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Re: Boo this man. *longish*
Posted By: Narcogen <narcogen@rampancy.net>Date: 4/26/11 1:48 a.m.

In Response To: Re: Boo this man. *longish* (Gravemind)


: For me, it's not just those things. It's the gameplay as well. Reach may play
: better than Halo 2 & 3, but it falls short of Halo 1.

I think insofar as Reach iterates and polishes on ideas introduced in Halo 2 & 3, that makes sense.

: AAs are better than equipment in terms of execution, though TBH I would've
: rather had things go back to the classic Golden Tripod. The addition of a
: fourth leg wasn't needed.

That would explain it, then. If you don't see those items being missing from Halo 1 as a deficiency, then having poorly implemented additions (H3 Equipment) is worse than well implemented additions (Reach AAs) but not necessarily better than no additions (H1).

About AAs, I'm not sure they are essential, and some, like the jetpack, would surely break H1 utterly in some places. As for destructible and boardable vehicles... I think that is a real deficiency, and one I would want to see addressed. I wouldn't want a remade H1 without being able to board vehicles. It's the one feature from the newer game that I absolutely miss when I go back to the original game.

AA.. I'd be willing to look at some if I thought they could be implemented with minimal scenario tweaks. Armor Lock, Sprint, perhaps even Evade and the drop shield might possibly be implemented with minimal impact, and I think would add to the game.

: It's also gritty, grainy, and fuzzy-looking as opposed to the sharp, clean,
: clear graphics of prior Halo games.

I agree, and it's not really an improvement. For the visuals I prefer Halo 3, ODST, and Halo 1 over Reach and Halo 2. Perhaps there's just something that happens when Bungie tries to push their engine to the limit, that doesn't happen at the beginning of a cycle. Halo 1 on the Xbox is clean, crisp, and beautiful. Halo 2, on the same hardware, appears at times muddied and too busy. Halo 3 is clean and crisp. Reach seems muddied and fuzzy, with a lot of unnecessary detail that makes it difficult to know where your eyes should be trained to see important things. It reminds me a lot of Halo 2 in that respect, except that most of the environments are less interesting than Halo 2's.

[snip]

: As far as I'm concerned, Halo 1 remade using Reach's assets will be nothing
: more than an impostor, a mere Reach expansion masquerading as the original
: game.

I'd agree with the second but not the first. Yes, it would be a Reach expansion. It's like playing the Myth: TFL levels in the Myth 2 engine, to get the advantages of the new engine with the scenarios of the first. I'm guessing you'd want the TFL gameplay patch, and I probably wouldn't. Or, rather, I would for Myth, but not for Halo.

It might look prettier (the grainy/fuzzy Reach aesthetic
: notwithstanding), but in won't play or feel the same. It won't really be
: Halo 1.

No, it wouldn't be. But we don't need Halo 1 again. Halo 1 still works. It's on Games on Demand. Anything else would be different in some way. What I'm saying is that "only a little bit different" probably can't justify any effort. I think the minimum amount of change that justifies doing the work and making a release is H1 scenario on the Reach engine, and that probably necessitates certain kinds of changes that would make you call the game "not Halo 1". That's fine by me.

: Don't forget that all vehicles are indestructible in MP. I don't really mind
: that, though. Vehicles never felt overpowered in Halo 1. Applying the
: damage meter possessed by the Covie vehicles in Campaign, to all vehicles
: in all modes wouldn't require changing much of anything, though. I don't
: mind the lack of boarding, either.

Doesn't impact me, though, as I was never able to play any significant amount of H1 multiplayer. By the game's release I had already been overseas for nearly two years, and without XBL no multiplayer was possible.

: I like how streamlined Halo 1's arsenal is. The expanded arsenals of later
: games were full of redundant weapons. The Covies not having their own
: long-range precision weapons in Halo 1 didn't detract from the game.

Hmm..... I'm not really sure about that. There are lots of places where judicious use of the pistol and the sniper rifle allow a player to unrealistically wipe out hordes of Covenant with virtually no fear of reprisal, because the scenarios don't allow units to leave their patrols, and because they have no long-range weapons. I'm thinking primarily of level 2 post light bridge, where you rescue the three groups of marines. The pistol, the sniper, and the LAAG are all available there, and it's possible to mow down distant units in a way that I think clearly breaks those encounters. They would be totally different if the Covenant had more long-range weapons.

Would
: it be nice if they could fight back at longer ranges? Yes. Would I mind
: the Carbine or beam rifle being in the game? Probably. (Incidentally,
: this guy , via a simple mod, made the Covenant far more effective at mid
: range without adding any new weapons.)

: "That means porting Perfect Dark's engine, made to run on the the N64's
: NEC VR4300 CPU and porting it to run on the 360's PowerPC CPU and ATI GPU.
: The thing is, that engine has already made its way onto that hardware, in
: the form of Perfect Dark Zero.* Etc., etc."

