Good marketing or just really stupid?

[DeeBye]

Apparently operating systems now have launch titles.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4698072.stm

Halo fans will have to upgrade their computer if they want to follow Master Chief's adventures on the PC.

Microsoft has announced that the PC version of Halo 2 will only work on the new version of Windows called Vista.

Now I'm not a big FPS gaming fan, and I don't own a console newer than a N64 or Playstation. I've never played any Halo title, either on Xbox or or PC. Take my opinion on this matter for what it's worth.

I just don't see why Microsoft would do this. Everyone who really cares about Halo 2 would have already played it on Xbox. From a technical standpoint it makes little sense too. Since Halo 2 is a Xbox title, there is no reason why an OS upgrade should be required. There isn't anything there that a semi-decent PC can't handle under Windows XP, and by all accounts Windows Vista will have some pretty beefy system requirements* that will exceed anything that Halo 2 should require.

Maybe Microsoft is hoping that requiring Windows Vista to run Halo 2 will help drive Vista sales, but I don't see people falling for it. It would be cheaper to buy an Xbox and Halo 2 than it would be to upgrade to Windows Vista.

This also kinda bothers me because I work in a store that sells PC games, and I can just foresee the problems with people attempting to return Halo 2 because they failed to notice the "requires Windows Vista" text. I already have problems with people attempting to return DVD titles when they only have a CD drive, but our policy prohibits us from accepting game returns on opened packages.

* - Microsoft says you will need 512MB RAM, and a dedicated (ie non-integrated) DX 9.0 video card. Recommended system requirements will likely be quite a bit higher.

[Doc]

A couple of beta tester types I know say that Vista doesn't even become stable or speedy till it has about 1.5 to 2 gigs of memory all to its self. And that is just for the system alone...

M$ is trying to make it look, feel, and behave just like Mac OSX, with all the animated widgets and such, and eye candy, but they just can't seem to pull it off smoothly as Apple did. Under a gig of memory and all the little animations and eye candy become slow motion slide shows.

Ugh.

This is typical to M$, bloating out a game that doesn't need to be to support its OS sales. It has happened before, it will happen again.

[jahcs]

Clicky for some Microsoft humor.

I really like this one.

Included this one just because it's my favorite. :D

[Professor Frink]

I just don't see why Microsoft would do this.  Everyone who really cares about Halo 2 would have already played it on Xbox.  From a technical standpoint it makes little sense too.  [right][snapback]101749[/snapback][/right]

At least for singleplayer, I vastly prefer Halo on the PC. Leaving out co-op multiplayer was extremely annoying, but the braindead checkpoints-without-save system the Xbox version uses is a show-stopper for me, and absolutely ruins the otherwise awesome Legendary mode. I would have preferred no checkpoints and no saves; that would have at least made the game somewhat "hardcore" instead of the current irritating russian-roulette checkpoint minigame.

As it is, neither Halo nor Halo 2 for the Xbox have any appeal for me as single player games. Hopefully Halo 2 will get the same improvement in the Xbox-to-PC translation that Halo did, and I'll be able to see if Halo 2's new levels and new toys balance out the whether the various ways in which everything fun and unique about Halo was watered down in the sequel, or not.

I realize this is stupid from a technical standpoint, and that there's no good reason for the differences aside from some marketroid declaring "savegames scare console players" and a marginally brighter one recognizing that "PC gamers will not tolerate an FPS without savegames".... but there it is anyway.

Short answer: Having bought Halo 2 for the Xbox, i would get it for the PC if it were available.

-- frink

p.s. I don't regret buying Halo 2 for the Xbox, it's a fun multiplayer game.

[Munkay]

the braindead checkpoints-without-save system the Xbox version uses is a show-stopper for me, and absolutely ruins the otherwise awesome Legendary mode.  I would have preferred no checkpoints and no saves; that would have at least made the game somewhat "hardcore" instead of the current irritating russian-roulette checkpoint minigame.

Just a minor question,

If you wanted to do it without checkpoints, wouldn't you just quit when you died, and restarted sans checkpoint?

Cheers,

Munk

[NiteFox]

I will bet anything that Halo 2 would have the same checkpoint system as its Xbox bretheren.

Realistically for most of us, if we suddenly had the desire to play Halo 2 on PC, it will probably cost the equivilent of two or three Xboxes (Maybe even more, since the 360 the price of the old box has been plummetting) on hardware and software alone.

