No Online Co-op in Halo 3

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Northbridge

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 23, 2007
Messages
225
In the latest issues of EGM, it's reported that online co-op isn't happening, yet. "We're not dumb," says Bungie's Frank O'Conner. "We know that people want it and we're trying to make it happen. I think the biggest problem for us for online co-op is that we have a situation where you can be in a Warthog with five troops, almost a mile away from the other player. That's a significant challenge. And there's lots of design things you could do to prevent that from happening, but they would make it not feel like Halo anymore. If we can make it happen in a way that works well, we will - and if it works badly, we won't.
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I cant believe this, no online co-op! That was the selling point to me. After playing Gears co-op online I demand nothing less. (who cares what I demand though :p )

As far as it being technically feasible I believe its possible. Someone remind me if I'm wrong but in Halo:CE did the second player not get teleported closer to the first player whenever a check point was reached or the distance was too far between them? Halo:CE was playable through gamespy arcade when there was no such thing as Xbox live, you just connected the xbox to your lan and gamespy picked it up. You cant tell me that online co-op is not feasible now when it worked perfectly fine back then.
 
Northbridge said:
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I cant believe this, no online co-op! That was the selling point to me. After playing Gears co-op online I demand nothing less. (who cares what I demand though :p )

As far as it being technically feasible I believe its possible. Someone remind me if I'm wrong but in Halo:CE did the second player not get teleported closer to the first player whenever a check point was reached or the distance was too far between them? Halo:CE was playable through gamespy arcade when there was no such thing as Xbox live, you just connected the xbox to your lan and gamespy picked it up. You cant tell me that online co-op is not feasible now when it worked perfectly fine back then.
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And Pong totally has no lag, man. Why can't they do that now? :p


In all seriousness, I want online co-op in the worst way, but you can't compare two different engines and say "well it used to work!" because the graphics have come a long way since then.
 
aramis said:
And Pong totally has no lag, man. Why can't they do that now? :p


In all seriousness, I want online co-op in the worst way, but you can't compare two different engines and say "well it used to work!" because the graphics have come a long way since then.
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But so has the hardware, and bandwidth.

It seemed to work fine in GoW, R6:V and GRAW 2. Granted they are all different, but there are ways to make it work. In GRAW 2 players could be on exact opposite sides of the maps doing their own things.
 
It probably caused to much of a system load now. With graphics being pushed already. Then you got to calculate and add bandwidth and lag to the situation. They are probably having problems keeping a decent frame rate. I think they are just rushing the game so it can sell for christmas most likely.
 
Conker said:
It probably caused to much of a system load now. With graphics being pushed already. Then you got to calculate and add bandwidth and lag to the situation. They are probably having problems keeping a decent frame rate. I think they are just rushing the game so it can sell for christmas most likely.
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I think the rush part is correct. From the gameplay and screens ive seen Halo3 doesnt look as good as GoW by a long shot, so i dont think its necessarily the load. Although i could be dead wrong.
 
I think the biggest problem for us for online co-op is that we have a situation where you can be in a Warthog with five troops, almost a mile away from the other player.
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The levels in Halo are usually larger then that of other games. Especially Gears of War and say Rainbow Six: Vegas. They're looking for a way to pull it off, in a way so you don't have a senario like what he mentions in the quote. He's not saying there won't be online co-op, but he's also not saying it won't be there. If you take his word for it they're still working on it.

I'm hoping they include online co-op. I will be somewhat dissapointed if it doesn't have it.
 
4saken said:
I think the rush part is correct. From the gameplay and screens ive seen Halo3 doesnt look as good as GoW by a long shot, so i dont think its necessarily the load. Although i could be dead wrong.
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Nah, if they were rushing for Xmas they wouldn't have set September as the launch month, they'd have held it to October or November when the big pushes happen.

Now, on the Gears front, what does look as good? LOL.
 
The Halo 3/Gears of War comparisons are a tad ridiculous, if you ask me. There's no doubt Gears of War looks great, and is still one of the best looking 360 games to date... but the game would not look that good if the levels were as open as they are in Halo 3, and had the same amount of characters on the screen at one time.

It's kind of maddening that GoW has become the graphical standard EVERY game is measured against, no matter what the genre, game dynamics, etc. "Madden looks like ass! I don't care if it has a large stadium with thousands of fans, and 22 players on the field, some refs, and more in the sidelines. It SHOULD look as good as a game with small levels and no more then 10 or so people on the screen at once." ;)
 
graw 2 can do it, that has reasonably sized maps. Pretty lame that there will be no online coop. They need to make it work.
 
