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You know, as "cool" as ODST was supposed to be. I really had to force myself to finish it. I was only mildly interested by the story, and in the end, the payoff felt supremely unsatisfying. You could see where they tried to make it feel epic(ish) and important, and it's precisely that tryhard writing that made me feel a teensy bit compelled to slog through the same game I've played a bajillion times before. By The time Reach rolled around, i'd already read the books and, like I said before, after 15 minutes of the same. goddamned. fucking. game. again. I could take no more.


That said, I'm pretty hyped for CE: anniversary! Weird, huh?

DPDarkPrimus wrote:Hard to make encountering Elites in ODST a worrying event when Spoiler

the only Elites you see in the game are dead.

Blah blah. I never played ODST. I was intrigued, but as soon as it was clear that it was just more of the exact same Halo gameplay... yeah, no.

You should have been more angry at the fact that they charged full price for what was basically a DLC.

CaptHawkeye wrote:You should have been more angry at the fact that they charged full price for what was basically a DLC.

Also never played Halo3 so point = moot.

I quite enjoyed Halo 3. The only big problem I saw with 2/3 was that the first act of 3 REALLY should have been the final act of 2; something tells me they ran out of time while working on 2, hence the unsatisfying cliffhanger of an ending.

Halo 3 featured the dumbest line of the entire series.

<retreating from underground base as the Covenant attack>
Hey sir, where should we tell everyone we're going?

TO WAR

uh, no, we need an RP actually can you be more specific

WAR

Chardok wrote:saw this:

<snip>

Why can't it just be a suit upgrade? Hell, the visor looks different anyway.

Molyneux wrote:I quite enjoyed Halo 3. The only big problem I saw with 2/3 was that the first act of 3 REALLY should have been the final act of 2; something tells me they ran out of time while working on 2, hence the unsatisfying cliffhanger of an ending.

More like everything tells you. Microsoft set a time-table for them at E3 and they had to meet it. The motto inside Bungie for Halo 2 was "ship it".

Is that really a thing? I mean documented - 'cause I've heard that, but I dunno...sounds dodgy.

Yeah, it's in the "Making of" thing that came with the collector's edition. They had to throw that first gameplay demo together in like 2 days because they literally had nothing to show anybody before that.

the irony is that the level depicted in the first gameplay trailer was better than the one we got. It looked like the battle for earth was in full swing, and the MC had a gun that could actually kill shit.

Darksider wrote:the irony is that the level depicted in the first gameplay trailer was better than the one we got. It looked like the battle for earth was in full swing, and the MC had a gun that could actually kill shit.

Did you just work out that trailers are worthless?

Its obvious that making 200m of corridor stroller look exciting with no context is easier than making a 12-hour corridor stroller work properly. If only Bungie had decent project management, I guess.

Obviously I don't put that much stock in trailers, i'm just baffled that Bungie had a gameplay formula that seemed like it worked, and actually looked pretty interesting, and changed it to something that was worse. Comparing the damage done by chief's weapons in the first gameplay trailer and the actual game itself, it's obvious that they toned down the amount of damage the guns do, (Golden Triangle FTW ) and the scenes regarding the battle for earth looked more intense than the actual scenes in the game, and they discarded them for their stupid Scarab boss fight.

I'm just a little confused because comparing the gameplay trailer and the actual game itself, it seems like Bungie made the game worse on purpose

are we still talking about Halo 2?

Look in the commentary about Halo 2 they confess that the Halo 2 demo level was almost entirely smoke and mirrors and it was pretty much the low-point of their studio's history because they lied to the world about what they had in store for them and then had to bust their asses to get a game shipped and the features and levels just kept getting cut as the due date got closer and closer.

So, "ship it ship it ship it".

Bungie fell into that David Broussard style of game development where they just kept making bigger and bigger wishlists of features and technology they thought Halo 2 should have. It took them until basically 2003 to realize non of that shit was going to made feasible in a realistic timeframe and they rushed through Halo 2's development as quickly as possible.

Halo CE's trailer at E3 2000 was also pure smoke and mirrors with Bungie admitting later it was 100% scripted and was never intended to be used in any part of the game. For a long time it Bungie suffered from chronically lazy staff and incompetent management apparently.

DPDarkPrimus wrote:Look in the commentary about Halo 2 they confess that the Halo 2 demo level was almost entirely smoke and mirrors and it was pretty much the low-point of their studio's history because they lied to the world about what they had in store for them and then had to bust their asses to get a game shipped and the features and levels just kept getting cut as the due date got closer and closer.

So, "ship it ship it ship it".

If only their management wasn't incompetent? Software feature creep and death marches are LITERALLY textbook material. If they hadn't bought their outrageous self-marketing, they would have efficiently run the project to deliver a better product on time isntead of talking shit and smoking crack until it was too late.

Hawx, I remember when the Halo trailer was used to show their battles and AI and shit, and yet was obviously scripted. Bungie has lied about Halo since day one; blaming evil Microsoft for demanding results is backwards.

Halo CE's trailer at E3 2000 was also pure smoke and mirrors with Bungie admitting later it was 100% scripted and was never intended to be used in any part of the game. For a long time it Bungie suffered from chronically lazy staff and incompetent management apparently.

