[FlamingCobra]

So... um... why did Microsoft/Bungie stop letting there be PC versions of Halo games? Especially Halo Wars, because everybody knows RTS' are always better on PC.

[Klaustrophobia]

here's my wild guess.

halo 2 was released for vista only in a marketing stunt to try to boost vista sales.  pc gamers, being the glorious master race that they are, saw right through it, and said "**** that, i'll just not play halo 2," and halo 2 pc sales tanked.  they therefore deemed it financially unsound to continue porting halo games to PC, and decided to stick to the vast market of mainstream idiots that is Xbox.  this has the added benefit of selling a few more consoles to pc gamers who REALLY want to play halo.

no, i cannot back any of that up. 

[NGTM-1R]

There was complaint about piracy at the time, but I think the bottom line was that Halo CE just didn't run well when it came out, and so it tanked.

[Nuke]

this has the added benefit of selling a few more consoles to pc gamers who REALLY want to play halo.

my question is why? there are way better fpses out there on pc than halo. i also find the graphics engine really buggy on pc. besides that i found the bad guys too cute to shoot at. it kinda reminded me of descent 3 actually, in that respect. bad guys just shouldnt be cute. though if it did have one redeeming factor, it was the coop play. something that has been missing form pc fpses since quake 2.

[JGZinv]

This can be traced back to stuff Bungie has said in recent years. Along with some stuff you'll find in the community.

1. Halo 1 was a much larger hit than anyone had dreamed. Halo 2 Bungie overshot themselves with ideas and didn't plan properly, they went over budget, over time, and
smacked all the could together into H2 and it showed. Read back through some of the video logs and the staff talks about it in detail. What got cut from H2 they tried to
figure out what was good or bad, and added some of it to H3.

2. Halo 1 is quite moddable, plenty of sites out there for that. Some of the tools were released by one of the companies that helped produce it for PC. Halo 2 has several things
like copy protection and locked out files that have kept it from being modded almost at all. They are almost night and day comparisons. The PC community wishes H2 was open,
but there's no provided tools, and no one succeeded in cracking it open far enough. So it's a dead issue.

3. Microsoft if I remember right, dictated that H2 had to be the poster child for the Games for Windows program, and that screwed a lot up.  Far fewer people bought H2 on PC than
on console, plus with no community support due to modding, it fell flat on it's ass sales wise. So MS cut it's losses and told Bungie to focus on the console, as they had done from the
beginning. There was also competition from other much more well known PC FPS titles back then. Essentially the PC version of Halo was Microsoft's spin off... and they killed it themselves.

4. Bungie hasn't been the one to handle any of the H1 or H2 conversions to PC. Even 343 had a limited role in converting CE to CEA, they outsourced most of the work for the update.

5. Halo Wars was Ensemble Studios baby, they just were in constant contact with Bungie for the lore and oversight to make it. It was never designed to be on the PC or in competition to
the PC strategy games. Microsoft wanted a Starcraft for Xbox... and that's what they got. The reason we don't have a Halo Wars 2, is MS closed or bought out... I forget.. Ensemble, and the
team split into 3 different companies.

[FlamingCobra]

Basically:

Microsoft is all about profit.

And PC does not equal profit.

[Polpolion]

Microsoft is all about profit.

And PC does not equal profit.

microsoft

pc

not equal profit

microsoft

pc

profit

Best guess is that they'd get more people to buy the xbawks for Halo 3 than to buy Winders for Halo 3. Reasonable considering they already control most desktop OS market where the gaming console market is much more contestable.

[FlamingCobra]

What I meant was, it would be more profitable to force people that wanted to play the game to buy an Xbawks.

What is a "winders"?

[Dark Hunter]

Topic title: A Halo Thread

DeepBlue? Did you steal FlamingCobra's account?

Anyway, on-topic: I played Halo 2 on PC, and I would have been fine with it if it didn't make the mouse horrifically unresponsive, even at the highest precision. That totally ruined it for me.

Which is too bad, because I liked Halo 1 PC, especially its multiplayer, which after Halo 2 came out was a lot more empty of trolls than normal.

* DarkHunter wonders if the Halo 1 multiplayer is still at all active.

[FlamingCobra]

Topic title: A Halo Thread

<snip>

* DarkHunter wonders if the Halo 1 multiplayer is still at all active.

