Gearbox Rumored to be Working on Halo 4

[D3ads]

Or it could be that in commenting, they'll be shot for breaking the NDA

[Jetsetlemming]

I played Halo 1 and 2 on Xbox, and Halo: Combat Evolved on PC. Halo 1 was playable in spite its horrible level design and stale premise- the only element out of it I found interesting was the behavior of plasma grenades. The enemy behaviors and entertaining reactions to grenades kept me going to the end. Halo 2 had a cool segment on Earth and then went to shit and was a much worse game than Halo 1. The PC port was even worse due to the age by the time I got around to playing it.

In contrast:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timesplitters

2000 Playstation 2 launch title. Took the quake style superfast movement and fun physics and behavior, a groovy soundtrack, a bullshit time traveling premise as an excuse for awesome levels spread across time and genres, and an absolutely great game. Timesplitters 2 in 2002 took the original game and added a genuine single player campaign and made the graphics better. Future Perfect is a goddamn amazing game. Fuck, the Timesplitters games even have LEVEL EDITORS! I'm almost exclusively a PC gamer, and I LOVE Timesplitters, and wish this console-only FPS series was on PC. Halo? Just overhyped banality.

[Zacker]

Isn't gearbox working on Colonial Marines? (aliens) Gues sthey are big enough to do 2 then

Gearbox currently has 5 titles in development...

[Izuno]

Or it could be that in commenting, they'll be shot for breaking the NDA

That's my guess. In all fairness to Gearbox guys, please give us your input when it's allowed/appropriate...and when you are out of HH crunch.

(ironically that's on topic)

back off topic which has actually become the new topic of this thread:

I've always believed that Halo 1 did a lot of things fairly well, just not great, and somehow the combination of these "kinda good things" became a great game on the Xbox mainly because of the the absense of great games at the console's launch. Add on Microsoft marketing power to make Halo the table top game of the Xbox and you get a brand phenomenon. Peronally, I played Mercernaries on Xbox WAAAAAAAY more than I ever did Halo even though Halo had roughly 10 times the sales of Mercs. I would give Mercs a 10/10 if I reviewed and Halo would be somewhere lower.

So Halo's success wasn't just because it did a lot of things fairly well (rather than awesome, imo) but also because what the hell else were you going to play on the Xbox at the time? It was the first shooter to control fairly well (ok, maybe not driving but what else did you have back in 2001/2002 to compare to in a shooter game on Xbox, remember?) and at the time It just felt good in your hands, even with the big fat duke controller. I just wanted to play it because the feel of it in my hands was empowering and different than my beloved mouse/kb combination. Microsoft took that energy and just ran with it. Oh boy did they run.

Bottom line, I've liked a lot of other console games more despite having no where near the sales of Halo, yet I'm not going to argue that Halo does not deserve the sales that it has achieved. It got what it got because that's what the marketplace wanted, whether through marketing influence or not. If the market did not want it to sell 400 trillion copies in 37 seconds after launch, it would not have happened.

Ok...now I'm eager to play some Mercs 2 when it comes out...

[dux]

I really like Halo, never palyed the other two however. I have lots of issues with the halo games but my biggest of all is the endings. These outdo hl2 in everyway. BITE. HAND.

[-HP-]

I really like Halo, never palyed the other two however. I have lots of issues with the halo games but my biggest of all is the endings. These outdo hl2 in everyway. BITE. HAND.

I tottaly agree with you.

I played the first on PC, it was a good game, but it was just about it, a good game, to play and move on.

[Furyo]

I think what most of you guys aren't seeing is the generation gap there is for this game. If you think of guys who were born after 1985, Halo on the console is to them what Doom was on the PC for us. Even Goldeneye was our game and not theirs, they were nearly 12 then. To that generation, like my own cousin's, who I need to tell everything about the Sega vs Nintendo days, what Sonic used to be like and so on and so forth, Halo was the very first shooter they ever played.

They could have played other shooters before, but they were either too young, or just not enough "in the know". No other shooter caught the mainstream audience like Halo has. Couple that with Microsoft's marketing department, quite possibly the best in any company, and you get yourself the halo phenomenon.

[-HP-]

That is quite an interesting point of view Furyo

[Taylor]

I imagine a lot of the people indifferent to the experience played the PC port, which wasn't redesigned for the keyboard, mouse and F6 mashing conventions of the platform, and was probably a lesser experience as a result. And, let’s be honest, most PC gamers who refer to themselves as such absolutely detest consoles and, at the very least, there would be an air of pessimism when playing [their pirated copy].