Well the actual game was better than the trailer in case of Halo CE. The trailer was cringeworthy bad in some places such as the cartoonish 80s robot voice they chose for Master Chief.

That doesn't change the point that they were dishonest and suffered from poor planning and laziness, does it?

Before Halo 2 came out I remember reading an article quoting Jason Jones and Joe Staten on how Bungie's development works. Paraphrasing, they "collide" various elements of code till they have a game, and the analogy was "building a cathedral in a hurricane". The article gushed about this bold new out of the box paradigm breaking wunderkind development model. As a former software project manager, I just put my head down on the table as I realized that Halo 2 was going to be a horrible mishmash of developer fail rescued from it's own incompetence by a Microsoft media blitz, hype, and a massive coat tail effect from Combat Evolved.

Hooo boy was it ever!

That whole game screams unfinished from beggining to the abrubt "ending". It was full of alpha bugs (grabbing flags through walls) and was obviously never playtested (having radar on in Head to Head, spawning with an SMG in a map like Coagulation). The story was similarily randomly thrown together, like what was the point of even having the Heretics in the game?

It took Bungie what, three evolutions to actually build a sequel to Combat Evolved when they made Reach. Halo 2 felt like some horrible alpha build, and Halo 3 was like a Halo themed Unreal Tournament mod.

aieeegrunt wrote:Before Halo 2 came out I remember reading an article quoting Jason Jones and Joe Staten on how Bungie's development works. Paraphrasing, they "collide" various elements of code till they have a game, and the analogy was "building a cathedral in a hurricane". The article gushed about this bold new out of the box paradigm breaking wunderkind development model. As a former software project manager, I just put my head down on the table as I realized that Halo 2 was going to be a horrible mishmash of developer fail rescued from it's own incompetence by a Microsoft media blitz, hype, and a massive coat tail effect from Combat Evolved.

Hooo boy was it ever!

That whole game screams unfinished from beggining to the abrubt "ending". It was full of alpha bugs (grabbing flags through walls) and was obviously never playtested (having radar on in Head to Head, spawning with an SMG in a map like Coagulation). The story was similarily randomly thrown together, like what was the point of even having the Heretics in the game?

It took Bungie what, three evolutions to actually build a sequel to Combat Evolved when they made Reach. Halo 2 felt like some horrible alpha build, and Halo 3 was like a Halo themed Unreal Tournament mod.

The weird thing is that this is exactly how Valve make their games (which is why the development cycles are so long I guess) but they must have some seriously dedicated project managers to turn such a mess of ideas into good final products.

Stark wrote: Hawx, I remember when the Halo trailer was used to show their battles and AI and shit, and yet was obviously scripted. Bungie has lied about Halo since day one; blaming evil Microsoft for demanding results is backwards.

If anything this was a case of the publisher saving the developer by cracking the whip. Microsoft basically saved them from their own laziness. Let's be honest, if it wasn't for the Xbox and Microsoft, Halo probably would have been a broken, forgettable shooter for the PC that fell in with Bungie's background of disorganized, spastic titles like Oni and Myth.

CaptHawkeye wrote:Bungie fell into that David Broussard style of game development where they just kept making bigger and bigger wishlists of features and technology they thought Halo 2 should have. It took them until basically 2003 to realize non of that shit was going to made feasible in a realistic timeframe and they rushed through Halo 2's development as quickly as possible.

I think you meant George Broussard, the director of Duke Nukem Forever.

Zac Naloen wrote:The weird thing is that this is exactly how Valve make their games (which is why the development cycles are so long I guess) but they must have some seriously dedicated project managers to turn such a mess of ideas into good final products.

Actually, it might be why Valve's own projects are so delayed and horrible, while they just buy other developers with Steam money and publish those titles instead.

I remember reading a lot of stuff about 'unconventional' approaches to software development in the late 90s and earth 2000s, so it wasn't just Bungie being a bunch of holistic random morons. As Hawx says, pretty much everything else Bungie made around the same time was a pile of shit.

CaptHawkeye wrote: If anything this was a case of the publisher saving the developer by cracking the whip. Microsoft basically saved them from their own laziness. Let's be honest, if it wasn't for the Xbox and Microsoft, Halo probably would have been a broken, forgettable shooter for the PC that fell in with Bungie's background of disorganized, spastic titles like Oni and Myth.

Microsoft saved them not once, but thrice. First by buying up their bankrupt asses. Second by giving them just barely enough time to finish making Halo CE, but not enough time to start the feature creep and never finish bullshit. They were let off the leash for Halo 2, and did literally nothing for years. Microsoft then stepped in and not only imposed the hard firm deadline that Bungie needed but also threw all sorts of extra resources at their disposal. Having not learned their lesson, they still wound up shipping a woefully incomplete product.

It is a fitting testiment to their incompetence that on the Halo 2 extras DVD when talking about how Microsoft descended upon them, installed a Microsoft Corporate Overlord to watchdog them, and gave them all these extra people that, they state that they had all these people hanging around for days waiting to be told what to start working on. That's killer project management fail.

It says a lot that Microsoft finally got sick of this and cut them loose. I can't see them doing well now that they have to re-enter the real world without Daddy Gates to back them up.