Odd how the news has gone from 4 player online co-op to none. That said, there's a big difference between Halo 3 and a number of the games mentioned here that have online co-op. Hopefully they'll work it out though.

Oh, and for the record I think Halo 3 looks better than Gears. People need to take a look at some of the screenshots for Gears and understand that most of the reason it looks so pretty come down to art direction. The textures and models really aren't that impressive close up.
 
Psychotext said:
Odd how the news has gone from 4 player online co-op to none. That said, there's a big difference between Halo 3 and a number of the games mentioned here that have online co-op. Hopefully they'll work it out though.

Oh, and for the record I think Halo 3 looks better than Gears. People need to take a look at some of the screenshots for Gears and understand that most of the reason it looks so pretty come down to art direction. The textures and models really aren't that impressive close up.
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Only if your rub sand in your eyes and look through frosted windows at Gears.
 
I'm pretty sure Gears uses ingame graphics for cutscenes, and if thats true, wouldn't it be... uh... cuscenes graphics = good = in game graphics?
 
]I'm pretty sure Gears uses ingame graphics for cutscenes, and if thats true, wouldn't it be.
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Sort of. Cut-scenes are highly-polished graphical presentations of the game. They go over and tweak the scene again and again to make it feel as cinematic as possible, and look as good as possible. In-game is different because you can walk up close to something and see how ugly a low-res texture looks up close, or find an area where the lighting doesn't look so great. A good example of this the recently released Killzone cinematic trailer, and the gameplay they released. The cinematic trailer just looks amazing. The lighting and angles are perfect. Then you see the gameplay, and it doesn't look nearly as epic. It looks just like a game.

Anyway, I suspect there are good reasons for this. It's not as if Bungie is full of evil assholes who don't want you to enjoy your purchase. The levels in H3 are supposed to be vastly larger than the levels on the original 'box, thanks to the increased power of the 360. The levels on the Xbox were small because they had to be. That limitation isn't there any more.

As for H3, graphics, the SP is looking pretty damned good atm...

H3.jpg
 
The only technical reason why theirs no online coop is that bungi doesn't have the skills to implement it. To say that Halo 3's graphics are too much for coop or whatever that is just bullshit. So does the game get a HUGE graphics degrade if coop is played locally? Theres no graphics issue when playing online other then your engine sucks at handling network latencys. I bet they are using a modified Halo 2 engine seeing how its not such a huge leap graphically.

My reason would be that XLive can't handle it, there are plenty of examples of online games getting their player counts cut when going to X360 yet games on the PS3 are able to handle up to 40 players without lag.

If you want an example, look at HAZE for the PS3, X360 and PC. It will have 4 player coop online and the game looks dam good. Hell MGS4 will have online capablities and it looks far better then Halo 3. Merc 2 will also support online coop and it has a larger enviroment and fully destructible.
 
Northbridge said:
Link

I cant believe this, no online co-op! That was the selling point to me. After playing Gears co-op online I demand nothing less. (who cares what I demand though :p )

As far as it being technically feasible I believe its possible. Someone remind me if I'm wrong but in Halo:CE did the second player not get teleported closer to the first player whenever a check point was reached or the distance was too far between them? Halo:CE was playable through gamespy arcade when there was no such thing as Xbox live, you just connected the xbox to your lan and gamespy picked it up. You cant tell me that online co-op is not feasible now when it worked perfectly fine back then.
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Who cares... you know you're gonna play it anyway. Besides, don't people usually play Halo on one tv with more people, which makes it more enjoyable? (Idk... I don't play Halo)
 
Psychotext said:
I'll happily pull up some comparison screenshots if you like. Gears only looked utterly fantastic in the cutscenes.
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Touched up screenshots from an unreleased game vs what is widely considered one of the best looking games out there that I've played and compared to every other game I've ever played before in my life.

My eyes win. Besides, screenies are useless. I remember seeing screenies of GOW that made it look terrible and sony fanboys going lolol bad grafix!!1 And the screenies were in fact bad. I've played it for a long time now and it never stops amazing me how good it looks in motion though.
 
So we'll stick with: You have my opinion, I have mine.