[Sentura]

I think what most of you guys aren't seeing is the generation gap there is for this game. If you think of guys who were born after 1985, Halo on the console is to them what Doom was on the PC for us. Even Goldeneye was our game and not theirs, they were nearly 12 then. To that generation, like my own cousin's, who I need to tell everything about the Sega vs Nintendo days, what Sonic used to be like and so on and so forth, Halo was the very first shooter they ever played.

They could have played other shooters before, but they were either too young, or just not enough "in the know". No other shooter caught the mainstream audience like Halo has. Couple that with Microsoft's marketing department, quite possibly the best in any company, and you get yourself the halo phenomenon.

i sort of disagree. i was born in '86 and doom was my first shooter. i reckon that people my age were exposed earlier than previous generations, due to computers having a greater influence in daily life. from what i've always heard of younger generations, CS or CS:S has been the first choice of shooters. i bet this is because most homes would have a computer before they would have a console.

with the ps2/xbox/gamecube console era, it is probable that most kids didn't just get a console or had as much knowledge about shooters on consoles, especially considering the pc was still in power back in 2000-2004. hell, i didn't get my first console until late 2005, and even then it was only for multiplayer games.

[Erratic]

I think all the theories and reasoning being brought up for its success are all noise, really. When you have to start theorizing why something is successful you're probably just over thinking things. The fact is it's probably just a really good game.

I share similar sentiments towards the Metal Gear series as of recent, 4 really didn't do anything for me, but it doesn't stop me from understanding why others like the game and what makes it such a huge success.

Though I still hold the original game in very high regard, so maybe I'm partial to it.

[Jetsetlemming]

I think what most of you guys aren't seeing is the generation gap there is for this game. If you think of guys who were born after 1985, Halo on the console is to them what Doom was on the PC for us. Even Goldeneye was our game and not theirs, they were nearly 12 then. To that generation, like my own cousin's, who I need to tell everything about the Sega vs Nintendo days, what Sonic used to be like and so on and so forth, Halo was the very first shooter they ever played.

They could have played other shooters before, but they were either too young, or just not enough "in the know". No other shooter caught the mainstream audience like Halo has. Couple that with Microsoft's marketing department, quite possibly the best in any company, and you get yourself the halo phenomenon.

I was born in '88 and my first shooter was Wolfenstein 3d. My first experience with videogames were a pack of Shareware games on CD in DOS when I was 5.

I learned to read thanks to adventure games!

[Bluestrike]

Born in 77 and my first shooter was duke3d :-P

[Furyo]

Jetset, obviously there will be exceptions thrown here and there by Mapcorians, but really if any of us considers himself part of the mainstream audience, he really needs a reality check. The very fact we're spending time online discussing things makes us part of the top 1% of the most savvy gamers around, let alone the fact we actually make games for a living (well many of us at least).

And even if Duke/Wolfenstein/Doom were your first shooters to play, no one will argue that you had to be in a pretty particular group of people to know these games even existed when they came out. You had to have the PC that would run them, something very few people were even interested in at the time, and there was no marketing to speak of, this was all word of mouth, you played these games because you had heard about them or someone had given you their copy.

When you compare those days to the huge marketing effort that a few games like Halo and Gears of War get from Microsoft, the differences are just gigantic, and yes to the vast majority of young gamers, Halo may be the gateway to other shooters, but it's less than likely the other way around.

I've seen CS mentioned, but even that, when it came out even officially, wasn't anywhere near as mainstream as Halo's marketing campaign. And in pure practical terms, before Steam, playing Valve multiplayer games still belonged to the Stone Age of video gaming. Again, as far away from mainstream as you can possibly get. It took dedicated hardcore fans and players to even care downloading that new patch and that new update every so often. As a reminder, steam only came out in 2003, two years after Halo was already rocking the xbox world.

[Erratic]

I've seen CS mentioned, but even that, when it came out even officially, wasn't anywhere near as mainstream as Halo's marketing campaign. And in pure practical terms, before Steam, playing Valve multiplayer games still belonged to the Stone Age of video gaming. Again, as far away from mainstream as you can possibly get. It took dedicated hardcore fans and players to even care downloading that new patch and that new update every so often. As a reminder, steam only came out in 2003, two years after Halo was already rocking the xbox world.

I dunno, I wouldn't call the most played PC game of its time far from the mainstream. Chances are if you played PC games at all, you knew what CS was. A lot has changed in the last 8 years with all the 'hardcore 'casual' non sense that gets thrown around. Most PC gamers in general were dedicated to it, downloading patches was as normal as anything else. There wasn't really a 'mainstream' or 'underground' that I can remember, it was just gaming.