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

Halo 2 Confirmed For Fall 2004 84

Posted by simoniker from the cruel-release-gods-taunt-me dept.
Jeremy Parish writes "Bungie has finally announced that Halo 2 will ship this Fall for Xbox, as relayed via 1UP. But to make up for this semi-distant release date, they've released the first Halo 2 multiplayer screen!" Over at Halo.bungie.org, they point out a Bungie development update noting the new screenshot is "...entirely representative of the lighting, polygon counts, bump-mapping and particle effects", and also refer to the original Bungie.net announcement, clarifying: "A number of people have been confused by the title of this news item. The game is NOT named 'Halo 2: In Reach of Fall'. This is just a reference to the title of novel The Fall of Reach.)"
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Halo 2 Confirmed For Fall 2004 More

Halo 2 Confirmed For Fall 2004

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  • It looks just like Halo 1!

  • half-truths (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Frac ( 27516 ) on Friday January 30, 2004 @03:47PM (#8138438)
    entirely representative of the lighting, polygon counts, bump-mapping and particle effects

    Certainly not representative of screen resolution though, unless the xbox can display 1600x1200 on any TV.

    • Re:half-truths (Score:5, Informative)

      by simoniker ( 40 ) * <simoniker&slashdot,org> on Friday January 30, 2004 @03:55PM (#8138503) Homepage Journal
      To be fair, Frank O'Connor did say, in the larger development update:

      "The resolution is a little sharper thanks to the way screens are dumped from the frame buffer."

      There just wasn't room to include that fact in the above Slashdot under-150-words synopsis.
      • And is that method simply: dump from framebuffer to file, import into Photoshop, scale to 3200x2400, and then reduce back to 1600x1200 with some antialiasing filter?

        --Jeremy

        • Re:half-truths (Score:3, Informative)

          by Phil Wilkins ( 5921 ) *
          Not necessarily. It's almost certainly rendered on the XBox, just not output on the display hardware. We do a similar thing for our PS2 game. One method is to render multiple viewports (either as tiles, or by pixel-fraction offset) of the scene, and then stitch them back together as a post-process.

          It's still a reasonable indicator of the lighting, effects, and the detail in the models. Just not what you'd actually see during gameplay. However if you don't do this, then you get a million fanboys crying abou
      • Their target framebuffer is most surely not larger than 480 pixels high. If they are reaching for full HDTV support, it _might_ be 720, but it's not likely.

        Thus, the image is lying. It's not a framebuffer dump.

        (To those who want to say something about 1080i here, note the 'i' .. )
    • > unless the xbox can display 1600x1200 on any TV.

      Doesn't really mean much, since it is in fact a "live" render. It's not like they set up that scene in blender and set the renderer lose on it for a few hours.

      That image was created in real time, all those effects do in fact exist. The final resolution of the image is a bit of a non-issue.

  • Oh man! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 30, 2004 @03:52PM (#8138487)
    Damn those Red and Blue guys! They're at it again!

    When will they ever learn?

  • Hmmm (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It doesn't look any different from the first one. Will it have more than a handful of multiplayer levels? Will I be able to make my own mods with the engine? (for the PC version obviously) Is it going to be as damn repetitive as the first one?

  • Its going to get pushed back, you know it. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Cap-America ( 689943 ) on Friday January 30, 2004 @04:08PM (#8138591) Homepage
    I'm sorry but I have a bad feeling that the game is going to get pushed back again. It always does, we get closes to the release date then bam, pushed back another 4 months.


    On another note, I'm really not to impress by the screen shots It does look a lot like Halo 1. The big deal with Halo 2 for me was Xbox Live. But now with Halo for PC I'm finding myself careing less and less about Halo 2. I have everything I wanted for Halo on my PC and I don't have to pay for Xbox Live.


    Whats the point of Halo 2 now that we ahve the PC version?

    • Halo had a great single player in most every department, the major exception being indoor level design and "now go through the whole area BACKWARDS!"

      Tim

      • Re:Single Player (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        yeah, god forbid the game display some consistancy with the storyline.

        Sure, they reused the maps, but they balanced the areas and encounters entirely differently. Was that 1/3 of the game less fun because you'd fought around that same hill, tree, and patch of ice a few hours earlier? Or is it ok to admit that so long as the game played differently when you moved through that same area again, it wasn't quite as bad as everyone would like to make it out to be. Or did you have absolutely no fun flying arou
        • To me it seemed contrived that the power generators were all located just above my previous path, disturbing my suspension of disbelief. The return to the Pillar of Autumn, however, was very cool even though it featured somewhat similar reuse.

