- JacobGRocks
- |
- Heroic Member
Posted by: Chaosenemy
For some reason I feel like replying to this thread. There isn't going to be a Halo Reach for PC, and if somehow it actually is ported, it's just going to be another Halo 2 in terms of quality.
Unfortunately ever since Halo 2, the Blam engine has been completely borked for anything but Xbox/consoles. Sure they could fix some things like getting rid of aim assist (though they won't), but the engine, from the ground up, was written to run at 30 fps. This means animations, movement, physics, everything polls at 30 times per second and was built specifically to be this way. The rendering can run at a different rate to provide more than 30 fps but on the Xbox this would've likely made everything look jittery and glitchy, so they locked the rendering at 30 fps. For the PC, I think what Hired Gun did to fix this was to interpolate each frame against the previous one based on the rendering fps, to smooth the motion. This extra overhead, combined with all the Xbox-specific optimizations being dropped (obviously), slowed down the game considerably on the PC platform. Plus, the interpolation between frames introduced a bit of input latency and I imagine this probably screwed with the mouse movement as well. So the engine itself is inherently sluggish and made for console gamers who don't care.
Now I'm not disputing that Hired Gun did a bad port job - they did, but Microsoft and Bungie are the ones who are to blame. Bungie built the engine with 0 consideration for other platforms, and Hired Gun was rushed by Microsoft and likely told to withhold features/content from the PC version like Gearbox was for Halo 1.
In the end, Halo is built to be a console game from the ground up and Microsoft are greedy -blam!-s. To get a truly decent Halo PC game would require Microsoft to put some real honest-to-God effort into rebuilding the engine specifically for the PC, not hacking together some quick fixes and seeing if the damn thing compiles. We need PC Cpu/Gpu optimizations, reworked game content built with variable fps in mind, and all the simple things that make a PC game a PC game. Microsoft isn't going to put forth the effort for any of this.
</ColdHardTruth>
Agreed. Just look at Halo PC. Once you disable 30fps, the animations seem to feel jittery.
Also, MS doesn't care much about PC gaming. Fable III PC isn't out yet, while others rumor it will end up like Alan Wake PC. AoE online isn't out yet either, and nothing has been announced for MS flight yet, and some people are thinking it's going to be a dumbed down FSX.