Halo 2 to be restricted to Vista
 

According to the BBC, Microsoft have taken the extraordinary step of artificially restricting Halo 2 to the Vista platform.

This is surely a sign of Microsoft's growing desperation to get people upgrading, as there are no obvious technical reasons for crippling the game. With future versions of DirectX - and even Vista's user interface - on the list of projects to be backported to XP, this decision has clearly been made in the interests of marketing, at the expense of gamers.

As an aside, are moves like this likely to encourage piracy of Vista?

Re: Halo 2 to be restricted to Vista
 

The fact that you have to pay for it is likely to encourage the piracy of Vista.

Whether or not you can play Halo2 on it will probably have very little real effect. Those that really want to play it on XP will probably crack it to run in any case.

When is Vista due for release?

Re: Halo 2 to be restricted to Vista
 

"Late 2006" is still the "official" release date I think

Re: Halo 2 to be restricted to Vista
 

Well thank God I don't give a shit about Halo.

Re: Halo 2 to be restricted to Vista
 

Noone cares about Halo 2. An XBox costs less than Windows XP Professional does at the moment, it'll cost a lot less than Vista when it's released. Add in that Halo 2 is already a year or two old and you arrive at my opening sentence.

The one thing this does do is annoy XBox users - Microsoft have repeatedly said that Halo 2 is (or rather, was) an XBox exclusive, so they've just damaged their reputation somewhat.

You're assuming it's an "If Vista == 0, NO RUN OK!" kind of doodle, instead of something like a required version of DirectX. It's plausable that the amount of work needed to hack Halo 2 to work on Windows XP will be immense.

Re: Halo 2 to be restricted to Vista
 

QFTW

Re: Halo 2 to be restricted to Vista
 

I just think it's a stupid game to be playing. Despite the personal opinions of people here on Halo, no-one can dispute that it has a huge following.
To then force your core market to shell out a couple of hundred dollars extra purely to improve Vista's market penetration numbers seems shortsighted at best - and who's to say Halo will be the only thing Microsoft feel the urge to sabotage.

Re: Halo 2 to be restricted to Vista
 

It has a huge following on the XBox. The PC version was a pretty big flop, not helped by the shoddy job that Gearbox did porting it over. It's Halo 2, not Halo 3, and, with the price of the XBox now well under £100, pretty much everyone who will want to play Halo 2 has already played Halo 2.

Halo's core market is people with an XBox. It can't, and doesn't, compete with the Half Life/Unreal Tournaments on the PC.

Although, amusingly, according to Gamespy more people are playing the Halo PC demo than Quake IV.

Re: Halo 2 to be restricted to Vista
 

TBH i think they would eventually bow to consumer pressure and make it XP compatible as well. Sure they done this not all that long ago with another game just for windows 98

think it might have been Dawn of War actually not 100% sure tho this isnt a new game anymore.

Re: Halo 2 to be restricted to Vista
 

I am a MAC guy. What is vista, a new operating system on windows? If so, yeah, that move is done strictly for marketing. Shows you that Microsoft beleives that the biggest market is video gamers. (Probably accurate)

Re: Halo 2 to be restricted to Vista
 

err, what ?

the biggest market for pc's is and always has been business.

Re: Halo 2 to be restricted to Vista
 

No, it's business. This "move" is for the "my son's sittin dere playin dem games on ma dell and he says we needs this Veeesta thing" crowd.

Re: Halo 2 to be restricted to Vista
 

If you were a proper Mac guy, you'd call it a Mac, not a MAC - which just confuses everyone with harware addresses of network cards.

Re: Halo 2 to be restricted to Vista
 

DRM LCD monitors?

Re: Halo 2 to be restricted to Vista
 

HD content may be reduced in resolution when the DRM checks aren't fulfilled (possibly as a requirement of the DMCA, I can't remember the argument here). There may be some other things there too.

Re: Halo 2 to be restricted to Vista
 

I didnt even look at Halo on the PC even though i liked the game from the videos, because when it finally was released it was outdated. Same for Halo2 - who cares about a then 2 1/2 to 3 years old game with the FPS situation as it is on the PC.

If it would be a truly great game, it would be hacked to work on XP anyway.

Re: Halo 2 to be restricted to Vista
 

Vista isn't actually much of an improvement on XP from what I could tell. Its all the same just re-skinned and renamed isn't it?

