Halo 2 Expansion?

Gamespot has coverage of the appearance on an official Korean Xbox site of a "Halo 2 X-Pack". The possible expansion is another possible way for Bungie and Microsoft to get the heavily foreshadowed ending to fans of the series. From the article: "Such a Halo 2 expansion could be a twofold boon for Microsoft, adding another incentive for gamers to join its online service and squeezing further dollars from the nearly 7 million gamers who already have Halo 2."

Halo 2 expansion

[Anonymous Coward]

I have gotten so much enjoyment out of this game since it came out that I'm excited about any plans they have to show me more of this universe. I am also intrigued by rumors that XBOX 360 will allow players to use attributes of a game's sequel in an original game, i.e., double-wielding in the original Halo. That's a brilliant concept that will breathe life into great, old games.

yeah right`

[killercentipedes]

This is bullshit, ill have played H2 and the shortness was the first complaint. You could almost assume this is a ploy of MS. If they get away with expansions for H2 where is it going to stop.

One born every minute.

[TotalFusionOne]

Anyone who reads the "Weekly update" section of Bungie's website knows what's going on here. The game multiplayer aspect of the game has a few bugs in it, and Bungie has been working for months on ways to fix those bugs without totally ruining gameplay. Why not quietly update their buggy product, give you a few new maps and multiplayer modes, and make YOU carry the costs?
Of course this is going to start a whole bunch of people discussing whether Bungie (or MS) should release products that aren't finished, or are "Buggy." And to those folks I say: Sod off. If we were to wait for every game to be absolutely perfect before shipping, we'd still be stuck waiting for our PS2 Viewtiful Joe demo discs!

Re:yeah right`

[altodarknight]

It is the common belief throughout the halo community that the disk will be distrubuted through OXM (official xbox magazine) for free, or for a $5 - 10 disk from retailers. Remember that all the content on the disk will be avaliable free on xbox live. And people could just use the free 2 month xbox live trials to download the content. The above solution is the doing of bungie, as they want to get the content to all halo 2 owners. Although they are owned by Microsoft, the are still a very community oriented game developer.

Re:Halo 2 expansion

[Meagermanx]

Actually, I liked the original Halo more. Dual Wielding didn't come in handy most of the time, because you couldn't throw sticky grenades, the most useful weapon in the game (well, at least in multiplayer ;).
Also, the levels and storyline didn't pack as much of a punch. Remember the night level where you first met the fludd? Remember how you were like "What the hell are those little freaks?!?!" Halo 2 didn't have that moody feel. All it's levels were more focused on tactical combat, and the storyline was just rambling and kind of confusing.
The sword is probably the greatest thing about Halo 2, but I'm not sure it quite makes up for nerfing the pistol.
Of course, I like Diablo more than Diablo 2, so don't listen to me. ;)

Re:YASHA

[rufo]

Don't have many friends, do you? Don't have a Live subscription eh?

Halo 2 will be a constant fixture in my/my friends' Xbox for years to come. At least, until Halo 3 comes out :-) Not for the single player campaign (which was good, but nothing truly remarkable), but for the multiplayer, which is (I do firmly believe) the finest console FPS experience made to date (with the arguable exception of Halo 1).

Lastly, according to Bungie, it's not stated but hinted that the Halo X-Pack disk will have the downloadable content that Live subscribers will get for free. This way if you don't subscribe to Live you won't be left out in the cold. You could also sign up for a free trial or borrow a friend's Live account but this will mean you don't have to.

Re:One born every minute.

[cgenman]

Plese tell me you're joking.

Many games have been pushed out the door unfinished. The Legacy of Kain is a famous example, as somewhere in the middle of development they realized they weren't going to make it and cut out huge chunks of game, including the ending, several levels, powerups, etc. In that case it was painfully obvious that they didn't finish in time, as their game constantly referred to a different number of things to do than you actually had, there were quite a few bugs, empty areas, etc. This was made all the worse by the fact that the game was really really good, and if they had convinced their publisher to give them 6 more months for content generation they could have had a staggeringly, legendarily good game.

Xenogears suffered a similar fate. At the time I was playing it, I felt that it was the best RPG ever made. I still feel that way, almost. It's half of the best RPG ever made. They go into excrutiating detail early on, creating a vast and rich world to really lose yourself in. The gameplay is great, they address all of the issues people talk about hating in standard RPG's... It's truly great. Then, about 50 hours in, they switch to "diarama - o - vision." A static picture appears on the screen, and text scrolls by. For about 10 hours. Occasionally this is broken up by largely unfinished gameplay sequences. I swear, this is the only game I've played on a console that had multiple save points within a single flow of text. It went from the greatest RPG ever made to the worst in the span of one cinematic. Eventually it regains its footing and actually finishes like it started, and the ending is great and satisfying despite some laughably bad voice acting. But by that point the experience is totally ruined.

