Halo What on the Whatnow?
Halo 2, on Windows Vista. Halo 2, you may remember, is a "shoot them up" featuring the adventures of Master Chief and his wacky sidekick, Cortana. Well, Halo 2 you know about, but Vista, what the heck is that?
Windows Vista is the next generation Microsoft operating system that will by turns, be sweet, awesome, radical, and potentially translucent (in places). It will also add layers of new functionality, speed, media processing and so on. I have heard a rumor, in fact, that it will replicate a lot of the functionality of them new-fangled Media Center PCs so that you can stream HD and whatnot to your Xbox 360. If that's true, that would also be nice.
The game WILL be for Windows Vista, as in, not for Windows XP, so you have a while to get used to that and complain to me about what a jerk I am to Windows 3.1 users.
But back to Halo 2. We're working with another team at MS to make this not only happen, but happen in a super-sweet radical fashion. To that end, we're going to be helping with a lot of aspects, but don't worry, we are not doing the actual coding work – we're too busy with ONP (Our Next Project). In fact, a lot of you spotted the job postings at Bungie.net asking for, "programmers who are awesome at programming Halo 2 Xbox to work on a PC," and other subtle clues.
Using your Sherlock Holmes-ian powers of deduction, you probably figured it out. Anyway, there will be significant differences between the PC and the Xbox version. The PC for example, invariably runs at resolutions that aren't 480i. So there's that. The specs and features have been targeted, but not carved in stone, and things will change, so we're NOT going to announce anything more specific than you find here today.
One HUGE difference between Xbox and PC versions is the absence of Xbox Live. Now, much as a subset of you likes to bitch and moan about Live matchmaking, most of you agree it's a very nice way to find games in a hurry. But don't worry, we'll have a cool system for that, no doubt.
There will also be some kind of map-customization ability. Does that mean you can build your own maps from scratch, pixel by pixel, importing your own textures, scripts and detailed shaders? Or does it mean one empty room and a crate? Well, we'll have more news on that later this year, but it will be cool, we guarantee that.
There's loads of questions the Bungie faithful will ask, like, "Will there be a Mac version?" We can't answer that yet. It's not out of the question, but it's not definitely happening either. We promise to keep you posted, and in the interim, you can read the PR-ified version of the press release and FAQ below.
