Penny Arcade wonders why Halo is only on Vista

That may be true, but I'm still scheptical until I start hearing game reviews. I'm still not convinced that burying OpenGL performance on top of the new DX10 stuff won't play hell with game developers as well, esp on older games.

What is the DX9 compatibility supposed to be like?

Chris, David Weller is the game developer evangelist. I'll ask him, but you could ask him on his blog too: http://www.inkblog.com/

This is another reason the gang at Valve amazes me. They are able to create amazing sound and visuals yet the playability is excellent on machines that don't cost $5000+ like they did with Half Life 2.

Are you saying that Halo 2 will will cause too much stress to my AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ and Creative X-Fi soundcard that Windows XP can't handle the audio?

Two words: Marketing Ploy

Thanks for the link. Adding that to my Ma.gnolia.com right now. Speaking of, have you tried that yet? I just imported all of my del.ico.us stuff. Not too shabby.

So which is it Scoble? is there *really* a performance issue here or this just a smoke screen for some trusted computing shenanigans? TC/DRM being supported more strongly by vista than XP?

Like many others, i'm having trouble buying the performance argument. One things for certain, in the past, new OS's tend to be significantly *slower* on existing hardware esp when they incorporate a lot of new chrome, animated widgets and whatnot. this was true for OSX, WinXP, Win95... and so forth

I expected nothing less from the world's largest software developer.

Oh for the love of Mike, Robert, you don't honestly think that the restriction of Halo 2 to Vista is anything other than a motivator to get people to upgrade.

At this moment, why would anyone who wasn't buying a new PC upgrade to Vista? Sure...Aero, security...all these cool things promised but ..aha...the rank and file aren't motivated to upgrade. And we know it's going to run slower than XP on existing machines.

It's one thing to spoon the general public the marketing drivel, but to put it on your blog as truth? You're asking a bit much. We may have to suck up to you A-list bloggers but don't expect us to call this sow's ear a silk purse.

All you're told us is that the multitasking in Vista might now be up to scratch - multitasking in Windows NT4/2000/XP was never quite as good as UNIX. Now you've given me something to look forward to.

And no, it ain't Halo 2. They're unlikely to release it for the Mac.

I'm not one to bag on Microsoft products (I make my living by them), but this smacks of marketing ploy. Why is it that Windows XP is the greatest OS ever for multimedia and gaming, and suddenly when Vista is around the corner, there's all sorts of things it can't do so we're forced to upgrade? I don't buy it - my Alienware PC can play anything you throw at it these days, and if there's some mysterious compelling reason why Halo 2 won't play on XP, let's hear it.

But surely anyone who wanted to play Halo 2 would have an Xbox already, as the game is over a year old now.

In PC gaming standards, graphically it's behind current games, and I can't imagine they'd put too much effort to make it look that much better, as Bungie would annoy the Xbox owners.

Now if they said Halo 3 was coming for Xbox 360 and Windows Vista only, that would be a different kettle of fish.

"Why is Halo 2 Vista-Only?"

Um, *DUH*?

Sheesh, MS's a business, if they can use Halo 2 to get more people to buy Vista, then they have to do that, because god knows, at this point, Balmer's about ready to start turning tricks in the fish market to get any kind of life into Microsoft's stock price.

So, you don't provide an answer, but you tell us audio playback on XP is shit? Why didn't you warn us 4 years ago?

Robert, "some sizeable technical reasons too" is an astonishingly weak, bullshit comment even from you. I'm not normally a troll, but you must understand that the people reading about this on blogs are not the pathetic non-techies that will swallow that sort of hand-waving statement. We know what is inside the XBox. We know what modern PCs are capable of. Hell I imagine a fair percentage of Penny Arcade readers are professional game software developers.

