- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
Posted by: UXB
While I agree that not having in-game downloads of maps is not as convenient as other games I totally disagree that Halo CE has had a shortened life span. You must first have an understanding of its genesis to fully appreciate how popular and long lived in its market segement the game has actually become.
Unlike most of the other games mentioned such as Half Life and UT which were PC based games then ported to the console, Halo was a console based game ported to the PC. As such the core code was not developed with game downloads in mind. Bungie's tag system while fine for consoles has some limitations when moved to the PC platform. Each map file includes most of the "tags" or assets to determine the look and operation of the level. This makes the map files anywhere between 10-100mg in size averaging around 16meg uncompressed. The bandwidth required for 16 people to download the map while still playing on-line would far outstrip any DSL/Cable connection and bring the server to its knees.
But excluding that limitation the original Halo PC game was released in 2003 and was a "port" of the console game from 2001. Wither good or bad the decision made for the Halo PC game was that it fit on a single CDROM and be playable on-line by 56K modem users. Remember that at the time these decisions were made there was less than a 10% Cable/DSL penetration and availability: a very small market segment.
Gearbox software, with their background in PC games, felt that the there should be a way for users to create custom content and with Bungie's approval in 2004 released the unsupported Halo Custom Edition for people who had purchased Halo PC. It was released without fanfare, without marketing, without support and without Gearbox or Bungie making any money from it. It was essentially a bonus program for those that stumbled across it and has been solely supported by the community.
Because it was never marketed or released in a retail or any distribution venue there have never been a large number of players at any one time. But the number of active players has remained fairly consistent since its release. People leave and new people find it.
By now you are probably wondering how I base my argument on its relative popularity and that is simple. Because the custom maps are required to be downloaded I can track the number of downloads of maps. Since Jan 1, 2005 there have been 2,668,430 map files downloaded from Halo Maps. And the rate of downloads has been steadily increasing even as people have retuned to school when downloads normally fall off.
Halo CE was never intended to be the replacement for Halo PC and by its very inception could never have been. It was developed by the PC gamers at Gearbox on their own time without compensation and offered for free. Although I do not know for sure, since no one from Bungie has ever contacted me, I suspect that Bungie has been watching Halo Maps and the Halo CE community very closely and it would not be a large leap to surmise that the decision to include the editing kit and custom content in the H2-Vista release was bolstered by the Halo CE community's response to the Halo CE game.
These things are always a matter of perspective. For the average buy-the-box-install-and-play gamer Halo CE is a dismal failure. For the much smaller die hard custom content Halo community it is a success. Its popularity has remained the same and has even grown some as it enters its fourth year. Considering how it started it is remarkable it lasted longer than a year.
Excellent point, UXB. I never meant to call Custom Edition a failure at all. I love CE, and I agree with you in many ways. But if CE was ever short-lived, it wouldn't be because of mere inconvenience, it would have been this thing that was called "Halo 2" which made people stop playing CE.
[Edited on 1/8/2007]