          The excellent gameplay mechanics persisted in the repetitive and indoor Halo areas, however - my only qualm with the gameplay was that on Legendary I sometimes noticed places where enemies would appear as if out of thin air (usually behind a door or something like tha
      • Call of Duty is guilty of that in two levels. I'm letting them off easy, because they are "shoot your way in and out" missions. But it *is* a short game, even without reusing maps to stretch gametime.
    • I don't see how you can want Halo PC over Halo 2. Halo PC is such a horrible port, and it came from a studio that had a pretty good name (Gearbox). Halo PC's net code is horrible -- I get lag and I'm running a P4 3.0c w/ a Radeon 9800 Pro.

      Halo 2 will def. bring a lot to the table not just Xbox live support. Dual weapons, having the computer driving warthogs and other vehicles, being able to hijack vehicles. If Halo PC actually had been done right then I might agree with what you're saying, but the horri
      • Wake up genius! Your chip and graphics card have no bearing on the lag you receive when playing online!
        • Wake up genius! Your chip and graphics card have no bearing on the lag you receive when playing online!

          Perhaps, "Genius", he provided that information to eliminate them as factors in the lag, supporting his notion that it was the network code that was at fault.

          • Do you have any idea how inaccurate that assessment would be? Quick lesson:

            Lag is generated by the delay in recieving packets from the server updating the client on the progress of the game. One of the main reasons FPSs are so easily made mutliplayer is because there is very little data (in terms of size) that needs to be transmitted because you just have to transmit player locations and actions, everything else is usually client side. All the net code is reponsible for is tracking down servers, listeni
            • Sorry, but you're wrong. For an extreme example, look at Multi Theft Auto, the unofficial multiplayer mod for GTA. On DSL, dual Athlon, and a Radeon 9700 PRO, there is still tremendous lag (and this is with everyone involved having a Obviously, since Halo's multiplayer isn't a hacked add-on (at least not in this sense), the same specific issues don't apply. But the fact remains that netcode can have a very real impact on a game's multiplayer performance. Unless, of course, you want to be anal and define net
              • What the hell are you smoking? You outright admitted that MTA is an "unofficial" mod for GTA. Do you honestly believe that they can do a mod to match a release by the developers of the game? Aside from that, there is a thousand and one other things involved in that process which can drag a game down.

                Furthermore, the net code in a mod like MTA is a whole helluva lot more complex, since it's not integrated into the games engine.

                Do you have any idea at all how a game works, on the code level? I'm not goi
                • You outright admitted that MTA is an "unofficial" mod for GTA. Do you honestly believe that they can do a mod to match a release by the developers of the game?

                  Of course not. I don't expect it. I'm not complaining about the lag in MTA. I know that there are other reasons why MTA is slow, but when everything you do locally updates instantly, and other players moving around take upwards of a second to update, that does indicate the netcode is at fault.

                  Furthermore, the net code in a mod like MTA is a whole he

              • Wait a second, I see a problem. Do you realize that the OS takes care of a lot of the hard work? Developers don't program in a whole new TCP/IP stack into a game, they use the OS to do all the hard work.
        • Actually you're only sort of correct. There are three components to lag:

          1) Network speed (ie, literally how long does it take the packet to go from player A to player B--or in the case of client/server, from player A to server and server to player B)
          2) Network processing time (ie, how long does the networkling layer of code play with the packet, wait for other packets with complete information and convert the packet into useful game material)
          3) Rendering time (the packet is now entirely in-game informtion,
          • Actually that depends on how you look at the situation.

            A) The graphics card has NOTHING to do with the whole situation. It's constantly rendering graphics, and that never changes, about the only way you can fit it into the picture is you play with graphic settings set beyond what it's capable of handling, and then you always recieve lag even in SP games.

            B) I'll grant you that the CPU does have a certain amount of influence, however, any CPU capable of running a game like Quake 3 or any of the recent FPSs
      • Halo runs great on my PC, and I have a AMD XP 2600+ with a 128MB GeForce 3 and 640MB of RAM. and I've also never had any Lag playing Online or Network games.
      • Mmm, yes. Halo PC was pretty bad.

        But I liked it more than the X-Box version, at least.

        Blech.
    • "I'm sorry but I have a bad feeling that the game is going to get pushed back again. It always does, we get closes to the release date then bam, pushed back another 4 months."

      Where have you been? This is the delay. Originally, it was going to be out last Christmas. On the main page at halo.bungie.net is this choice quote:

      "So remember last year when we told you we don't announce release dates until we're confident well meet our deadline? Well now were confident. Halo 2 will ship in Fall, 2004. Pleas
    • I have everything I wanted for Halo on my PC and I don't have to pay for Xbox Live.

      I wonder why they don't just release Halo 2 directly to the PC at the same time as they release it on the Xbox. Oh right, nobody would buy it for the Xbox.

      • I wonder why they don't just release Halo 2 directly to the PC at the same time as they release it on the Xbox. Oh right, nobody would buy it for the Xbox.