The PC version had better fix the LOD popping that the Xbox version has at a minimum (in addition to the requisite resolution boost) for the tech reason for Vista-only to hold water. H2 runs quite fine on a 733 Celeron with what's basically a GeForce 4 running 64 MB of memory (aka, the Xbox), so why would the Windows version stress it out so much as to hiccup the sound?
Although to be fair, I've noticed plenty of sound problems on my XP machine (my built-in Realtek sound cut out during any 3D game of Freelancer quality on up, and my Audigy 2 somehow managed to crash the OS...I don't even play games on my PC any more for that reason)

Yeh, I think most gamers are smelling foul play at this point. Halo 2 is a fairly old game, running on technology which is more or less identical (it seems to me, at least) to the original Halo, which has already been ported to the PC and runs just fine. Oh well, already bought it for the Xbox, so doesn't bother me.

As the Xbox runs a stripped down Windows 2000 kernel, could MS make Halo 2 run on Vista and Windows 2000 then?

I mean, obviously XP isn't up to the job of running a game originally designed for a 733MHz x86 CPU with (by today's standards) a paltry amount of RAM, but if Win 2k can run it, could Microsoft support those lucky customers who have the superior gaming OS (i.e. 2k or Vista)? I mean, it's a shame that XP is so crippled with respect to multimedia, but there's no need to penalise the Win2k users for that.

Yes, that was sarcasm.

My advice: until you have actual technical reasons to hand as to the reasons for this decision, I'd keep quiet about this. You run the risk of looking very foolish.

In fact, I can't work out if this whole blog entry is some elaborate troll or not.

There are no technical reasons for Halo 3 to be limited to Windows Vista. Stop lying.

All modern games downgrade respectfully to prior versions of DirectX. Even Half-Life 2 is playable on video cards limited to DirectX 7 technology.

At any rate, I don't imagine adult gamers are going to upgrade to Vista just to play a kiddie game like Halo.

Ben: I've asked the Halo 2 and Game teams to give me more details. But to me I can see how a business decision could be reached here. Vista machines will be guaranteed to be at a certain level. That guarantees our customers to have a much better experience and see fewer returns at retail.

I've witnessed the hell up front and close. Just the other day my nephew bought a game he couldn't play very well on his machine.

Tim: please note that I didn't pretend that my comment here is ALL the reasons why this decision was made.

Windows Vista is much better with multimedia and games. Anyone who plays with the system for more than two minutes will see that. It will let game developers create a better experience and one that'll be more consistently excellent.

OF COURSE there are some business issues here as well. It costs a lot of money and resources to test software on more operating systems. Bungie is a pretty small group (I did an interview there if you wanna get some sense of how many people work there).

Robert: Bungie's doing the Halo 2 port? That work's usually contracted out to another studio that specializes in PC ports. Halo 1 was, as was Doom.

Whoops...scratch that Doom part. I had it backwards; Doom 3 was ported to Xbox from the PC by another studio (I was using it as an example of a gfx intensive game running on an xbox but got my wires crossed)

lol, returns at retail. Since when has retail allowed games to be returned? Not since 1998 I am sure. Halo 2 on Vista is nothing more than a total cop-out from Microsoft to try and force people to upgrade. Flight Simulator X on Vista is more palatable since it's a new game, but even then it's total marketing, and MS will be punished for it by missing out on millions of sales. Once they realize their "faux-pas", you can bet your ass there will be a patch to "enable" access on XP.

Having one department dictate the policies for another worked out real well for Sony, is that who Microsoft idealizes these days?

This was a business decision, made by people who want to push Vista adoption at the cost of their sales of Halo 2 to PC Gamers. There is no technical reason, no matter what bullshit you dredge up, that dictates this being a Vista only product.

Here's hoping that these retarded decisions marginalize the worthless company you work for to irrelevancy.

looks like yet another "ready, fire, aim" entry.

Dmad: aren't all the interesting entries that way? Geesh.

"All you’re told us is that the multitasking in Vista might now be up to scratch - multitasking in Windows NT4/2000/XP was never quite as good as UNIX"

Wow. I don't want to argue about it here, but I hope that's some kind of joke.