Re: Halo 2 to be restricted to Vista
 

No, although it's not quite as revolutionary as Longhorn was originally supposed to be.

Re: Halo 2 to be restricted to Vista
 

Its about HDCP and basically the same try of the content industry to fully control what the users are allowed to do with content as with DVDs. My prediction is that in at most 2 years after it is widely used, everybody (read: internet users with a clue) is laughing about it as a "protection" just as it happened with CSS. Technically it was already broken.

Re: Halo 2 to be restricted to Vista
 

Having only played Halo on Xbox and not been that impressed, the fact I cant play Halo 2 unless i get Vista is not exactly the most important thing ive ever heard.

Re: Halo 2 to be restricted to Vista
 

You kidding? The PC version was great. I own a Xbox but never touched Halo on it, primarily cause of the awkward controls.

At least with the PC version you could use mouse & keyboard and the experience was greatly enhanced and made many an entertaining LAN nights. The only genuine complaint I heard at time of release was the fact it was practicly a direct port, meaning it played still like a console game and people didn't have their 360 degrees of freedom they were used to with most PC FPS. I was never a fan of the Halo franchise until then, it was a simple run & gun FPS harkening back to the days of Doom & Quake, none of this gay CS or COD type crap.

Re: Halo 2 to be restricted to Vista
 

The vehicle controls are abominable, and it ran extremely badly on most systems. Then there are also the problems of the original XBox version, like the snooze-worthy level design with insane amounts of backtracking.

Re: Halo 2 to be restricted to Vista
 

Half Life 2 waterboat

Re: Halo 2 to be restricted to Vista
 

The Half Life 2 airboat controls are fine. The vehicle itself can be fairly pernickety, but its designers thought that you may want to look in directions other than where you wanted to turn while driving.

Re: Halo 2 to be restricted to Vista
 

No I just wanted to throw up. Although the race sequence with the smokestack collapsing and jumping over it while the hunter chopper is dropping balls and people are shooting at you from all directions was :ace:

Re: Halo 2 to be restricted to Vista
 

That might be an issue with the increased FOV in the vehicle segments. Although that doesn't make it a control issue.

Re: Halo 2 to be restricted to Vista
 

You are all pussies!

Re: Halo 2 to be restricted to Vista
 

Vehicle controls were logical and simple, locking the turning to mouse direction made doing pin-point turns viable. We certainly had no difficulty with it. Also never experienced problems with running the game, and most of my friends machines were 1-2 years old at the time so performance of them were average. As for level design that depends which you're referring to, if you mean single player then yes.. but single player campagn was dire anyway.. Halo's strength was in multiplayer and the maps used in that were well appropriate.

Re: Halo 2 to be restricted to Vista
 

It's logical and simple unless you're dealing with a system based around two independent set of axes, like keyboard and mouse. Being able to look in directions you're not going makes navigation infinitely easier, and pinpoint turns are still perfectly possible. Try Unreal Tournament 2004 for easy, logical, powerful vehicle controls.

Halo ran better on a Geforce2 than it did on a Radeon 9700 Pro. This is not a particularly poorly documented problem, the job Gearbox did is commonly regarded as terrible.

Halo's multiplayer? It's no Unreal Tournament 2003 (which was out a year or so prior) or Unreal Tournament 2004 (which was released soon after). It's no Quake III. It's no Quakeworld. It's no Half Life.

Re: Halo 2 to be restricted to Vista
 

This statement does not apply to flying in BF2.

Re: Halo 2 to be restricted to Vista
 

I've got the plane! I've got the plane! > Fly into tree.

Re: Halo 2 to be restricted to Vista
 

You are right. :( I just have the iMac G5, iPod 5g 60gb, iPod Nano 2gb, and the 12" Powerbook. They just have my money. :(
http://www.flickr.com/photos/daoberr...n/set-1460706/
negrep me to make it even.

Re: Halo 2 to be restricted to Vista
 

So......are you Chika or are you Obeezy, or maybe you're Tyler?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/daoberrys/page7/

You got a lot of hardware, are you rich? :0

Also I love your dogs and your whole family looks pretty cool dude, ( or dudette as the case may be).

Re: Halo 2 to be restricted to Vista
 

Actually, Chika fits my conception of a Mac/Apple person pretty accurately.

Re: Halo 2 to be restricted to Vista
 

the baby looks so cute chika, one hell of a lucky guy