        No, thats called 'shovelware' and no one would buy it because the console version would run better than a computer, would be filled with bugs, and lack cool features like the ability to crank up the resolution up to 1600*1200 with a bunch of fancy graphic effects. As well as have crappy net code because the Xbox version would be made for broadband player

        • Just buy a Xbox and quit shunning it just because the Xbox is owned by Microsoft. Helloooo Bungie is owned by Microsoft too.
        • "Shovelware" means you have a physical medium with software on it, and you have some free space, so you throw some more software on it (usually various demos for your other products, or your partners' products) to make it look impressive. It's just try before you buy, like those SGI software samplers back in the day. Usually one or two of the included demo versions will be useful, and the rest of it is time-limited software, which is overpriced or crappy anyway.

          It's 100% true that if Halo 2 PC and Halo 2

    • You can't really expect it to look that much different from Halo 1.

      The original Halo pushed the Xbox's hardware pretty far. A sequel can't go much further.

      Unlike Doom3 and HL2 which scale down to lesser PC's an Xbox, while like a PC is stuck with 3 year old hardware.

      So now that people see what is possible with DX9 OGL2 hardware what would've been awesome 2 years ago is, feh.
      • Being a game programmer, and more specifically, having worked on the XBox, I have to say you are wrong. Halo 1 did not push the XBox hardware that much, the machine has a LOT more power in it. And as a game developer, sure I can do things on the PC that I can't do on any of the consoles, but I effectively have to write the game twice, once for the low end PCs, and again for the higher end hardware. Either that, or I have to cut out the lowed end PC market, at which point its probably no longer worth it.
  • feh, I was hoping to see how good it looks splitscreen...a tougher challenge in many ways.

  • Nine month slippage? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by *weasel ( 174362 ) on Friday January 30, 2004 @04:46PM (#8139001)
    This is starting to feel an awful lot like Crimson Skies. Hoopla, playtesting, major rework, Hoopla, playtesting, major rework.

    At least you know Bungie's not just rushing out anything wrapped in the Halo logo to capitalize on the buzz. And they're not blaming it on some half-baked code-leak or anything. (Really, what would Valve have to recode due the leak? the network encryption? That shouldn't take 6 months...)

    Well, Crimson Skies turned out to be a damn fun game. So if they're holding Halo2 back to similarly refine the gameplay experience, good on em - I'd rather wait than have a glorified expansion sully the franchise.

    I'm just hoping the (xbl) multiplayer is up to snuff, and they hit that 24/server xbl target.
    • A few months ago I upgraded my DSL service to 256k up. Solely to allow me to host bigger Xbox Live games.

      256k may not be great, but it's a lot better than 128. It's even broaderband.

      Occasionally I take my Xbox to work (around Christmas) and I love to host 16 player Crimson Skies games there. Things chug along great.

      I would be happy with an 8 person game- but hopefully we will be able to do more.

  • Translation (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 30, 2004 @04:55PM (#8139110)
    "...entirely representative of the lighting, polygon counts, bump-mapping and particle effects"

    That statement screams "doctored picture". And on closer inspection there are a lot of things that don't make sense about that image:

    (1) This is not a 1st person perspective picture. It's not representative of a 1st person shooter. The viewpoint is too low and there's no HUD. You will never see screens like this when you own the game.
    (2) It's a bit too well composed. Almost like they paused the game, then moved the camera around to try and get the best picture. Or used photoshop.
    (3) The blue player on the left appears to be shooting at the blue player on the right (with the shield effect). This is indicative of clueless compositing, unless all the players were completely incompetent.
    (4) Note the faint motion blur on the ejected machinegun shell that's rotating in mid-air. Um.. motion blur? This suggests badly repaired interlaced video capture, not direct digital framebuffer capture.
    (5) Odd stairstepping in places. Check out the antenna on the rear of the car. Why is it so blocky? Also look at the edge of the canyon wall on the right side of the picture - it's clear this image has been resampled. And resampled up - not down. This is most odd.

    This picture definitely has some fishy elements to it - motion-blur and antialiasing at 1600x1200 not withstanding. The very early trailer video [bungie.net] they released of Halo2 Xbox (which I believe was in-game since all the movies in the 1st game were) was basicly 640x480 with no antialiasing.

    • Re:Translation (Score:3, Insightful)

      by fowlerserpent ( 690409 )
      the blue player on the left is not shooting at the blue player on the right. The blue player on the right is being shot by the red player on the right. Notice that the red player and the blue player are pointed at each other firing their weapons, thats how you can tell.

      The weird blocky effect on the antenna is a result of the antenna "wobbling." Perhaps you'll recall the antenna on the scorpion tank in the original halo. It flopped back and forth. The antenna is apparently not supposed to be a stiff metal
    • 1. It could be a 1st person perspective. We just don't have enough information. Bungie could've simply disabled the HUD and had the picture taker have no weapons at the time. Simple as that. Considering its a shot taken by the developers, disabling the HUD is very very simple (they also had it disabled during the E3 gameplay screening).

