I agree that "what would've been" was a shame.

I would like to see HALO PC's stats in the several months prior to the launch (and non-launch, heh) of HALO 2 (PC) and of the HALO 3 beta. Sales of a prequel always go up when a sequel is launched. For instance, Gearbox made a little money when HALO PC got popular again after the release of HALO 2. The HALO 3 beta was a pretty big event. Surely it impacted sales (and then plays) of HALO PC.

Still, it was a popular game and probably not much less popular than it is now. More on HALO PC's current stats later.

The netcode for HALO PC was unfortunate. The way Gearbox handled themselves publicly after launch was also unfortunate (think Randy Pitchford making forum posts blaming Microsoft and then those posts being deleted). This divided the hardcore community that was active in online forums and blogs (did they have blogs back then?). People that followed the game could tell that Gearbox and Microsoft weren't getting along. More later on how the community was divided again in a minute.

Gearbox says that the netcode was Microsoft's fault because of the requirement to support 56K users. I believe them - even though posts were deleted and words said. It's a shame that Gearbox publicly denies that the game lags on lan. It does and did at every CPL event.

Gearbox also tried to change the gameplay. The reason why Infinity is such a large map is because they pushed for Master Chief to run faster than he does in HALO Combat Evolved. Making a map on that assumed change is ridiculous. It almost undermines Bungie and the HALO canon. Infinity was dreaded by a lot chunk of the community.

Let's look at the top online game right now:

http://archive.gamespy.com/stats/

#1: 36787 servers, 66625 players HL
#2: 28952 servers, 64805 players HL2
#3: 5402 servers, 14255 players BF2
#10: 927 servers, 2643 players HALO PC
#19: 274 servers, 1135 players HALO PC demo
#32: 168 servers, 311 players HALO Custom Edition

By the way, Bungie.net says "19,578 Players Online in Halo 3 beta" and "45,578 Players Online in Halo 2" right now.

Wow. HL and HL2 still have something going for them. HL, a PC game released in 1998 is still more popular than XBOX's best offerings. Actually, it's about as popular as all of the online HALO offerings (XBOX and PC versions of the games). Amazing if you ask me.

I think it's neat to see how the XBOX world and the PC world are split. Look how much attention HALO 2 gets in the media. Now look how popular Counter-Strike (HL) still is. I think it's cool to think about what game you hear about the most and think about the web that you surf.

Neat to see HALO PC in the Top 10 after all of these years. It is not too far from being a Top 5 game. Just a few more thousand gamers and it would be in there. Of course, it would require a few more thousand games online at one time. This means the install base would have to be several times higher than it is now. That would be hundreds of thousands of more copies being sold. So, maybe it's not close to being a Top 5 game.

HALO Custom Edition was unfortunate also. It basically split the small HALO PC community into half. Instead of making the now number #10 most popular online PC shooter better and more popular, they killed the would-be synergy to birth the #32 most popular PC shooter. HALO Custom Edition was dead less than 6 months after its launch. More people play the HALO PC demo than HALO Custom Edition. I've been online with HALO Custom Edition when less than 100 people have been online.

If HALO PC supported everything in HALO Custom Edition, more players would be playing HALO PC today. The way mapping and playing maps unfolded was unfortunate.

What's the point of allowing the community to create custom maps if there's no way to download custom maps in the game? There's not even a way to find where the maps are stored from inside the game. You're not even told the name of the map you need.

You'll be playing a Custom Edition game, the game will end, and a new map will load. During that time, you will be suddenly kicked from the game. What did you do wrong? You weren't online keeping up to date with the several HALO Custom Edition mapping and modding websites downloading the latest maps.

To continue playing HALO Custom Edition, you really need to subscribe to several websites and download and install tons of maps. This killed HALO Custom Edition and ended up costing HALO PC in the long run. HALO Custom Edition's purpose was to play on custom maps. The game itself practically made it impossible.

HALO Custom Edition was a virtual extension a certain collection of online websites that dealt with modding and mapping HALO PC.

At least HALO 2 (PC) will download custom maps from the dedicated server. This is the way most games handle new players playing on maps that they don't have - the dedicated server will upload the files to the user's hard drive.

By the way, HALO PC got a 9.0/10 from Gamespot! Great score. HALO 2 (PC) only got a 7.0/10. That's a little low for a HALO title. We haven't seen a score that low ever for a HALO title.

Gearbox had something lined up. Gearbox was working on Brothers in Arms while HALO PC was being developed. They didn't want to support the game even though Microsoft funded them to do it. Gearbox kept saying that they were out of money. Yet, they had plenty of money to invest in Brothers in Arms.

In the end, Gearbox made out like a champ. They got a (I think) 10 year deal with Ubisoft to make Brothers in Arms.

Unfortunately for me, BiA ended up being a bust for me. It was buggy and I could see right through the hype of being able to command your squad. I got my name in the game manual and didn't play the game more than 20 hours.

Here are some videos of the aimbots which are found in HALO PC.

The tenth most popular PC game doesn't have police punishing the bad guys from aimbotting. That's why a dedicated server community was important. Moderators could boot/ban the bad guys in a heartbeat.