This is why Halo 2 (Vista) is a purely marketing decision. Halo 2 (Xbox) is essentially written for Windows 2000 + DirectX 8 (the MS multi-media library). Most PC have hardware capable of running DirectX *9*. There is NO technical reason why Halo 2 cannot be programmed for XP + DirectX 9.

Just to add... The Xbox is a Pentium 3, 700 MHz, 64 MB machine running Windows 2000 & DirectX 8. It did have a kick-ass graphics card -- But that was 3 of Moore's cycles ago.

Minh: I hear that there's some new technology being developed for Windows Vista that'll make it possible to have the game hook into Xbox too and that technology isn't being developed for XP.

I should also note that the audio stack for Vista has been completely rewritten. So has the networking stack.

The gaming team's David Weller just wrote to me to have you all stop speculating and hang out until they can discuss the reasons in public. There ARE reasons, I hear.

You can always tie it to something (a new API) that only exists on Vista. The issue I think people have is not whether it's tied purely in a business sense (i.e. no technical tie) or whether it's tied technically to support the business justification. Either way, many obviously believe that it needn't be tied.

Minh, it's worth noting that the xbox has some mods to memory and (i think) video buses to make it a lot faster than a stock celeron.

Still, my initial comment stands: making weak statements like your initial one Robert is worse than making none at all. At best it makes you look condescending, at worst you look like the worst kind of old-school marketing drone.

Just do your normal thing and say 'I agree this sux, let me find out why it is happening'

Ben: I get that. One thing that separates me from an old-schooler? Comments! :-)

Jake, well said.

Only time will tell if more people will spend the ~$200 for a Vista upgrade + Halo 2 or will those people be offset by a group who would have purchased the game had it run on XP.

There may be some people who not only refuse to buy the game but also refuse to upgrade to Vista because they are tired of getting jerked around.

I just talked to my son, Patrick. He has a year-old computer. He just bought Star Wars Battlefront 2, but it won't play on his Windows XP machine. Why not? Cause his hardware isn't good enough.

So, here's an example ALREADY of a game that doesn't work on XP. I guess everyone will say "there's no technical reason why that shouldn't be," right?

Patrick says: "Hello, my computer is a year old. It's outdated. It's not the game, dude, it played awesome on your computer."

The gaming team’s David Weller just wrote to me to have you all stop speculating and hang out until they can discuss the reasons in public. There ARE reasons, I hear.

Pardon my cynicism, but I wonder if those reasons are as good as the ones executives at Microsoft argued (in court under oath, I might add) for Internet Explorer being impossible to remove from Windows.

But you know, do what you want. I thought Halo was garbage and I won't be running Halo 2 whether I use Vista or not. It's petty of Mighty Microsoft to resort to using game franchises to push sales of a new OS release.

I guess Patrick's machine won't run Vista and won't run Halo 2. Shame to have throw away a 2 year old computer to run a game.

Jake: it might run Vista, but definitely won't run the glass interface.

Jake: I know a family who has an old computer that's never used simply cause it wouldn't run games that their eight-year-old wanted to play.

There's an argument form in your case. Maybe Bad Analogy.

For some reason, call it "the cruft" that develops on a year old installation of Windows XP on a typical home computer - that ruins it from doing anything useful or interesting. Your son is experiencing this common disappointment in trying to play a new game. And that example becomes the justification for tieing a nearly two year old last generation console game port to the new OS.

I get it!

Jake: my son's game doesn't run because the hardware isn't appropriate. Has nothing to do with the OS. But, I can certainly see situations where the game manufacturer might want to rely on technologies that exist only in a certain OS.

Hint: the game he has DEFINITELY won't run on Windows 95.

"multitasking in Windows NT4/2000/XP was never quite as good as UNIX”

Wow. I don’t want to argue about it here, but I hope that’s some kind of joke. said Brandon Paddock.

