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First Person Shooters (Games) XBox (Games) Entertainment Games

Halo 2 Release Date Slips? 60

Posted by simoniker from the now-slightly-askew dept.
George Bailey writes "Forbes.com/Reuters has posted an interview with Microsoft's Chief Xbox Officer Robbie Bach, who provided some vague hints in regards to the launch of flagship Xbox FPS sequel, Halo 2. In his own words: 'We're going to ship it when it's ready...That might be the first half of 2004, it might not. You have to be careful with franchises like this.' The current projected release date is, or was, April 1st 2004, according to game retailers." Update: 01/11 07:46 GMT by S : Several commenters point out that 'slipped' is in the eye of the beholder: "What I get from Mr. Bach is that they don't have a firm release date at all - hell, they've probably never had one at all - and they're avoiding a firm commitment to consumers on the issue."
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Halo 2 Release Date Slips? More

Halo 2 Release Date Slips?

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  • Bah, they should've just kept the April 1st date (Score:5, Funny)

    by Rayonic ( 462789 ) on Sunday January 11, 2004 @02:21AM (#7943206) Homepage Journal
    And yelled out "April Fools!" to all the people trying to pick it up that day. I'm sure everyone would get a kick out of it.
  • Last I heard was in this months new Electronic Gaming Monthy, and they'd heard that the release date had been pushed back until late (Christmas period) December of 04. April sounds a little sketchy.

  • Re: when it's ready (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Quixotic Raindrop ( 443129 ) on Sunday January 11, 2004 @02:25AM (#7943224) Journal
    As much as I hate Bungie (well, Alex Seropian and Jason Jones) for selling out, they have always released their software when they were ready. I am assuming that Bungie is still doing Halo, of course ... but with Marathon, they tried releasing it before it was ready (when it was still just Pathways into Darkness II), and it got slammed at MacWorld. I think they learned their lesson. I'm glad to see that some of Bungie's ass-kick-ness is still left.

    • Re: when it's ready (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      As much as I hate Bungie (well, Alex Seropian and Jason Jones) for selling out, they have always released their software when they were ready.

      How were they selling out? Because they made a game for the Xbox and tha went on to sell over 3 million copies in the US alone? Geez... why be a lil troll about it because you are one of those people that think that PC games are actually profitable.

      Game developers these days are getting smart, and smart enough to realize that PC gaming is a dead end and the money

      • How were they selling out?

        Actually, I think it's possible he was referring to the fact that Bungie literally sold out to Microsoft - you know, like, they were for sale and were subsequently purchased?

      • Re: when it's ready (Score:5, Informative)

        by Quixotic Raindrop ( 443129 ) on Sunday January 11, 2004 @03:25AM (#7943395) Journal
        Maybe you're not familar with the history of Bungie. Let me 'splain it to you.

        Bungie software was formed in 1991 by Alex Seropian. Late in 1991, Alex hooked up with Jason Jones, who was apparently a Comp Sci major at U Chicago, a classmate of Alex's. Alex convinced Jason to come on board Bungie, and from the mouths of these babes (and a host of others) came Pathways into Darkness, Marathon, Marathon 2:Durandal, and Marathon Infinity. Myth was released in 1997, and Myth II in 1999. Bungie software was making money making games for both the Macintosh and Windows platforms, simultaneously releasing on both platforms.

        Apparently, it wasn't enough to make the greatest games. Halo was announced, previewed (by Steve Jobs, no less) at MacWorld, and was going to be a simultaneous release for Macintosh and Windows, as both Myth and Myth II had. That was enough for the Borg Collective's Hive Mind, Bill Gates.

        Microsoft enticed Bungie with stories of untold riches, and by all accounts has delivered. The simultaneous release of Halo, announced at MacWorld, became the slave's response of "we were just kidding. We may never deliver Halo for the Mac or the PC" ... which, eventually, was handeled by outsiders. Three years later.

        So, I ask you: how is that not selling out? Bungie Software was making great games (and still is making a great game, by all accounts), and making more money than anyone in Bungie had ever dreamed of. Making enough money to buy themselves new cars, give away computers at trade shows, living what amounts to the pre-IPO/dotcom startup dream. Then, with one whiff of freshly-minted greenbacks, turned their backs on the very customers who had paid all that money for their success.

        That, my fellow slashdotter, is how they sold out.

        • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

          by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
          Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Re: when it's ready (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward
          I would like to point out that Bungie had *always* said that Halo would come out for Mac/PC.

          I still think it's rather inexcusable that they didn't release it sooner, but my feeling is that MS pressured them into doing this, as Halo was one of the top X-Box games.

          Also, by some people's accounts (no official ones, but then there are no official accounts on this that I'm aware of), Bungie was in serious financial trouble. With Oni being constantly delayed and looking more and more dissapointing, and similar

          • Re: when it's ready (Score:2, Insightful)

            by edwdig ( 47888 )
            Microsoft came to Bungie with a bucket of money and said "We'll give you this if you become one of our studios and make Halo an X-Box game." It doesn't seem unreasonable to me, and doesn't really seem to violate any principles that I'm aware of.

            Most of Microsoft's money comes from illegal abuse of monopoly powers. See the recent anti-trust trial and the 1995 consent decree. Read the details of the consent decree - that's why Windows is around today. If Microsoft didn't do those things, then mentioning Win
            • "Selling out" is a term I'm more accustomed hearing from the arena of music, strangely you never hear about it from movie productions. Regardless, it's a silly and immature term coined by people who are lost in the past or determined to demonstrate their superiority over other people because they "knew about something first" or some such bullshit. After all folks let's face it, we live in a consumer society so in essence we are all sell outs. You like that car of yours? Great you're a sell out! Did you

        • Re: when it's ready (Score:5, Insightful)

          by TwistedSquare ( 650445 ) on Sunday January 11, 2004 @09:51AM (#7944341) Homepage
          I, personally, don't blame them. Bungie are a lot more famous now than before joining with Microsoft, and Halo became pretty much the killer app for the X-Box. It's like having a go at a football player for signing for a team in a higher division who will pay more - loyal followers will be angry but that player wouldn't have wanted to miss the opportunity.
          • Are they? Do you think there are kids who have gone out and dug up Minotaur for the Mac just because they think Bungie is the bomb?

            I work for a university. Trust me: the kids who play Halo have no clue who developed it. Some of them don't even know that MS makes the Xbox... which then begs the question: how the hell did they get into college? But, I digress...

        • That's not 'selling out.' That's 'making a sound business decision.'

      • Because they made a game for the Xbox and tha went on to sell over 3 million copies in the US alone?

        Try worldwide, not just in the US. The biggest percentile of those copies are in the US/Canada, yes, but the rest of the world has also bought quite a few copies (or got them bundled for free ala Australia).

      • It's not a question of whether PC games are profitable. It is a question of Bungie keeping its identity within a larger entity - which it clearly hasn't (though it's clear they still can't ship on time). Blizzard, for example, has done a damn fine job of keeping its identity within the Vivendi family. Rockstar has a very clear identity in Take-Two. If Bungie had gone to one of those folks, it wouldn't be a case of "selling out" because they would have kept much of the old Bungie. But, when MS absorbed
    • > with Marathon, they tried releasing it
      > before it was ready (when it was still
      > just Pathways into Darkness II)

      In this event you mention, they have not tried releasing Marathon before it was done, they just showed an early version at a Macworld and, yes, that got slammed because it was "just another PiD". The "Marathon Trilogy Box Set" has that and other pre-release versions - some of them were so bad, you needed Macsbug!

      Much later, they indeed had to delay the game a few months because they lo
  • While Gamestop [gamestop.com] and EB [ebgames.com] both list the tentative release data of April 1st, Amazon [amazon.com] lists April 18th as the day the Master Chef returns. Maybe Amazon knows something? Nah... that'll be the day...
  • MS are going to have this game launch around the same time as Doom III and half-life2 just so people think of it in the same category.

    Though I have to admit I tried original Halo on the PC and was terribly disappointed. I think xbox owners are wowed by it cause they don't have much to compare to on that platform. As much as I am pro-PS2, first person shooters belong on a mouse on a PC.
    • Though I have to admit I tried original Halo on the PC and was terribly disappointed. I think xbox owners are wowed by it cause they don't have much to compare to on that platform.

      I have Halo on the XBox, and I was wowed by it. Like you said, I haven't found much to compare it to on that platform - I tried several other first person shooters for the XBox, and they all paled in comparison to Halo. These included Medal of Honor, Brute Force, and Unreal Championship, plus some others that I tried only brie

      • Re:This is a MS strategy (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Well, do you want graphics or gameplay/story?