Dunno. I'm 99% sure that StarCraft I's multiplayer is no longer active, but if you have friends you can set up multiplayer via a virtual LAN over Hamachi.

I figure same goes for Halo 1. So....... you'd just have to set something up. Maybe find a Halo: CE pc community and join a chatroom.

[Ghostavo]

StarCraft's multiplayer is still active. Hell, Warcraft II: Battle.net Edition's multiplayer is still active!

[FlamingCobra]

StarCraft's multiplayer is still active. Hell, Warcraft II: Battle.net Edition's multiplayer is still active!

Oh. Well I just assumed that it would be shut down with the release of SCII. I stand corrected.

[BlueFlames]

* DarkHunter wonders if the Halo 1 multiplayer is still at all active.

As recently as last year, there were a few active servers with enough players on during the daylight hours to constitute a good game.  In fact, a clan called BFM had a good set of Team Race servers that I spent quite a lot of time on.  The only real question mark about their servers is the decision to turn on infinite grenades and then prohibit "grenade spam," which seems a little counter-intuitive.  Still, they're well moderated servers, which keeps most of the idiots at bay.  Saturday evenings are obviously the best time to go looking for activity, but after-business-hours during the week aren't bad either.

[MatthTheGeek]

So... um... why did Microsoft/Bungie stop letting there be PC versions of Halo games? Especially Halo Wars, because everybody knows RTS' are always better on PC.

For Halo Wars, there's a simple reason. It was designed from the ground up to be a RTS on console. And it pretty much succeeded : it's basically the best (recent) RTS on console. Which isn't hard given the lack of competition (the few existing being ports of PC games, I think about LOTR).

Halo Wars just wouldn't work on PC. It was never made for that, and it wouldn't be up to the competition.

[FlamingCobra]

So... um... why did Microsoft/Bungie stop letting there be PC versions of Halo games? Especially Halo Wars, because everybody knows RTS' are always better on PC.

For Halo Wars, there's a simple reason. It was designed from the ground up to be a RTS on console. And it pretty much succeeded : it's basically the best (recent) RTS on console. Which isn't hard given the lack of competition (the few existing being ports of PC games, I think about LOTR).

Halo Wars just wouldn't work on PC. It was never made for that, and it wouldn't be up to the competition.

Then why did they kill Halogen?

[MatthTheGeek]

Because it was a competitor, not in term of console RTS, but in term of Halo-themed RTS. Both being the target markets of Halo Wars.

[JGZinv]

Halo CE on PC just had one of the more well known modding teams reassemble to do another campaign overhaul, so I'd imagine it's not in bad shape.

[Klaustrophobia]

* DarkHunter wonders if the Halo 1 multiplayer is still at all active.

As recently as last year, there were a few active servers with enough players on during the daylight hours to constitute a good game.  In fact, a clan called BFM had a good set of Team Race servers that I spent quite a lot of time on.  The only real question mark about their servers is the decision to turn on infinite grenades and then prohibit "grenade spam," which seems a little counter-intuitive.  Still, they're well moderated servers, which keeps most of the idiots at bay.  Saturday evenings are obviously the best time to go looking for activity, but after-business-hours during the week aren't bad either.

i actually fired the old HALO 1 up for old time's sake about a month or so ago.  there's still people playing it.  there's about 3-5 active, full-time servers and a smattering of on and off ones and individual hosts.  the problem is that there isn't much in the way of gameplay left to choose from.  i only found one server that i could enjoy playing on, all the others had assanine rules and power tripping admins, game types i hate (ctf, race with aforementioned assanine rules), or mods, which i REALLY ****ing hate.  i enjoyed it for a few nights, but i think it's time to put it to bed for good now.  there's other stuff that i can play without having to deal with the lag or supreme ****wads found in HALO (i swear, i will NEVER understand why the scum of the earth seem to have all congregated in one ****ing video game)

[T-LoW]

Halo CE on PC just had one of the more well known modding teams reassemble to do another campaign overhaul, so I'd imagine it's not in bad shape.

Where to find?

There is a high-res Mod in the making for CE:

http://douggodfreydesign.com/TextureProjects/?page_id=72

[Davros]

pc gamers, being the glorious master race that they are,

As one who follows the teachings of the Gaming Gods (and Guardian of the "Sacred TeraByte of Gaming Goodness")
I couldnt agree more - Remember


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