are beginning to feel like their soft polite voice is not being heard which contributes to growing frustration and push comes to shove and critique comes to insults. Its getting to be almost a month now since the game was first released, and no updates or even announcements of them, no bugs or issues have been officially addressed, (no, hot coffee 2 doesn't count), and its beginning to get that oh so scary "with so few players online, so many bugs and issues, and so many angry customers all over the internet forums; its such a failure, theres nothing left to do but abandon it" feeling with the game. I don't ever want to see that happen. But when one is quiet in a bad situation, others will assume the worst about it. Thats just real life.