- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
Sorry, but I have to cut into your argument with some speculative analysis. Hear me out.
I'm personally hoping that PC never sees the light of Halo 2, despite any plans to the contrary. I'm one of those people that went out and bought halo for PC in order to play online, a trusting and gullible soul who could never dream that the phrases "bad netcode" or "bloated rendering" could be associated in any way with a gem on the level of Halo. But, because Microshaft jumped the gun and decided to make more money, they pawned off one of the greatest games of all time to a 3rd-party developer to make a speedy port. I clearly remember having to fire an inch ahead of an enemy player even on public servers in order to hit him when he was moving... even though I have a top-end system and a 3 megabit cable connection.
That aside, Halo and Halo 2 were designed, born, and bred to be xbox games. Things like the control scheme, the tightness and coordination between the analog sticks, the slight rumble as you smack an opponent in the back of the head as he sighs and his corpse crumbles to your omnipotent feet, just can't be done on PC and probably never will.
Porting Halo 2 to PC is also not very smart from a platform perspective, because it is putting an exclusively (and justly) console game into the same arena as giants like ut2004 and half-life 2. Our favorite monster of the xbox will doubtless look pretty goofy and childish next to the raw power of the source engine, much like the aforementioned botched port of the original. Bungie doesn't even have a year to write a PC-friendly dynamic engine for Halo 2, let alone the kind of timescale that most such ventures require.
Also, Halo 2 uses normal mapping, which makes things look absolutely awesome and realistic on the xbox, but on the higher resolution (face it folks, we're playing on 640x480) will doubtless look cartoonish and most likely eat up lots and lots of ram and clock cycles, much like our friend "Halo: Gearbox edition". We found out with Halo that when you expose an engine designed for a stable, one-hardware-profile platform such as the xbox to a dynamic, speedy, and versatile platform like the PC, the result is unstable, often-choppy, and crash-prone.
So please, Bungie, my man, if you're reading this... please, please keep Halo 2 where it belongs.
[Edited on 2/23/2005 8:12:26 PM]