As a less extreme example, the new KOTOR had an ending that just fell completely flat. It wasn't a content pull like in Legacy of Kane, it wasn't a stick-to-the-eye like Xenogears. It was just a rush job, with a much better and more satisfying ending being yanked for time, replaced by something half-arsed and roundly disappointing.

Unfinished games suck. They suck the enjoyment out of a title and they suck out the potential. In the example of Xenogears, it was pretty clear they just had bitten off something that was far, far too big for any reasonable budget of the time. Any publisher would have done the same, though any publisher should have pushed them to work on the important points of the plot first and shaped the degree of detail in the world that could be achieved realistically.

But Halo 2? We're talking about a guarenteed million seller here. Any publisher would have ponied up the extra 6 months for that, as a good reception for Halo 2 would guarentee another insane sales bonanza for Halo 3. The bloody thing made 200 million in presales. But Microsoft isn't any publisher: Microsoft is a publisher with a system to sell. If Microsoft is really dumping the Xbox for the Ybox this upcoming Christmas, they have a major problem on their hands if their in-house publisher releases a system-selling game for the wrong system. Hence, buggy, unbalanced, or even unfinished, they had to get it out the door. Which is a crying shame really, and will really hurt their Halo 3 sales. The moment they realized that Halo 2 was going to ship either late or unfinished, they should have switched the bungee people over to XBox 2 development right away, and had them work on porting what they had done and finishing what they hadn't done. It would have sold a lot more systems than Halo 3 is now capable of.

Don't be so impatient. No publisher or game development company wants to wait until absolutely every little detail is perfect before putting something in a box, but it should least bloody well be finished. Given the choice between a bad experience now and a perfect experience in 6 months, go with the perfect experience. With so many great games out anything less isn't worth your time.

Re:One born every minute.

[hunterx11]

the multiplayer aspect of the game was completely fine at launch

I would agree that despite the bugs, it was fun and playable, but to make an unqualified statement of that nature is simply untrue. Dummying, no grenade hopping off host, broken teleporters, flag bouncing, sword flying (two kinds), inconsistent elevator physics, reload animations that don't always trigger, being able to jump hundreds of feet into the air, and being able to grab flags through walls are all problems. Now, they aren't all as much of a big deal as people make them out to be, but to say that something is completely fine (emphasis yours) in spite of all these things is not true. Halo 2 would be perfectly acceptable for a PC game, but it isn't They only had one pretty homogenous platform to target (and it manages even to perform inconsistently there).

Maybe you think that I am holding them to too high a standard (though I doubt it). However, I think a pretty reasonable standard would be Halo 1. After all, Halo 2 wasn't written from scratch, it was based on Halo 1 which was already finished. I found more bugs in the first month of Halo 2 than in the first year of Halo 1. I really do love Halo 2, but that doesn't blind me to the fact that Bungie has really not met up to their previous standards of quality. I hope that the bugfix will ameliorate this, and if so I'll be perfectly contented.

Call me a purist . . .

[Red_Icculus]

I own a copy of Halo 2, but I would rather play DOOM any day. Let me explain. The Halo series has pretty graphics, but the game speed is so slow. I became horribly bored at how slow everything crawled compared my FPS of choice on a 200 mhz pentium system. The first person shooter has been re-hashed so many times. Multiplayer was a great innovation, but let's see something new more novel gameplay that performs as well as their FPS predecessors. I think the gaming companies are just seeing how much more they can squeeze from the money tree with variations on a theme. In the mean time, I am going to stick to my copy of DOOM.

Re:Call me a purist . . .

[drxray]

I'd say the slowness WAS the novelty of Halo. It made it accessible to console players and non-FPS gamers (while putting off experienced players). The vehicles were also nice - you can't play VCTF in Doom...

Re:One born every minute.

[TotalFusionOne]

I completely agree. Also, if you remember correctly, when the game was launched the matchmaking system would take up to five minutes to decide who should play with who. It took very quick thinking on Bungies part to get that resolved in less than a week. Which brings me back to my original point: Halo 2 was released with acceptable flaws. It wasn't as buggy as, say, Dakatana when released, but it wasn't released perfect either. And as gamers we should be graceful enough to accept flaws without crying "Foul!"

And everyone who runs out and buys it...

[Winterblink]

... just further affirms to the game industry that it's totally ok to half-ass the ending to a game so it can be shuffled out the door early. Don't help them set the precedence that they can make more money by selling the finishing touches later that should have been included in the first place.