Think about it.

Just as well that this little black duck doesn't have the desire to play Halo 2.

[SwissMercenary]

Considering that there are plenty of PC FPSes that were not designed with the console in mind, I can't say I will shed any tears whatsoever over missing Halo 2.

[Wyrm]

I still haven't even played Halo 1... Tried the demo and wasn't all that impressed with the visuals, sound, or the ever-so-popular assualt vehicles that made Halo famous (control and UI weren't anything all that special either). Was almost completely turned off by the craptacular idea that save games should go in the "My Documents" folder instead of the game directory, so I deleted it and haven't looked back since.

I'll take Doom and Doom 2 any day of the week over half the modern crap that's coming out.

I just don't see why Microsoft would do this.

Never underestimate corporate greed. Think about it. The game will either increase Vista sales and they'll get more money or it won't do so well and MS will have an excuse to fire the people who worked on Halo 2 (game didn't meet corporate standards after all) and pocket more money for themselves. That, and if memory serves correctly, MS got broken up in an anti-trust suit a while back into the Windows and XBox people (slightly more complicated than that, but that's the basic idea) and this is their way of bypassing the law.

[Munkay]

I just don't see why Microsoft would do this.

To add to Wyrm's response, Microsquish will do just about anything to push sales of Vista. For such a long wait, and it's lauded features, Vista already looks like its falling short. There isn't anything incredibly innovative about Vista, and when you see the transparent windows being pushed as a top feature, you know the product is in trouble. Transparency? Download GhostIt.exe, a 800k program that'll unobtrusively add transparency to any window. Or run a GUI version of Linux circa 2000.

This also kinda bothers me because I work in a store that sells PC games, and I can just foresee the problems

Sorry to hear you are going to be put in that unfortunate situation DeeBye, Microsquish doesn't mind the headaches, as long as their on your head and your dime.

Cheers,

Munk

[[vL]Kp]

Was almost completely turned off by the craptacular idea that save games should go in the "My Documents" folder instead of the game directory[right][snapback]101809[/snapback][/right]

You do realize that's the correct way to support multiple users on a single system playing the game, right? Writing savegame files into the game directory means that every user who plays must have write access to that directory, and most likely that the players can step on each other accidentally. ("That was your savegame I just deleted? I thought it was mine!", etc.)

It took Blizzard 8 patches to Diablo 1 just to get it to where it could run at all without administrator rights (they only tried in that eighth patch as far as I know, but the point is it took them a very long time even to think about it), and it still requires that the player have write access to the game directory even now. Starcraft is marginally better since it writes the saves to a subdirectory, but it's still not very permissions friendly.

Bottom line: all data generated by the normal use of the application should default to landing somewhere under the user's home directory. Whether "Local Settings\Application Data" might've been a better choice than "My Documents" is an open question, though. Incidentally, giving the home directories nicer names would've been a great step for the OS (think c:\home\<user>).

[Drasca]

Writing savegame files into the game directory means that every user who plays must have write access to that directory,[right][snapback]101829[/snapback][/right]

Nope, only console games have to think that way, for the sole reason that they're generally so backward. Ever heard of in-game profiles? For descent, it was used for individual keymapping to begin with. Some newer games have smartened up, and autowrite different directories for savegames specific to characters. You don't need this OS userprofile nonsense. A game with a decent interface can do it for you.

[SwissMercenary]

Nope, only console games have to think that way, for the sole reason that they're generally so backward. Ever heard of in-game profiles? For descent, it was used for individual keymapping to begin with. Some newer games have smartened up, and autowrite different directories for savegames specific to characters. You don't need this OS userprofile nonsense. A game with a decent interface can do it for you.
[right][snapback]101831[/snapback][/right]

Exactly. As someone who never stores anything in My Documents (I use a real file management application, not the sorry excuse that is Windows Explorer), I hate software that saves... Well... Just about anything to My Documents.