I've never been absolutely owned in HALO PC. I've met a handful of gamers that were as good as me. However, many times I suspected wall-hacking that Gearbox never could detect. Wall-hacking (being able to see through walls) started happening shortly after the release of the game. Randy Pitchford said that HALO PC wouldn't be hacked. He said that aimbots wouldn't be developed. He said that Punkbuster is overrated. Gross statements.

I am able to detect aimbotters (especially in Blood Gulch). Blood Gulch has a "flow" to it. It has channels of movement that the "leet" gamer takes and plays. Often times, an aimbotter would be "owning" everyone from an obscure (actually insecure location). When someone owns like that, they don't care about protecting them selves with the geometry available to them. They don't have to.

Even through all this crap, HALO PC was the most fun I had gaming. I met so many neat people - people that I have later met in person - some of which have stayed at my house on occasion. It was a fun game despite its flaws. Long live HBO-COERCE and the cooked Gamers.

Halo PC was both the most fun and the most frustration I've ever had. There was a Randy Pitchford sitting at CPL Summer 2005 though. He arrived in jeans and a hat and did his absolute best to stay away from the Halo tourney area, and never came into the BYOC. Even though I wasn't top of the line, I still get called a hacker in pub servers when I do play from time to time. :\

DJ

First off I live in Ireland... I'm very torn by Halo PC I have to admit.. I love the game, love HALO and was lucky enuff to be workign in m$ when it was rolling in Ireland for the first time. So my first experience of HALO was playing in our building lobby on those two player demo stations.. class times!

When I heard about it I pre ordered HALO PC and couldn't wait to play. Had to resolve multiple driver issues and patches to get it working but loved it none the less. When broadband (adsl) hit Dublin I moved to the multiplayer, always playing never hosting as my connection is not good enuff and the US ppl complained of lag. Even on good days my ping is barely below 100 so I suffer at the hands of people from the US. If I join something and see a HOST 0 ping.. I probably won't stay cos I just won't be able to compete.

I've taken to joining an irish forum to try and get some Irish ppl on for games to level the playing field as even playing on multiple pcs in the same place isn't great.

With regards to AIMBOTs I don't know alot about netcode etc etc but I get kicked or banned from servers frequently and accused of AIMBOTTING just because you get a killing spree. Too many ppl on PC seem to like being big fish in small ponds and dominating the one gametype and map they play.

I love the game and return to it often but just wish something could have been done to tighten up the stuff like that that kills us good to average players. the now orpahned PC version still pulls a lot of ppl back to play and I won't be upgrading to Vista just to play H2.

Here's hoping the falling leave system works and XP users can try it

Aw, the days of ranting on gearbox forums, learning how far you had to lead your pistol based on ping on all the different servers to get a 3 shot kill, and LANs playing worse than a 30 ping server. This was the game that I had been waiting for for so long. I was so frustrated with the game, and so pissed with the lack of support and lies coming from everyone on the development side, I literally uninstalled the game at the CPL when we were eliminated.

Only good thing that came out of it was meeting rapture and the cG crew :)

Halo PC was probably the best/most fun game I have ever played despite its flaws. I had so much fun with my old clan and just hanging out in servers. I was in it from the day it came out. Though around the time when Halo 2 came around I stopped playing. I used to be so hardcore at this game, definitely one of the few games I can admit truly mastering. After playing some of the best clans(mainly the original KW clans ie. RoT, IAA,OLD, GC/SB, FOX, DD), people I played on xbox and in person just seemed pathetic. I never got into the whole Halo CE thing though....people on their always pissed my off with their "exclusive maps" "come to Halo CE or die" *cough*nitrousoxide*cough*. I stopped playing around the time the dreaded "aimbot" came out....which was created by a so-called fan, that later sent out some BS apology for making it, and it just somehow "happened" to get leaked. It is a shame though, once in a while I still play around with some old friends that still play, but even they find it fustrating now due to aimbots and wall hacks. But to this day I think Halo PC>Halo 2/Halo 3 beta, it was a game that took skill.

Perfect example here of Gearbox spewing technical mumbo jumbo, as I said in my post, to be used as a smoke screen. The fact is, good networking code is hard to write. Halo2, from what I can tell, uses a similar system to one found in most modern games. For those interested it is documented fairly well here:

http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Lag_Compensation

I can imagine a system like the one documented above, is extremely hard to write especially when you have a set budget. Even in the document it says, “replicating the necessary fields to the client and handling all of the intermediate state is a fair amount of work”. So prototyping something like that, for a game you aren't familiar and really just porting, could potentially be a huge time drain.

A few years back the Quake 3 source was released under GPL license. From what I've read it seems fairly obvious Gearbox copied Quake 3 networking paradigm for Halo PC. It could just be a coincidence, but several Gearbox employees did work at ID. From the Quake 3 wikipedia:

The reason for weird ping numbers you'd get in Halo PC was because the server updated the client “at a fixed rate”. It is obvious the fixed rate couldn't go below 33, why I have no idea. However this was most likely the reason for the lag on LAN environments.

Was a fun time at that LAN.

I hope we hook up again T3!

You could get pings as low as 6ms on LAN though, but only if you used a listen server :).

DJ