      2. 'Well composed' pictures are always used for media purposely. When you publicise a game, do you show the screenshot of the player crawling through a vent slowly, or do yo

    • Re:Translation (Score:2, Insightful)

      by cabra771 ( 197990 )
      This is not a 1st person perspective picture. It's not representative of a 1st person shooter. The viewpoint is too low and there's no HUD. You will never see screens like this when you own the game.
      FYI, Bungie has built in camera settings to their engine to stop any kind of action, move the camera where they want and take a snapshot. This really isn't all that new. Think of it similar to Quake 3 when playing online and being able to "fly" around the map when your not playing and watching the other player

  • Halo 2 and production values (Score:4, Interesting)

    by MBraynard ( 653724 ) on Friday January 30, 2004 @05:27PM (#8139403) Journal
    In determining the quality of Halo 2, Exhibit A is the original Halo. However, just playing the game for most people can only give a partial picture about the production values of the game.

    The official Xbox magazine has a demo disc and, for several months, this featured a series of discussions with the Bungie development team discussing in detail various aspects of what they went through in making Halo, giving a far greater appreciation for there work and revealig production values that I had not noticed, despite beating the game on highest difficulty.

    They go into great detail about things I never would have noticed - like the way a wall and floor looks with the player's headlight turned on versus off and how ther are three layers of passthrough transparency.

    I'm not sure how long we are going to have to wait, but the example Bungie set with Halo makes me anticipate another 'game of the year.'

  • Bungie never announced a release date for Halo 2 up until today, so nothing's been "pushed back" or "delayed." Still... FALL!? I recognize how much of the H2 demo played by the Bungie guys was scripted and limited in scope, but it was still an example of where the engine was.

    The screenshot released today shows that they have functional multiplayer now, too. Beta testing should take a few months, but it seems to me that Halo 2 is clearly past the alpha stage at this point.

    So why 8-10 months more? Even IF t
  • One word comes to mind when I look at this image that makes other people go apeshit and that word is "plastic."
  • I played the original HALO on my 65 inch HDTV set two years ago and was blown away; it was fantastic! Just for shits and giggles I disconnected the "HD" part and played the game in regular res. Boy did it blow. I just wish there was a keyboard/mouse adapter for the Xbox. I hate having to wait two years to play the game the way it really was meant to play (that is until Bungie was bought and what began as a computer game became "optimized" for the xbox.)
  • I loved Halo 1 when I played it on X-Box... it was great. But that was only because i played it for a VERY limited time (20 minutes or so). Two years later, I was still basking in the warm fuzzy glow of Halo goodness, and found myself snatching up the long-awaited PC version. PROBLEM: I realized that once the novelty of Halo wears off, and after you watch all the Red vs. Blue, Halo is just a standard FPS... Quake 3 with unique vehicles. Anyways, the point I am making is that I am going to have to hear a L
  • Mod this -5: flamebait if you must, but as a serious PC gamer, Bungie Can Go and Fuck Themselves.

    The way they acted towards the PC (and worse, Mac) community regarding Halo was disgraceful. On top of that, Halo 1 really wasn't that good - the single player game was boring and repetitive, and the multiplayer was NOTHING on QIII, Medal of Honour or virtually any other half decent MP PC game. The saddest part was seeing all the fawning 13 year olds proclaiming Halo the 'greatest game of all time' and the gush
  • "It looks just Like Halo 1!" No, no it doesn't. "I've been betrayed by Bungie! Damn Xbox worshippers!" No, no you haven't, there a company, they make money, fans are second inline deal with it. "Lets Boycott them!" Yes, yes you will, you'll download the game like you normally do. God damn Guys, the game isn't out yet and you've decided its not worth what you stand in by accident in the park. Grow up and wait till it comes out, then judge.
  • "Its looks just like Halo 1" No, no its doesn't. "Damn bungie xbox worshippers! Lets boycott them" Yes, yes you will, like you did with Halo 1 when you got it copied or downloaded it. You guys need to grow up, wait till the game comes out before trying to give it all this "Oh look at that they promised 66 frames a second, but its just giving 33 and look at the pixels! It SUX BALLS!!!!1111!!!!!1, now were did a place pocket protector?"
  • Halo for PC is online, Halo for xbox is not online, xbox users will get online play, and PC users (when the pc version is released) will have the continuum of the history and some extra nice features (like hijacking, modding and better AI) you like the package? cool, go and get it, if you dont, dont buy it.
    Seriously I think is seriously immature and stupic to claim immaturity or stupidity from anyone just because they dont share your beliefs and tastes.
    Some people loved Halo (as the best console FPS) and w

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