Re the co-op not being done because of graphics. Bungie never said anything like that... the main reason so far seems to be that synchronising the AI and Physics over the sort of map size you'll see in Halo 3 is a very difficult thing indeed when you're dealing with lag.

The "not enough power" thing came from this forum.
 
Psychotext said:
I'll happily pull up some comparison screenshots if you like. Gears only looked utterly fantastic in the cutscenes.
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Yep, you look at the screens in H3 and they're just as good, if not better, than anything in Gears.

http://xbox360media.ign.com/xbox360/image/article/803/803187/halo-3-20070711001718824.jpg

http://xbox360media.ign.com/xbox360/image/article/803/803187/halo-3-20070711001713324.jpg

If you're easily wowed by bloom effects and brown and black covering everything, you might say that Gears looks far better. But, in my experience, it's far harder to make the environments in H3 (trees, vivid colors with few blacks) look as good as the environments in Gears (broken concrete, tons of browns, blacks, and greys).

Here are a few shots of Gears:

http://xbox360media.ign.com/xbox360/image/article/741/741993/gears-of-war-20061026042957834.jpg

http://xbox360media.ign.com/xbox360/image/article/740/740030/gears-of-war-20061018104610397.jpg

I have a hard time calling one significantly better than the other. My personal preference lies with Halo but that's just personal taste. I am tired of people bashing Halo's graphics though. I guess some people are too damned dumb to realize that the multiplayer beta will not be reprensentative of the single player final release.
 
|MaguS| said:
The only technical reason why theirs no online coop is that bungi doesn't have the skills to implement it.
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I doubt it. They've had split screen co-op since the original, and if they have the skills to implement the online system they're going to have, along with a very feature filled movie editing and playback/sharing system, they probably have some guys with the skills to do some online co-op.

My reason would be that XLive can't handle it, there are plenty of examples of online games getting their player counts cut when going to X360 yet games on the PS3 are able to handle up to 40 players without lag.
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...And I can name an original Xbox game that had up to 50 player online multiplayer. The biggest downside to Live though, is when you have people hosting matches who don't have the connections for it.
 
|MaguS| said:
The only technical reason why theirs no online coop is that bungi doesn't have the skills to implement it.
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Highly unlikely. After all, Bungie did create a seamless mutliplayer on H2, the most popular online console game ever on the most popular online console service to date (XBL).

If anybody can do it right, it's Bungie.
 
I still stand by my position of whats wrong with just using teleportation like they did in the other titles. You are most likely to be close together anyways because it is online co-op. It wont really detract from the experience. It works on lan and it should work on xbox live except with some increased latency and maybe frame rate issues. What am I missing here that makes this not work?
 
Considering you have to pay for XBL, I'm surprised that XBL doesn't have dedicated servers to do the hosting..... >.> ... yea off topic but that just hit me >.>
 
Northbridge said:
I still stand by my position of whats wrong with just using teleportation like they did in the other titles. You are most likely to be close together anyways because it is online co-op. It wont really detract from the experience. It works on lan and it should work on xbox live except with some increased latency and maybe frame rate issues. What am I missing here that makes this not work?
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I remember on Silent Cartographer going all the way around the island to grab the other warthog without my buddy so we could both have one right from the start. You only teleport at a checkpoint.

As for the whoel GoW vs. Halo 3 argument, let's just agree that both games look fucking fantastic.
 
Conker said:
It probably caused to much of a system load now. With graphics being pushed already. Then you got to calculate and add bandwidth and lag to the situation. They are probably having problems keeping a decent frame rate. I think they are just rushing the game so it can sell for christmas most likely.
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graphics being pushed? the graphics on halo3 look rubbish compared to cod3 which aint even that great either..

i wont be surprised if halo3 was a failure. no way is it gunna be better and outsell cod4, UT3, and bioshock.. too much competition this time round halo fans :)

Halo 3 looks fantastic? not to me and its silly comparing it with GOW has it looks 10x better than halo 3
 
jonneymendoza said:
i wont be surprised if halo3 was a failure. no way is it gunna be better and outsell cod4, UT3, and bioshock.. too much competition this time round halo fans :)

Halo 3 looks fantastic? not to me and its silly comparing it with GOW has it looks 10x better than halo 3
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1: It was announced some time back that Halo 3 has 5 million pre-orders. Probably more by now.
2: I'm going to assume you didn't even bother looking at the links above. Sure, I can understand why some people would prefer Gears but 10x better? Give me a break.
 