[[vL]Kp]

Nope, only console games have to think that way, for the sole reason that they're generally so backward. Ever heard of in-game profiles? For descent, it was used for individual keymapping to begin with. Some newer games have smartened up, and autowrite different directories for savegames specific to characters. You don't need this OS userprofile nonsense. A game with a decent interface can do it for you.[right][snapback]101831[/snapback][/right]

If I recall correctly, Descent still placed the profiles in its installation directory. That's somewhat forgivable for Descent, since it actually predates the idea of having multiple user accounts on a Microsoft-operated computer. Writing to appropriate subdirectories is exactly what I was promoting above. It's better to stick it all under a user-account-specific directory though, not to bury it under the game's installation directory. By placing everything under the user profile, it becomes very easy to transport all files related to that user (especially important since Windows lacks a nice equivalent to 'find -user <name>' -- for that matter, it lacks a nice equivalent of find(1) at all!).

Similarly, it's easy to write a backup rule which backs up the user's data files and doesn't back up the game's data files. Assuming you got the game on disc, there's no point copying all its data files (think d2sfx.mpq, d2music.mpq, etc.) to a backup -- just reinstall the game if something happens to the hard disk! Besides, most Windows games don't do very well if you restore their data files without all the matching registry entries.

Much of the value of the layout I'm promoting is that you can set the individual players to have no write access to the game's installation area, so there's no way they can screw it up. It's possible to get pretty close to read-only with games like Descent and Diablo, but it's quite a lot of needless trouble. The administrator must lock down the area, then go back and allow the user to create new files in the directories the game wants to write, while still denying change access to files which exist before the user started playing. Even then, it may not work well if the game tries to access a profile owned by a different user, and gets EACCES due to the ACL. If the game were to store all profile information under the user's personal directory, it wouldn't even see or attempt to access profiles owned by other players.

Exactly. As someone who never stores anything in My Documents (I use a real file management application, not the sorry excuse that is Windows Explorer), I hate software that saves... Well... Just about anything to My Documents.
[right][snapback]101832[/snapback][/right]

Me either. I store everything under ~, which my shell expands to $HOME, which is itself defined to </docume~1/$USER>, where $USER is whoever I happen to be today. I'm not greatly fond of the My Documents directory either. It's badly named, has too long a name, and has very weird semantics because of Microsoft's insistence on the shell virtual namespace that creates a 'Desktop' object at the top-level, when the directory which implements Desktop is typically three levels deep on the hard disk. Even sillier, "My Documents" is a child of "Desktop" in the virtual namespace, but a sibling of "Desktop" in the real filesystem (and the hard disk on which Desktop resides is itself a grandchild of Desktop)!

[Wyrm]

You do realize that's the correct way to support multiple users on a single system playing the game, right?&nbsp; Writing savegame files into the game directory means that every user who plays must have write access to that directory, and most likely that the players can step on each other accidentally.&nbsp; ("That was your savegame I just deleted?&nbsp; I thought it was mine!", etc.)

That's a bit impractical for me though, I'm the only one with access to this computer, so I don't need multi-user support. I'm already sick and tired of programs that create more directories than they should or place files where they shouldn't (seriously... games don't need to add themselves to the Windows directory). Add to that the fact that some games are programmed very sloppily and make a mess of the registry and I'm ready to throw them right into the garbage can (and spend the next few weeks finding all the crap they left in the registry and hidden throughout the hard drive).

But anyways... My biggest complaint about using the My Documents folder for saving games (aside from the fact that it's being used at all) is there's no unified method for it. If Microsoft had built in a sub-directory for games the way they did with pictures (another rant) it wouldn't have been quite as annoying. But since they didn't you wind up with about 5 different sub-directories for 2 games; one game makes a "Saved Games" sub with a "Game saves from our company here" sub of its own, MS games have a "Microsoft Saved Games" sub with "Saves" and "Halo Saves" with sepereate directories for every profile" and yet another company will ignore those save directories and just put an "Our game saves" directory in My Documents so that by the time you've got all of your games installed, the computer is completely cluttered with completely useless directories that don't have any business being there.

I like to keep games compartmentalized. If I want to do something with a certain game (such as modding or making backups of critical files that aren't on CD) I don't want want to have to go to 10 different places to get all the files I'll need. Diablo 2 would be the (somewhat) perfect example. If I want to play the Median 2 mod, I make a backup of the dlls and mpqs from the original that I need to and put them into a zip file. Then I put my regular SP saves directory into that zip file so that when I'm done with M2 and want to sign on to bnet to check my accounts, I just put the M2 stuff in a zip the same way I did with the regular game stuff and then do a copy/paste of the original back into the D2 directory. If D2 saved games to the My Documents folder, that's already creating more work for me when I want to switch between the mod and the original. The process gets even more complicated with multiple mods. Even if you put the saves into the same zip you've still got the extra work to go through unzipping some of the file to one place and some to another. That's extra work I shouldn't need to do.