I don't need to argue about it. I have a screenshot which reminds me how "bad" the multitasking can get under Windows. I'm NOT saying it is BAD, but that in my experience, I've seen a lot better - especially when under load.

If you don't believe me, then we just need to go to the local Microsoft Technical Evangelist to get the full story:

Hey look, we're at his web site already - the reason he gives for Halo 2 being on Vista only is that XP's audio won't play properly when the machine is under stress. How much more transparent can you get?

In the channel 9 interview, Bill Gates talked about the importance of backwards compatibility. Talk is cheap. I don't buy the spin on Halo 2 needing more system or OS requirements. Most of the graphic processing is video card dependant not cpu. The issue of sound is whimsycal, almost no resources needed. So the argument just doesn't hold the H20. To put it in a nutshell, it is all about money in this case. I don't think the XBOX is running Vista. Is it Scob?

Must have been a low end year old computer. It should have at least a Radeon 9800 Pro in it, which is more than a year old now I believe. Battlefront II is a fun game at first, but seems to get kinda boring after a while. The way the guns feel is weird. I truly don't mind the OS upgrade, just as long as the Halo 2 port is effcient and quick as possible. Halo 1, at least in my opinion performed poorly, it could have been so much better (for PC). If the Xbox can play it, it should feel fluid on the PC.

I just talked to my son, Patrick. He has a year-old computer. He just bought Star Wars Battlefront 2, but it won’t play on his Windows XP machine. Why not? Cause his hardware isn’t good enough.

So, here’s an example ALREADY of a game that doesn’t work on XP. I guess everyone will say “there’s no technical reason why that shouldn’t be,” right?

Robert, that's like saying "My car can't run on Diesel, so Diesel's bad fuel" even though you have a gasoline engine. Your example would only work if Halo 2 was brand new and state of the art. It's not. Halo 2 is an old game running on older hardware. The fact that Microsoft is using any reason other than "Drive Vista Sales among gamers" as a reason for limiting an old game like Halo 2 to Vista shows that once again, MS still has that old "Our customers are too stupid to know how things work" streak going. Gotta purge it some more.

MS bloggers can provide all the clear information they'd like, but when the company engages in idiocy like this, it taints everything they do. I don't really care if Halo 2 plays on Vista or not. My reasons for buying it have more to do with the moribund state of the gaming industry and how 40% of the games out there are still nothing more than remakes of Wolfenstein 3-D. (Hell, iD's been making the same game for decades, but it obviously works). But don't try and come up with BS about technical issues when it plays on an old POS like an original XBox. I mean, Honky Puh-LEASE!

I won't be playing Halo 2 when it comes out, I'll be playing Vista! LOL at all those 'angry', 'angry' people.

What's the limitation? Improper DirectX driver support for some integrated video chipset with insufficient ram most likely (usually the killer in the under $XYZ category where $XYZ is the street price of the killer machine that is always less than the price of a Mac).

Wasn't there just a back and forth on Slashdot and integrated video and Vista and glass?

I would echo what Tim said above: wait for David Weller to explain this away.

Gosh, just admit it, it's not technical, and if it is, then Microsoft/Bungie are incompetent.

But even so it's a pointless thing methinks, Halo 3 will be out by that timeframe or near, and Halo has never played well on PC, nor had much volume. Halo got the console mantle, and Microsoft taking all this bad press and losing sales just to push a platform strategy. Chinese Wall the Bungie group, I thought they said they would, and not wrap Bungie in the Microsoft soup. Mark that down as another broken promise.

Make a Halo 3 for 360 and Xbox 1. Make Halo 2 for Xbox and PC. But no, Microsoft playing the force upgrade game. I don't care what techincal excuse wand cop-out you wave over it, it can be done.

Would they play the SAME game with say Office? Office 12 doesn't run on XP? Come on...

I don't know why people trust Microsoft anymore, they must think their customers are stupid, and watching Scoble quicksand on this spin, is quite amusing. Bloodsport.