There's a difference of scale here. Perfect Dark on XBLA is a lightly enhanced port of an N64 game. It's distributed in less than 300Mb. The game engine was rewritten and now runs that old content at 60fps at 1080p-- and that process took 11 months.

What PDZ wasn't was as successful as Halo. Hardcore PD fans had complaints about changes made to the game, and the decision to port the original may well have been a response to that. That's not the case with Halo. With the exception of ODST, each game has sold better and better. There's no basis for an orthodox "back to basics" approach to an H1 remake, because the backlash against changes in the franchise is swamped by its financial success.

Halo 1, as a Games on Demand distribution, is several gigabytes in size. While most of that is art assets, and not code, I think it's a good metric to compare the sheer number of pixels and polygons each engine has to push. Despite being released only 18 months earlier, it's visually a much more impressive game.

I'll stand by my assertion that effort spent on a third fork of the Halo engine-- not running in emulation, as the GoD distribution does, but not utilizing the existing codebase native on the 360, will not bring in sales revenue equivalent to development costs. Yes, that's pure speculation, as I have no figures to base it on, but that's my hunch. I don't think there are enough purists who would be turned off by the use of the new engine and some of its features to reduce sales significantly enough to justify a year or more to port a ten year old engine.

Where I could be wrong would be in how much effort it would take to adapt the H1 scenario to one of the newer engines. If doing that takes MORE effort than porting the old engine, then I'd be exactly wrong, and a straight port would be more likely-- although still less interesting to me personally. I also think such a release is more likely to be seen as a ripoff.

There is already a Halo equivalent of the PD XBLA release-- Halo 1 Games on Demand. PD rescued an old game and made it playable on modern hardware for people who didn't have an N64 anymore, or perhaps never had one. H1 is playable in all its original glory on the Xbox now-- just without multiplayer. They won't split the online population by releasing that game with multiplayer, and a straight port gains too little over the GoD distribution. The middle way I think is the only viable one: an update to use a more modern engine and at least some of the additional features those engines support.

: *NOTE: Except it's not the same engine, just like how, contrary to your
: statement, Halo 2, 3, and Reach all use different engines. Different
: engines, different feel, different games.

: There are no technical hurdles to making an HD port of Halo 1 with online MP
: and co-op using the Halo 1 engine that can't be easily overcome. If 4J
: Studios can do it for PD, then 343i can do it for Halo 1.

I think you're wrong there. The technical hurdle is redundancy. Halo 1 runs in emulation, Halo 3, ODST and Reach are native iterations descended from the same code tree. There's no business case for making a third fork for the purposes of making graphics-only changes to a ten-year-old game.

As I wrote above, porting the scenario content may be as big or bigger a technical hurdle; I don't have enough information to say definitively, I can only guess.

: And no XBL capability. And like I said to others, don't suggest Halo PC or
: XBC. The former's not an option for me (my computer isn't so great, plus
: H1PC's netcode sucks from what I here anyway), and the latter is just
: horrible.

There's no way in heck that H1 with XBL is getting released inside of Reach's projected lifetime. None whatsoever. That's the same reason why ODST didn't have unique multiplayer except firefight. For matchmaking to work as intended, the online playerbase has to be monolithic.

: You could say that for any ports, enhanced or otherwise. We have Super Mario
: All-Stars. There's the Playstatin Classics HD line, which includes the God
: of War I & II Collection and the upcoming Ico & Shadow of the
: Colossus Collection. Final Fantasy IV has been re-released several times,
: first as a straight port on the PS1, then as an enhanced port on the GBA,
: and now on the PSP as part of the FFIV Complete Collection. We have an HD,
: XBL-capable Perfect Dark port for XBLA. We have the TMNT Arcade game on
: XBLA (with online co-op!). We also have Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, and Marathon
: on XBLA, all with online MP.

Most of those are the only options for playing those games on modern hardware, though. That's not true of Halo, because the GoD edition exists. The PS3 no longer has backwards compatibility. The Wii has some, but I'm not familiar with it.

PD XBLA is the ONLY way to play PD on the Xbox 360. It's true that perhaps at some point they could have considered updating that scenario for use in the PDZ engine, except that PDZ, unlike Halo 3 and Reach, was not a particularly successful title. There was no reason to believe people wanted more of that gameplay.

As for what Nintendo and Sony regularly do.. yes, they regularly re-issue the same games with minimal changes and people buy them.

: This notion that, for whatever reason, Halo 1 can't get the Perfect Dark
: treatment (HD + online MP and sold as a $10-15 XBLA download) just seems
: asinine to me.

Can't? No, it could. Will? I think not.

Online MP? Again.. never, not within the lifecycle of Reach.

