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SPEAK YOUR MIND
"Does the distance one travels from center make one more free
to move?"
"No. Freedom has two parts: potential and resolution; as
metaphor has two parts: form and interpretation. Of course,
the two are intertwined. Metaphor lines the road to freedom,
as symbols and words are the bricks and mortar of meaning.
Freedom is being the bricoleur, the mason."
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Marathon: Resurrection Forum
Halo and Marathon, M$, Bungie, thin hypothesis
Posted By: Grasshopper
Date: 2002.12.13.08.23
In Response To: Re: Basic Critizisim. (A.C. Wells)
Probably a bit of both. This is just my opinion mind you, so bear with me. But basically, there are a few differences between being being part of a team of six or seven coders living on pizza in an apartment basement and working your ass off to make something that you hope is gonna fly, and working on a title for M$ that you KNOW is going to be played by hundreds of thousands of (mostly) kids worldwide.
One of those differences is called "Covering Your Ass(tm)," and is the result of a long and distinguished tradition of consumer expectation, and legal-trigger-happy folks in this fine country.
So, let's say that the PC/MAC version of Halo has significantly more content than the XBox version. I'm not talking extra levels here, I'm just talking more text, terminal consoles, a convincing tie-in between the Marathon and the Halo universe. If that were to happen, there would be a percentage of Xbox customers that would call/email/write Bungie to say "wtf, you're shipping two different games, had I known that the PC/MAC version was gonna have all this extra cool stuff, I woulda waited for it rather than buying the XBox and Halo. Gimme my money back."
Now, Bungie is gonna say "well, the PC/MAC version is Halo Gold, and has additional content," but the point is, it requires ressources to field/answer all of those calls/inquiries. Ressources = money, and no one wants to waste money to satisfy a handful of Marathon die hards. If you're talking about M1 which sold (I'm making this up) say, 100,000 copies, and 5% of your customer base is gonna be pissed off, that's 5,000 phone calls/emails/inquiries. Halo, which I think has sold over 2,000,000 copies (I could be wrong) would involve dealing with, well, you can do the math: 100,000 emails/letters/phone calls. That's a lot.
Let's look at a previous example of a Bungie "port," Oni. Oni was developped to be a Mac/PC/PS2 title. Well, the Mac/PC version was deliberately crippled to "match" the PS2 title. A good example of this would be the Save Game engine, which, as any Oni fan will tell you, is very console-like (it's based on save-points), and which totally sucks. If you save your game, nearby lenemies won't respawn, even if they were alive when you saved your game, because then engine "assumes" that you killed them.
So, there's my thin hypothesis. :-)
-gh
: Hmm. Good point.
: But, what about this: Bungie would never have allowed
: Gearbox to touch it without doing it the Bungie way.
: Probable conclusion? Or thin hypothesis?
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