Bungie has just killed a potential marketbed of millions of users, but they maybe think the numbers of XP users will be so small as to make Vista more viable? Why rope a Game Developer into this Microsoft upgrade strategy hell?

Guys, there's nothing to get excited about, here. Halo is going to run only on Windows Longwind, because it belongs to the evil empire, and they have the prerogative to do that.

Of course, if the only benefit to longwind is the ability to run yet another shoot-em-up game, I doubt that anyone over the age of 18 will need it.

If you can get games like Call Of Duty 2 running on both Xbox 360 & my 4+ year old XP machine (running at 1.533Ghz), it shouldn't be that much difficult to have Halo 2 do the same

@26.More evidence to the fact that bloggers are no where near being journalist. So, we might stop implying they are. A journalist would have done the research to answer the questions before "reporting" on the topice. What you posted seems more like gossip.

It's not clear to me what MS accomplished by announcing H2 for Vista so early. We're looking at something 1 or maybe 1 1/2 years away, no? For an operating system which hasn't been released yet? Why announce it now? I think *maybe* this could have waited until midsummer (at least after E3). Just a thought.

This is one of the stupidest things i have heard in a long time. I am not even going to try to describe all the holes in this statement because there are too many. Scoble, i have one word for you - shameful !!

"Cause his hardware isn’t good enough.

So, here’s an example ALREADY of a game that doesn’t work on XP."

No, the hardware won't run the game, not XP. Jesus, what pathetic logic. What game does not, besides mentioning OS compatability, mention memory, video card, etc... as recommendations/requirements?

Why would anyone need to say: what we want is this video card, this memory, etc... but instead we'll just say the software we hope for because even then a machine with that software might not meet our hardware reqs? No one.

"my son’s game doesn’t run because the hardware isn’t appropriate. Has nothing to do with the OS."

So... you know you've already thrown out 2 or 3 bullshit excuses and are happy to keep sliding along to the next bullshit excuse that might sound half reasonable even though you have no information whatsoever? Brilliant!

History's repeating itself. When Halo came out on the x-box, the console gamers went nuts because they didn't have anything like it. Most PC gamers showed only mild interest because there were already several arguably superior games in the same genre on the PC. The delay in releasing it for PC merely meant that it was old hat by the time it came out and no-one cared since PC games had more so far beyond that level. I've nver seen it played at a LAN and know only a few people who have played the PC version when it finally came out. None were terribly impressed since it was competing against the likes of counterstike and BF1942.
Halo 2's going to be the same. When it came out, it was already more than matched by PC games like Far Cry, Halflife 2 and Doom 3 (all of which I personally think are superior games, each for different reasons). If it was released on pc then it would have given all of them a run for their money though. Delaying it even more is pretty much guaranteeing failure on PC since it will look downright primitive compared to the crop of pc games it will be competing against.

It is plain and simple M$ marketing bullsh*t. To be completely honest, I will openly applaud the first bunch of guys out there to hack it to bits and port it over to XP (as is what will invariably happen).

LAME. Seriously. It's all just marketing.

Two words: Bull Shit

This is a complete crock. Vista is only different from XP in that theres more DRM, nothing else.

First, asmany comments have pointed out, of course Microsoft is going to release some products Vista only, do you think they *don't* want to sell copies of their new platform (the chief money maker and microsoft)? Stop sniffing you Open Source/Free Software glue and grow some business sense.

Second, the real reason Halo will be Vista only is right here: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1931... It's called DirectX 10, and its got a lot of new stuff. And those of you who think Vista is just XP SP2 + DRM should read the rest of the article.

well i know the xbox doesnt have a fast proccesor or any thing kick ass like a core 2 duo or sumthing, i have vista basic and halo 2 is compatible with every thing i have exept my proccesor it recommends 2GHz but im running at 1.60GHz will that 4MGz effect my game play??? im going to buy H2 sumtime this week and try it out....i think i might be able to barly play BUT PLEASE if anyone thinks im running too slow email me at big.boy172@gmail.com