- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
i found this off of rampancy.net
If You Want World Domination, You've Got To Break Eggs
The Background
As many know, Halo was originally supposed to be a crossplatform game on PCs and Macs. Originally an engine replacement for the Myth series of RTS games, it became a third-person shooter that was revealed at MacWorld in 1999, with much fanfare over the fact that it ran in realtime, using OpenGL, on a Macintosh.
Most of Bungie's most rabid fans at that time were Mac users, and although the company certainly benefited from the overlap, it was also a limiting factor for them.
The buyout by Microsoft and a chance to shape the Xbox platform changed all that.
But what of the Mac and PC users among Bungie's fans, the ones who perhaps didn't want to switch to console gaming? Would they be left out in the cold?
After a long wait, it was revealed that no, they wouldn't. Halo would come to the PC and the Mac as originally promised, if perhaps a little bit delayed.
Of course, the way in which this was done was totally different than Bungie's earlier crossplatform titles, like Myth, or the Mac shooter series, Marathon. In those days, the company was an independent developer and publisher. They did everything from soup to nuts-- programmed their own engines, developed their own content, published their titles and negotiated to get them distributed and sold; a task so onerous that few small companies these days even attempt it in this space. They even dabbled a bit in publishing titles by other developers, but with mixed results.
But when you were talking to a Bungie representative somewhere, you were dealing with the guys who did everything; they knew what was going on in every facet of their business, and the guys who ultimately controlled everything were Bungie guys. There was no buck-passing because there was nobody else to pass the buck to. Bungie at times came up with facetious reasons for some of their shortcomings ("the Marathon boxes are being printed") but when it came right down to it, they owned up and did the right thing for their customers, such as when a bug in the Myth 2 installer was found that put clients' computers at risk. Bungie recalled the production run, eroding most of the financial gain from an award winning title, and, the rumor mill says, set the stage for Microsoft's buyout later on.
Bungie was, in a sense, more monolithic than most of the companies who get that moniker applied to them. But in Bungie's case, it was positive.
Xbox: Fight The Future
Fast forward to 2004. Halo is a nearly three-year old Xbox release with a large following, and PC Halo a million-plus with a year under its belt. The one thing missing is the kind of furious third party development which made games like Half-Life and its descendants, like Counter Strike, an ongoing sensation.
It hasn't happened, and it isn't likely to; a victim of the conflicting interests between Microsoft and Bungie, forging forward in developing Halo 2 to help keep interest in the Xbox alive even as the console nears the end of its life cycle, and Gearbox, the company that took up the task of fulfilling Bungie's promise to bring Halo to the PC (and later, through Westlake Interactive, to the Mac).
Omelets aren't easy to make; you just go ask an egg.
Count Gearbox's Randy "DuvalMagic" Pitchford as an egg broken in the making of the PC Halo omelet.
STB has collected a large number of posts on Gearbox's forums by Pitchford. In some of them he refers to Gearbox as the "bastard children of Bungie" with regard to getting support from them for Halo, and warns that "you can only wake up the dragon [Bungie] so many times before you get squished."
About the relation between Bungie Studios and Microsoft, Pitchford said:
They've always been one and the same to my eyes. When I said something about the blockage coming from aboves us on-line, I started getting calls from their leadership trying to shut me up. Good faith and verbal commitments became nada once Halo 2 hit the fan. I understand that decision, but there was nothing I could do about it and Gearbox was being hung out to dry...
Redmond, We Have A Problem
The crux of the problem has always been getting approval to release patches. To hear Pitchford tell it, Gearbox has devoted quite a bit in terms of time, money, and effort into PC Halo that has not seen, and might not ever see, the light of day.
The sequence of events following Halo's PC release was an object lesson on why a company like Bungie would want to leave PC development to work on a console. Debates about system requirements, about network performance, about video cards and drivers-- all the things a developer has to worry less about when they have a stable development target. Of course, with PC Halo out there, the problem didn't really go away, it just got passed on. And as with many porting contracts, support does not go on forever. Companies don't generally (at least in the games space) contract for updates in perpetuity. Companies get paid to port the game and sometimes to do the first few patches to kill the last few show-stopping bugs if any show up. Everything after that, the porting house does to protect its reputation, to keep good client relations, that sort of thing. Sooner or later, though, they run up against diminishing returns and must move on to other projects; Gearbox has already done so with the announcement of Brothers In Arms.
Six Of One, Half Dozen Of Nothing
With Gearbox frustrated that it couldn't get permission to release patches, and PC Halo fans frustrated that PC Halo didn't perform up to their expectations, the eventual solution was a compromise that, as is typical in these situations, tries to please everyone and ends up pleasing no one.
Halo Custom Edition is in essence a completely different game. Multiplayer only, it can't play the single player levels of Halo, but won't work without the original Halo game, either-- so if you don't own Halo, CE isn't of any use to you; and rightfully so. It isn't multiplayer interoperable with PC Halo, either, so it has effectively bifurcated the online Halo community. The casual PC gamer, who may have bought PC Halo to see what all the fuss is and play the single player game, isn't going to know what to make of what online Halo PC gaming is; either he's stuck playing an outdated version of the game with one part of the community, or he has to download this new version with its own set of patches and play with the other part.
Of course, the real reason for CE's existence isn't just patches to multiplayer. In fact, if it was that, many users would have rather done without, as they complain that CE's network performance is not as good as PC Halo's. No, the real reason was to have a platform for which the community could author mods, as PC Halo originally had no smooth way to install user-authored content. As in the case with other games, before the editing tools and then Halo CE were released, the community did quite a bit of work on their own, but there was no easy way for a casual Halo gamer to get access to it. CE could have and perhaps should have and solved that problem.
Walking On Eggshells
Now, however, Gearbox may be nearing the end of its rope with Halo CE. Pitchford reports that users just haven't been switching to CE from plain vanilla Halo. Those who haven't say that among the reasons are the problems with network performance cited earlier. The fix? Another patch. But another patch may not be forthcoming unless Halo CE gets more patronage.
CE was supposed to solve the problems of conflicts between Gearbox and Microsoft over support, but it doesn't seem to have turned out that way. Pitchford says that any major patch still requires their approval, and that Bungie is simply too busy with Halo 2 to pay much attention to a PC port of a game they released nearly three years ago-- which is certainly understandable. The idea that Microsoft would support vanilla PC Halo, while CE would, apparently, be developed by Gearbox but essentially unsupported-- seems to have fallen by the wayside. Gearbox still can't release major patches to PC Halo without their approval, and can't justify releasing major patches to Halo CE if it doesn't have a userbase, which it won't gain without better support, say its users.
off of http://rampancy.net/info/articles/if_you_want_world_dominatio n_youve_got_to_break_eggs