Rocketpig said:
Yep, you look at the screens in H3 and they're just as good, if not better, than anything in Gears.

http://xbox360media.ign.com/xbox360/image/article/803/803187/halo-3-20070711001718824.jpg

http://xbox360media.ign.com/xbox360/image/article/803/803187/halo-3-20070711001713324.jpg

If you're easily wowed by bloom effects and brown and black covering everything, you might say that Gears looks far better. But, in my experience, it's far harder to make the environments in H3 (trees, vivid colors with few blacks) look as good as the environments in Gears (broken concrete, tons of browns, blacks, and greys).

Here are a few shots of Gears:

http://xbox360media.ign.com/xbox360/image/article/741/741993/gears-of-war-20061026042957834.jpg

http://xbox360media.ign.com/xbox360/image/article/740/740030/gears-of-war-20061018104610397.jpg

I have a hard time calling one significantly better than the other. My personal preference lies with Halo but that's just personal taste. I am tired of people bashing Halo's graphics though. I guess some people are too damned dumb to realize that the multiplayer beta will not be reprensentative of the single player final release.
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Halo 3's gfx are nice, but [technically] they cant compare to Gears. Judging from the H3 SP screenshots the game environments and characters have a very low polygon count. Master Chief himself looks to have the same poly count as he did in Halo 2. The only real improvement is in the textures, lighting and shader effects which look really cool. Gears on the other hand had high resolution models and equally good lighting and shader effects.

Artistically though, they are both good looking games. I always loved the art style of Halo. Suitably futuristic but natural at the same time. I didnt really like 1930's architectural style of the Gears world. It didnt seem to fit the futuristic setting. It felt more like world war 2 Europe than a far off planet. It looked fantastic but the art was definitely an acquired taste.
 
Part of the reason why Gow may look better than Halo 3 is down 2 things already stated. Art direction (colourful world vs grey/dark world) and also the open-ended nature of halo vs the closed/set-routes of Gow. I'm not saying one is superior to the other but it's food for thought.
 
Skirrow said:
Halo 3's gfx are nice, but [technically] they cant compare to Gears. Judging from the H3 SP screenshots the game environments and characters have a very low polygon count. Master Chief himself looks to have the same poly count as he did in Halo 2.
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Did it ever occur to you that Bungie didn't waste massive numbers of polygons on MC because for 95% of the game, you don't even see him?

I would argue that the poly counts in H3's backgrounds are better than Gears. Epic used a lot of blacks and haze to hide the fact that their backgrounds in Gears aren't that great. Add in the fact that most of the time you're looking at rubble and rock and it only compounds the fact that Epic focused on the characters (because it's a TPS) at the expense of the background.

Don't get me wrong, I think Gears is beautiful but I think those screens of H3 look better.

In any case, you can't say one is significantly better than the other.

Again, look at these screens:

http://xbox360media.ign.com/xbox360/image/article/803/803187/halo-3-20070711001713324.jpg

http://xbox360media.ign.com/xbox360/image/article/740/740030/gears-of-war-20061018104610397.jpg

I have a hard time saying that Gears is technically superior to the lush backgrounds of Halo. Look at the blur and the bloom effects hiding the inferior textures in the background.
 
it seems there are alot of people in this thread hoping halo fails, why? what does it matter?
 
Trimlock said:
it seems there are alot of people in this thread hoping halo fails, why? what does it matter?
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People hoping Killzone 2 lives up to the promise of Killzone; that it's gonna be a Halo-killer. In order for that to happen, Halo 3 is REALLY gonna have to suck.
 
I don't think anyone can say Halo 3 is not living up the hype yet. I will wait till a week or two after release to give my opinion. I know the multiplayer beta somewhat decreased my expectations of the game. (not to say the beta was bad, it just wasn't the god all end all multiplayer Halo fans made it out to be)
 
I don't really care what people are saying, i think it looks damn nice. So I already pre ordered it, the only thing that bugs me is that I recall reading some statement that they are going to concentrate more on multiplayer and that is a big disappointment for me. As much as I love multiplayer gameplay, I don't much like deathmatches and those kind of thing that much. I want them to cncentrate on single player or co-op part of the game.

Hopefully they had a good breakthrough on a gameplay system that'll be fun and good like Gears did.
 
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