: I wouldn't touch it with a ten-meter cattle prod.

I don't usually resort to an appeal to popularity, but I think the basis for your preference is essentially orthodoxy, and as such, I'm not sure represents an addressable market.

: Replace "Halo" with "Perfect Dark" and I think you'll be
: able to figure out my general feeling regarding that statement. In fact,
: if Perfect Dark was deserving of an HD port (an a successful one, too,
: with well over 300,000 copies downloaded in 2010), then Halo 1, the game
: that single-handedly built the Xbox brand and sold over twice as many
: copies as Perfect Dark (and according to Metacritic is also tied with PD —
: and Metroid Prime — as best-rated FPS ever), sure as hell is deserving as
: well. I can guaran-damn-tee Halo 1 HD would sell as least as well as
: Perfect Dark HD.

Microsoft has already served a good portion of that audience with the Games on Demand release. You might beat 300K sales with multiplayer, but as I pointed out-- that's not going to happen, and without it, your edition is only going to make people wonder why they should pay for Halo 1 yet again only to get a slight visual upgrade.

Given the figures above, I wouldn't even be sure that PD XBLA broke even. 300K sales at $15? That's only 4.5 million to cover all costs, including a development team of four working for 11 months on the engine port.

A $15 version of slightly tweaked H1 on XBLA would be leaving money on the table, no matter how many copies it sold. That's why ODST, even as a glorified expansion pack without unique traditional multiplayer, was priced at $50 and above. They'll want to sell millions of units, and to make closer to $30 than $15. To do that, I think they have to deliver significant value. There are two ways to do that, I think: online play, and the engine upgrade. I don't think they'll do the former while Reach is still being supported. They might do the latter.

They also might do nothing at all, who knows :)

Death by intelligence


Message Index



Replies:

Ten Suggestions For A CErtain RemakeDani 4/23/11 12:26 p.m.
     Re: Ten Suggestions For A CErtain RemakeMoorpheusl9 4/23/11 12:39 p.m.
           Re: Ten Suggestions For A CErtain RemakeDani 4/23/11 1:06 p.m.
     11th Suggestion.Bones153 4/23/11 12:44 p.m.
           Re: 11th Suggestion.padraig08 4/23/11 1:16 p.m.
           Re: 12th Suggestion.DMFanella 4/23/11 1:27 p.m.
           "I never want a remake. Period." Mentality.NsU Soldier 4/23/11 7:23 p.m.
     Re: Ten Suggestions For A CErtain RemakePkmnrulz240 4/23/11 12:53 p.m.
           Re: Ten Suggestions For A CErtain RemakeDani 4/23/11 1:15 p.m.
     One Amendmentpadraig08 4/23/11 1:10 p.m.
           Re: One AmendmentDani 4/23/11 1:18 p.m.
                 Re: One Amendmentpadraig08 4/23/11 1:31 p.m.
                       I remember thatSEspider 4/25/11 1:30 a.m.
     Re: Ten Suggestions For A CErtain RemakeTaco Power 4/23/11 1:42 p.m.
           Would prefer it remasted than remade meself *NM*Firestorm12 4/23/11 1:50 p.m.
     Re: Ten Suggestions For A CErtain RemakeCody Miller 4/23/11 1:45 p.m.
           Re: Ten Suggestions For A CErtain RemakeDani 4/23/11 2:03 p.m.
                 Re: Ten Suggestions For A CErtain RemakeCody Miller 4/23/11 2:07 p.m.
                       Re: Ten Suggestions For A CErtain RemakeDani 4/23/11 2:18 p.m.
                 Re: Ten Suggestions For A CErtain RemakeRC Master 4/23/11 3:53 p.m.
           Re: Ten Suggestions For A CErtain RemakeDHalo 4/23/11 2:11 p.m.
     Re: Ten Suggestions For A CErtain RemakeDHalo 4/23/11 2:08 p.m.
           We can rebuild it, we have the technologySonGoharotto 4/23/11 3:26 p.m.
                 Argh, want to reply to OP... *NM*SonGoharotto 4/23/11 3:29 p.m.
                 Re: We can rebuild it, we have the technologyQuirel 4/23/11 6:01 p.m.
                       Re: We can rebuild it, we have the technologySonGoharotto 4/24/11 8:09 a.m.
                             Re: We can rebuild it, we have the technologyQuirel 4/24/11 12:28 p.m.
                                   Re: We can rebuild it, we have the technologySonGoharotto 4/24/11 2:15 p.m.
                                         Re: We can rebuild it, we have the technologyQuirel 4/24/11 3:38 p.m.
                                               Re: We can rebuild it, we have the technologySonGoharotto 4/24/11 4:38 p.m.
                                                     Re: We can rebuild it, we have the technologyQuirel 4/24/11 10:22 p.m.
                                                           Re: We can rebuild it, we have the technologySonGoharotto 4/25/11 4:18 p.m.
     Re: Ten Suggestions For A CErtain RemakeBanditORR 4/23/11 2:13 p.m.
           Re: Ten Suggestions For A CErtain RemakeDani 4/23/11 2:18 p.m.
           Re: Ten Suggestions For A CErtain RemakeQuirel 4/23/11 5:49 p.m.
     "Softly Does It"Hyokin 4/23/11 2:17 p.m.
           Re: "Softly Does It"Dani 4/23/11 2:29 p.m.
                 Re: "Softly Does It"Hyokin 4/23/11 2:40 p.m.
                 Re: "Softly Does It"Kermit 4/23/11 2:58 p.m.
           Re: "Softly Does It"The BS Police 4/23/11 5:21 p.m.
                 Re: "Softly Does It"Hyokin 4/23/11 9:41 p.m.
                       Re: "Softly Does It"The BS Police 4/24/11 4:17 a.m.
                             Re: "Softly Does It"Joe Duplessie (SNIPE 316) 4/24/11 5:21 a.m.
                                   Re: "Softly Does It"The BS Police 4/24/11 6:19 a.m.
                                         Re: "Softly Does It"Joe Duplessie (SNIPE 316) 4/24/11 6:47 a.m.
                                               Re: "Softly Does It"The BS Police 4/24/11 7:13 a.m.
                                                     You just don't get it.Joe Duplessie (SNIPE 316) 4/24/11 7:29 a.m.
                                                           Re: You just don't get it.The BS Police 4/24/11 7:46 a.m.
                                                                 Re: You just don't get it.Kermit 4/24/11 8:37 a.m.
                                                                 Re: You just don't get it.Hyokin 4/24/11 11:59 a.m.
     I just don't care.uberfoop 4/23/11 3:16 p.m.
     Boo this man. *longish*Gravemind 4/23/11 6:23 p.m.
           Addendum.Gravemind 4/23/11 6:34 p.m.
           Re: Boo this man. *longish*Dani 4/23/11 6:52 p.m.
                 Re: Boo this man. *longish*DEEP NNN 4/23/11 7:05 p.m.
                       Re: Boo this man. *longish*Cody Miller 4/23/11 7:15 p.m.
                             Re: Boo this man. *longish*DEEP NNN 4/23/11 7:22 p.m.
           Re: Boo this man. *longish*Narcogen 4/24/11 11:12 p.m.
                 Re: Boo this man. *longish*Gravemind 4/25/11 2:35 p.m.
                       Re: Boo this man. *longish*Narcogen 4/26/11 1:48 a.m.
     Re: Ten Suggestions For A CErtain RemakeFyreWulff 4/23/11 6:59 p.m.
           I should addFyreWulff 4/23/11 7:02 p.m.
                 Re: I should addDani 4/23/11 7:16 p.m.
                       Re: I should addFyreWulff 4/23/11 7:21 p.m.
                             Re: I should addGeneral Vagueness 4/23/11 9:42 p.m.
                                   Re: I should addThe BS Police 4/24/11 8:36 a.m.
                                         Re: I should addGeneral Vagueness 4/24/11 11:09 a.m.
                                               Re: I should adduberfoop 4/24/11 2:06 p.m.
           Wait, what?uberfoop 4/24/11 2:25 a.m.
           Re: Ten Suggestions For A CErtain RemakeThe BS Police 4/24/11 4:12 a.m.
                 Before somebody takes that comment out of contextThe BS Police 4/24/11 6:26 a.m.
                       Re: Before somebody takes that comment out of contDEEP NNN 4/24/11 8:08 a.m.
                             Re: Before somebody takes that comment out of contThe BS Police 4/24/11 8:21 a.m.
           Re: Ten Suggestions For A CErtain RemakeGravemind 4/24/11 12:02 p.m.
     No new multiplayer!ElzarTheBam 4/23/11 7:00 p.m.
     Re: Ten Suggestions For A CErtain RemakeSEspider 4/25/11 1:23 a.m.
     "DUMB" are we?!SEspider 4/25/11 2:46 a.m.
           ::facepalm::Louis Wu 4/25/11 7:45 a.m.
                 Re: ::facepalm::Quirel 4/25/11 9:41 a.m.
                 Re: ::facepalm::CaneCutter 4/25/11 10:52 a.m.
                 Re: ::facepalm::Narcogen 4/26/11 1:53 a.m.
                       Re: ::facepalm::Dani 4/26/11 2:47 a.m.
                             Re: ::facepalm::Kermit 4/26/11 9:44 a.m.
                             Re: ::facepalm::Narcogen 4/27/11 12:12 a.m.
     HBO: Sarcasm? On the Internet? Impossible. *NM*General Vagueness 4/25/11 7:34 a.m.



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