It took Blizzard 8 patches to Diablo 1

Diablo 1 was written for Win 95 back when multi-user systems was still a fairly new concept.

It's badly named, has too long a name

I only find that humorous because docume~1 is the DOS shortened version of "documents and settings."

not the sorry excuse that is Windows Explorer

I never had a problem with the old explorer from Win 95 that was still a seperate entity from the OS (or was it all the way back to 3.11?). Once they came up with the idea to integrate it into the OS... well... let's just say it still gives me a headache.

[TFLlama]

I went to CES this year in Vegas, and at the Keynote address with Bill Gates, they showed off alot of Vista. I got to use it some on the showroom floor as well. It does a few neat things, like hoving over a tab on the taskbar gives a little preview of what it is, (I guess that's in case you can't read), and you can arrange the windows in sort of a 3-d rollodex type feature. Other than that, the new features don't do anything Firefox and Winamp don't already do. It's basically XP with a few transparencies and more visual flair, which I personally don't care for.

[Guest]

XP is the first Window that really works. It rarely crashes. It doesnt slow down over time.

And XP happened to coincide with the generation of PCs that has enough power to keep everyone but gamers happy.

I really cant see why people would want to upgrade unless its voice activated or something radicle like that.

[SwissMercenary]

XP is the first Window that really works. It rarely crashes. It doesnt slow down over time.

And XP happened to coincide with the generation of PCs that has enough power to keep everyone but gamers happy.

I really cant see why people would want to upgrade unless its voice activated or something radicle like that.
[right][snapback]101861[/snapback][/right]

Can't watch High-def DVDs, or some other gunk like that without a DRM-compatible monitor, AND Vista, IIRC.

Not to mention that Micro$oft's 5 year support policy means that they no no longer have any obligation to provide security updates to XP.

[pakman]

Halo sucked. Halo 2 sucked more. I have no incentive to upgrade to Vista. The only reason that I will own it, however, is the deal that Purdue has with Microsoft where I get to buy software for $10. That does not necessarily mean that I will install it because it's minimum sys. req's. are like playing a game, only you're just trying to run your OS.

[Doc]

Why Vista when there is OSX?

I mean, it's already out, already stable, and zillions of open source goodies work on it. It does everything and then some that Vista is promising.

And that hovering over a tab bit that somebody mentioned, OSX had that several revisions ago. What, 2001 2002 maybe?

What I can't figure out is why Vista is turning in to a gigantic bit of bloatware. 1 or 2 gigs of ram just for the OS to function, plus all the additional ram required for applications, I would really like for somebody to explain to me why that has to be that way. I can not grasp it. It's like when Windows 98 came out and they insisted that everything would work fine with a measely 32 megs of ram. There is going to be yet another fiasco coming around soon.

It's not a Mac vs Windows thing... It's Windows vs everything else sort of thing. Every other OS has it's crap together it seems.

Edit.

Win98 technically did work with just 32 megs of ram just like M$ promised. It did function. It was just that you couldn't do anything else with it.

[Roland]

XP is the first Window that really works. It rarely crashes. It doesnt slow down over time.

And XP happened to coincide with the generation of PCs that has enough power to keep everyone but gamers happy.

I really cant see why people would want to upgrade unless its voice activated or something radicle like that.
[right][snapback]101861[/snapback][/right]

Windows 2000 pre-dated XP by a long shot, and is a much better OS than Windows XP, IMHO.

Besides, Windows 2000 has better administrative jurisdiction built into it than XP. XP is a terrible replacement for 2k Pro as a business desktop. I can't believe they even tried to pass it off as such, except this IS Microsoft, and they know that what rules the home rules the business.

I swore once that I would never buy XP, and that I would have to swear off Microsoft. I forget now just why I switched from 2k to XP (oh, wait, no I don't - I screwed up my registry by overclocking testing, lost my bootleg copy of Windows 2000 Professional, and was forced to actually buy a copy of an OS :P), but I didn't do it willingly. Vista, I can almost promise, I will not buy. I just hope Linux catches up enough in terms of gaming support that I don't have to ever buy Vista just to play video games on my rig.