        Tribes 2 has a lot of the elements Halo has(vehicles, weaponry). It tanked tho, so not too many people play it.

        Half-Life was truly groundbreaking in how they pieced together everything and made so many improvements over past attempts at similar things.

        Team Fortress Classic is great, so is Counterstrike(Multi-player).

        System Shock 2 is a classic, similar reasons as to half-life.

        Deus-Ex is fantastically complex, wonderfully immersive and just all around great(

    • Though I have to admit I tried original Halo on the PC and was terribly disappointed. I think xbox owners are wowed by it cause they don't have much to compare to on that platform. As much as I am pro-PS2, first person shooters belong on a mouse on a PC.

      I bought an X-Box for Project Gotham Racing. I also got DOA 3 because I like DOA 2 on Dreamcast (too bad it was the same game with better graphics). Anyway, like you, I felt that FPS games belonged with a keyboard/mouse and held off on buying Halo becaus

  • As usual: RTFA (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Babbster ( 107076 ) <aaronbabb@NOspaM.gmail.com> on Sunday January 11, 2004 @02:37AM (#7943267) Homepage
    The projected release date for Halo 2, according to this article, has NOT slipped. What I get from Mr. Bach is that they don't have a firm release date at all - hell, they've probably never had one at all - and they're avoiding a firm commitment to consumers on the issue.

    The dates quoted by retailers further than a month in advance are tentative, and they've been so for a long, LONG time (which is part of the reason it's news when a game "goes gold"). I can still recall my "favorite" waiting period back when Microprose kept promising Gunship 2000. The Software, Etc. I frequented at the time had it on the "maybe next month" list for an exceedingly long period of time (at least a year).

    • Usually when I see a release date that's the 1st day of a quarter I assume it won't be out then. All that means is either the developer mentioned a quarter at some point, or somebody speculated a quarter for them.

  • April 1st huh? (Score:2, Funny)

    by exick ( 513823 )
    Yeah, I heard that was the release date for DNF too. And it's also the day that Infinium's Phantom service goes live. Wow, what a big day for gamers.

  • Really, no firm date? No surprise. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Inoshiro ( 71693 ) on Sunday January 11, 2004 @03:01AM (#7943342) Homepage
    Last year, if you walked into an EB and grabbed their new release binder, you'd find they had release dates for Duke Nukem Forever and Team Fortress 2.

    This was around the time when they had a release date of June 6th, 2003 for Halo 2.

    After a couple of months passed, the dates for DNF and TF2 were deleted (they had probably sat at June 6th, 2003 for a looong time), and Halo 2 was moved to April 1st, 2004. Fable used to be listed as January 16th, 2004 -- it's not coming out anytime soon, either.

    Unfortunately for the gaming public, EB doesn't have any way to signal that they don't have a relatively firm release date for an item. The closest they get is when they have a release date with a 0$ price on it. Anything else could be firm in stone, or entirely hypothetical -- it's just there to generate preorders so thay have an idea of what the demand for the game is going to be, and thus how to ship things. After all, EB's entire profit structure is based around carrying the minimum number of each title in order to maximize the number of different titles they can carry (thus beating the crap out of Wal*Mart for selection).
    • EB's profit structure is based around selling pre-owned games.

      The selection for new releases hardly makes them $$, and the console sales actually break nearly even. They make a killing on people trading in a random game for 5 bucks and then later selling that same game for 30.

      People still haven't figured out that EB does nothing to the games, they just put them back in cases. You get a much better deal going on eBay than you do at EB.

      • Yea, true as well. (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Inoshiro ( 71693 )
        The only major difference aside from the price on eBay vs. EB is that EB will take back any used game that doesn't work. The policy is pretty flexible because (as you know) they don't really do anything to the games beyond slapping on a price tag.

        This does ignore some of the other sides of the equation, though. I tried to sell my Steel Battalion on eBay and got a non-paying high bidder who stalled me long enough that the next highest bidder wasn't interested anymore. eBay still charged me 20$ for sellin
  • OMGA! They changed the release date, someone call the Anonymous Leaker! lol I kid, I kid.

    - shazow
  • Bungie has always had a release policy of "when it's done, it's done", even back in the old Marthon (original) days. A sideways comment like "may or may not be released ..." is not atypical for Bungie, either. (They have announced suspected release times before then pushed it back, especially with Marathon 2.)

