Bungie just posted stats for Halo PC.

http://www.bungie.net/News/content.aspx?type=news&cid=12521

The stats are surprising, but what could’ve been is really a shame.

Halo PC has gone completely unsupported by Bungie and Microsoft for 3+ years now. It has the worst netcode of any modern game in my memory. It lags horribly even on a lan enviroment. And if first impressions are the most important; the fact upon it’s release you almost had to have a super computer to play a 2 year old game. I’m sure threw some people off the bandwagon initially.

With no continued support, it means the netcode will never will get fixed. With no support, cheats like wallhacks and aimbots, although rare, have put a stigma on the game. For instance, I can’t play Halo PC without getting banned or kicked for aimbotting. Not because I aimbot, just that the mark of aimbotters has branded anyone good at the game as an aimbotter.

The idea of aimbots in Halo PC might be ironic to those who have followed it since the beginning. You might remember Randy Pitchford, President and CEO of Gearbox, claiming the netcode could either be one of two things: poor and have NO aimbots, or the netcode could be good and have aimbots. Now it has aimbots and the netcode sucks.

At the time, I recognized this as a complete and utter false dichotomy. It came along with another other misinformation claiming Half-Life/Counter-Strike was client authoritive, which it isn’t, and other spewings of technical mumbo jumbo just to confuse the issue. The real problem had nothing to do with any technical aspect or choice of game design. It had everything to do with money. Their just wasn’t any money to support it or fix the netcode. All the rest was just a smoke screen.

The Halo fanboy crowd loves to blame Gearbox for these problems. In the end it doesn’t matter what Gearbox did or didn’t do. It is Bungie’s IP. If Gearbox didn’t do something: like fix the netcode, or continue patching Halo PC. This is not the fault of Gearbox. It is up to Bungie and Microsoft to invest and task Gearbox or some other company if they can’t do it right. If I’m Gearbox, I’m not going to patch Halo and not get paid for it.

It is obvious from Bungie and Microsoft’s continued neglect and most importantly their initial lack of proper investment into the PC version shows that they just never cared. Halo PC/Mac was a just churn it out and put on the shelves game. Amongst all this though, the game continues to thrive.
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