Is anyone else curious what halo 3 online is about?
- Thread starter Qroach
- Start date
I would agree though i could see them getting a large number of people online akin to their other viral marketing efforts. Lots of people playing it, talking about it, posting about it, etc....free advertising. Unless, of course, it sucks.
Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.
Legend
Online shooters need to be very finely balanced. Mistakes in speed, scaling, weapons balance, map glitches, etc can and have ruined many online games, and even small changes can fix big issues. If you look at something like the demo versions of UT2K and then see the kind of feedback that was generated on the official forums, large scale testing can be very valuable at identifying problems that happen in the real world. It's also very useful for feeding into the development of the next titles.
IIRC, that kind of interaction beyond what the developers intended is now called "emergent gameplay", and can really only be discovered when you give your game to a load of people to play with and see what they can break.
done. Don't worry that happens to the best of us...
FTR, a Bungie dev recently went on record saying that halo 3 will not be more than 16 players strictly for the best game play experience for the balance of the game as it's designed. they do not like what Halo3 online would turn into at 24/32 and up etc...
I'll find a link if i can
Yes however there IS a point where you have too many testers. You don't need say between 50k testers to test a simple 16 player arena based first person shooter. Like i said before. The number of testers they are looking to get is way more then enough for a online game of this size.
TurnDragoZeroV2G
Regular
Going by Halo 2, they need as many testers as they can possibly get. If they can get 300K playing, they'll need them, even for a 16-player 'arena' type game.
being prepared for stuff like that allows you to fix the problem. Working with online games has shown me in the past no matter how many testers you have, you will never find all the issues. Just look at the WOW issues found after it launched. considering how many testers halo 2 had, it had very few game breaking issues...
Johnny Awesome
Veteran
It's a clever marketing ploy. They get to sell more copies of Crackdown and generate hype right around when Sony will be launching PS3 in Europe and getting their supply problems sorted out. It's just smart business with a little Beta testing on the side.
Yeah I dont buy they "need" this mass amount of testers. It's never been "needed" before in FPS history, including Halo 2.
I really am a bit worried Halo 3 will get overexposed. You cant underestimate that hype comes from anticipation. Anticipation of opening the shrink wrap on a game that has never been widely played before. That is why a Halo 3 demo would not be a good idea (was there a Gears demo? Hell no!). And this mass beta testing is little more than a demo.
That said, I cant wait to get my hands on it, even if I'd rather they didn't release the beta test.
But I think the "plus" for ms is that if they charge, they can probably make almost as much from the beta as the real game. It'll be like double charging. Even if they "only" charge 19.95, how many MILLIONS will do it? That's like 40% more game revenue.
I really am a bit worried Halo 3 will get overexposed. You cant underestimate that hype comes from anticipation. Anticipation of opening the shrink wrap on a game that has never been widely played before. That is why a Halo 3 demo would not be a good idea (was there a Gears demo? Hell no!). And this mass beta testing is little more than a demo.
That said, I cant wait to get my hands on it, even if I'd rather they didn't release the beta test.
But I think the "plus" for ms is that if they charge, they can probably make almost as much from the beta as the real game. It'll be like double charging. Even if they "only" charge 19.95, how many MILLIONS will do it? That's like 40% more game revenue.
It should be considered a good sign that they are using this amount of testers. First thought that comes to my mind is that they have a concern for possible issues and really hope to find and eliminate as much bugs as possible, believe it or not but its still rather likely that the shipping product will contain a few bugs even after all this testing, when you get hundreds of thousands of people playing your game you are much more likely to see those bugs exploited because there's just much more people who can exploit them. At the very least large beta tests help eliminate nearly all the bugs before hand.
They could be testing other aspects of the multiplayer beyond the gameplay also. Such as server load, stats tracking, game matching, etc. There could be new technologies they are using in these fronts that need a large amount of players to give a good pounding to see how robust and solid these systems are. One thing that you certainly would not want on launch day (with an extreme amount of players on first day for this game) is to have a broke matching and stats system.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say this is a good and possibly great sign that they are going to do such large scale tests.
They could be testing other aspects of the multiplayer beyond the gameplay also. Such as server load, stats tracking, game matching, etc. There could be new technologies they are using in these fronts that need a large amount of players to give a good pounding to see how robust and solid these systems are. One thing that you certainly would not want on launch day (with an extreme amount of players on first day for this game) is to have a broke matching and stats system.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say this is a good and possibly great sign that they are going to do such large scale tests.
Of course it would be impossible to get all the bugs but the less bugs the better am I correct?
I would agree though i could see them getting a large number of people online akin to their other viral marketing efforts. Lots of people playing it, talking about it, posting about it, etc....free advertising. Unless, of course, it sucks.
It's a clever marketing ploy. They get to sell more copies of Crackdown and generate hype right around when Sony will be launching PS3 in Europe and getting their supply problems sorted out. It's just smart business with a little Beta testing on the side.
Yeah, I think it is partly marketing driven; but agree with others that seeing as Halo 3 is MS's flagship they want to refine the experience.
@ Qroach: We can wish for maybe a "2nd" Halo 3 online mode which is a MMO
