It should be no surprise to people who have looked over BRH.numbera.com, or who know me even in passing, that I love Halo 2. The game is a lot of fun, and was obviously built with a lot of care. However, I’m always on the lookout for a good online game, especially one for the Xbox 360, since I really like what Microsoft has done with Live on their next-gen platform. However, no matter what game I’ve played, I’ve been disappointed. Halo 2′s approach to multiplayer has essentially spoiled me to all lesser implementations. From here on out, I expect three things from Live-enabled games. These three things have so far been present only in Halo 2:
- Matchmaking Parties
- Playlist Matchmaking
- Split Screen over Live
Matchmaking parties are a group of friends, who get together online to move through the matchmaking system as a unit. For example, me and three of my buddies can get together and join the Team Skirmish playlist in Halo 2. We’ll always be in the game together, no matter who else gets matched with us. This means we get to play 8-player matches, but we don’t need to set up a custom match. As a result, we get into matches quickly, and enjoy all the benefits of playlist matching. In contrast, while The Outfit allows me to play 2 on 2 and 3 on 3 team matches, it doesn’t allow me to enter the quick matchmaking with a friend as my teammate! This brings the likelyhood of me playing a team game down to about 0.
Playlist matchmaking was a feature of Halo 2 that actually received a lot of scorn early after the release of the game. The old way of getting a match going (and still the default way for many games) was to create a room, select the options, wait for people to join your room, wait for everybody to get ready, then play. With this strategy, getting a game together took a while, you have to make decisions about gametypes or maps or options, and you’re not very likely to switch things up between rounds, or play with different people. In Halo 2 (and some newer games) you simply select a playlist that contains the general type of games you want to play. A random, preconfigured game gets chosen from the playlist, you get matched with other people wanting to play that playlist, and you’re off. Combined with matchmaking parties, this means more time in the game, more variety, and a more diverse group of opponents.
Split screen over Live is one of those features that for the life of me I can’t understand why it isn’t default everywhere. In Halo 2, or Crimson Skies, or a small handful of other games, you can have two or more people connected to your console, on your TV, while you are online playing with other people. This means, for example, that me and my girlfriend can both play Halo 2 online with our friends back East simultaneously. Amazingly, this capability is rare in Live games. X-Men Legends 2, the online successor to a great party game, allows only one person online at once, even though it doesn’t even need to split the screen for multiple people. Burnout Revenge is the same way. The game has split screen multiplayer, and online multiplayer, but never the two shall meet. Perhaps it’s a good assumption that most gamers only play games by themselves, but I would imagine a situation where the Xbox is shared between members of a household is pretty common.
The lack of any one of these three features basically kills an online game for me. And I really can’t understand it – most game developers must have played Halo 2. Why can’t they just rip off these ideas? Why aren’t these features part of the Microsoft livensing guidelines? Can it really be that the designers of a great game like The Outfit, which is really a multiplayer-only game, never tried to play their game online with friends?
Here’s hoping the next generation of games truly understands online multiplayer the way Bungie does. And here’s hoping Bungie comes up with 3 new indispensable features for Halo 3.
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