    I don't know about the BorgBungie, but pre-X-Box days the Bungie fellows were always pragmatic and forward about this. It looks like their view of taking their time, at least, has not changed.

    Cyan
    • I think of Blizzard more than I think of Bungie ot Cyan when I think of "when it's done, it's done." They just pushed back World of Warcraft's BETA, because they didn't even consider it ready to test. And they have cancelled a game, WarCraft Adventures....ah, that was for the best. But seriously, their games are often delayed far more than Halo 2 has been. But it's worth it. Of course, they don't have publishers breathing down their neck. When you start a Blizzard game, you see just one company logo on star

  • What ! Me Hurry ? Ha ha (Score:3, Interesting)

    by leoaugust ( 665240 ) <leoaugust AT gmail DOT com> on Sunday January 11, 2004 @04:29AM (#7943566) Journal
    He also said it was unlikely Microsoft would make any major hardware upgrades to the Xbox before the current business cycle ends, as Sony has done with PS2.

    Slightly on a Tangent to the Main Topic, but whatever happened to the notion of companies being Agile and Business being a dogfight ? The bottomline is that MS has never been in a hurry. And the point is - do you want to bet money against that paradigm.

    Some juicy quotes from Steve Ballmer in April 2003 [com.com]

    1. Remember, we brought Windows 1 out in 1983 and we didn't have any real volume until 1991. It took us eight years to get volume. I don't know when we got profit, but it took us eight years to get volume.
    2. Take Windows server. We started on it in 1988, but it was probably 1998 before we had real volume, and I don't know when we would have said we had profitability on that product.
    3. I feel very good that we have great teams to take MSN and Xbox in exactly those same directions.

    "They do their tuning with hardware, we do our tuning with software," he said.


    Tuning could be replaced with extortion and the sentence would probably be more true. But what I think MS is missing that few people are expecting and clamoring for FREE hardware (FreePC experiment notwithstanding) but many people are clamoring for FREE software. And the RIAA has helped ingrain that paying for digital bits is putting the money in the wrong pockets. So I think the leverage that MS expects from software is overestimated.
    Maybe it is time to turn the ship like they did in 1995.

  • I should go check if Gravy Trader is out yet.
  • Here's the Halo 2 Documentary [xbox.com] (warning, requires WMP 9). Go 2:05 into the movie, and they'll show you a cinematic of a UNSC marine hugging a Covenant Elite. WTF? The marines are supposed to be killing the Covenant, not hugging them... sigh.

    • I take it that you never completed the original Halo on "Legendary" level, because if you had, you would have already seen a marine hugging an Elite.

      It actually made some sense in context, and was funny, in a way.
      • I heard about that cinematic shortly after playing through on Heroic (I never bothered with Easy or Normal, just went straight to the good stuff) and beating the game. I had to see it, so I beat the whole thing again on Legendary, and by the end, I didn't really care about the cinematic anymore because I was too busy concentrating on beating it - the game has great replay value. The cinematic was still pretty damn cool, though.
  • Considering the amount of highly awaited games currently being listed as having an April 1st release date, I get the impression that the entire videogame industry is preparing an April fool's joke of monumental proportions...

    As for Halo, it's important to remember that Halo 1 was rushed so that it could be ready for the Xbox's launch, and ended up being a poorer game because of it. They're definitely doing the right thing by taking their time with the sequel.
  • i heard a little about that phantom thing.. isnt it that new system that is gonna be like on demand tv? I remember reading somethin like that in a magazine where u buy 7 games and then u exchange them every month for a small fee... if anyone has more information about it can u post the link.
  • ...I worked there last Thursday and the release date in our system had been chagned from 'April' to 'June.'

    I really don't expect it until xmas '04, and haven't since early last year. This whole 'don't set a concrete release date, then push it back every few months' really reeks of a scheme to get more pre-sales for retailers.

    My $0.02
  • MS is probably trying to save their best card to counterstrike the PSP launch. After all, they can afford it. Anyway they are pretty much covered with triple A titles for the rest of the year (or at least the most important dates).

    Ninja Gaiden/DOA online (march/april/summer(?))
    Doom 3 (october/november/Halloween)
    Halo 2 (December)

    So yes, I would expect Halo 2 to be released until december, cry, laugh, cringe about it, then accept it, it is the best time for the title to ship.

    p.s.
    IMO theres as much chance o

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