G-pinions

In reflecting on Bungie's online plans for Halo 2, you must understand their ultimate goal. Through the most up-to-date technology, some very clever ideas, and a heaping handful of faith on the consumers end, they're trying to make their online multiplayer emulate their offline multiplayer as closely as possible. The fact that they have a specific philosophy about it, and don't just do what's expected and what would rudimentally work, deserves accolades of it's own. Playing online has always had it's share of inherent problems, but rarely inherent solutions; some games have systems in place to fix a problem once it happens (such as banning a player who has been cheating), but it's always too late for some. People play games against a bunch of uncontrolled players to artificially raise their ranks, others go room to room killing their teammates for the hell of it, and still others lurk in games with inexperienced lower-level players, for obvious reasons. In general, there are a lot of douches online. Even when you step away from the problems that lie in the players hands, there are connection issues, the resulting lag, and chaotic lobby room organization. It should never be tough to find a game to play when thousands of people are trying to do the exact same thing as you. Anyone who has played a handful of online games will be able to attest to all of these problems, and that adds up to one huge issue - there are about as many reasons not to play online as there are to do so. If and when Nintendo decide to take their consoles online, I'm sure they will totally re-imagine how we play games together, and find a simple, elegantly revolutionary new way to accomplish it. In the meantime, Bungie seems to have the right idea. Here's how it works:

There are two ways to play - custom games, which you set up every detail of (just like offline multiplayer), and which are unranked, and 'matchmade' games, whose setup you don't control and which are ranked. First, a word about ranking - if you don't care about ranking, you haven't been playing online long enough. There is a certain point where you'll desire some sort of relatively tangible report of your improvement - it's inevitable. Maybe Halo 2 will shock me and be so amazing that the gameplay alone with satiate (take that, Dan!) infinitely, but I'm guessing that sooner or later everyone will care at least passingly about their rank. Anyhow, back to the topic at hand. Going into a matchmade game, you have very little control over any of the game settings. You can choose if you want a free-for-all, small team or large team game, and the system does the rest, randomly picking game type, weapons, rules, etc. So basically, you'll never know what you're getting into until you're blasting away. At first this sounds kind of shitty, but if you think it through, it's a much better way to run things. Something else important to this whole equation is that Bungie will monitor all of the action on a daily basis, so that as the weeks pass the settings in each random game will reflect what people like playing the most. From the sound of it, you'll rarely, if ever, end up playing something you don't like.

Some other important things to know - when you join a game, you'll always be matched with people near your skill level (slightly higher, for a nice consistent challenge, but never out of your league), and the host will always be the person who's best suited for it (they won't even know they're hosting, ever). That way games will always continue as long as at least one person is in a room, since it will always jump to the next best host when someone leaves. I think that this system will thrive because of two things - variety, and ease of use. You'll get to constantly play all different types of games, with the best types of people, and the best games won't be hard to find and play in, they'll be the ones that you join without thinking twice about. Eliminating lists of room which you have to scroll through (and then attempt to join and then get booted out of and then scroll again and end up in a clan room and get owned by them and have to find another decent game by scrolling through hundreds more lists blah blah blah etc.) will go a long way towards making online play a more natural extension of console gaming.

As far as features go, one big one that I almost forgot about is the party system. Like a temporary clan of sorts, you can add someone to your party (I'm assuming) before/after/while you're playing with them, and when the game ends, you'll travel room to room with them. So as you play throughout the night, you can stick with the non-douches and have a snowball of decent people to frag with. When you sign off, it all resets (unless you put them on your permanent friend list), and you'll start fresh next time.

Everything about Bungie's approach seems a bit odd at first, but the more I think about it the more I like it. It really is a very different way to play online, but I think it will lend itself well to the medium and will be copycatted by many soon after (if not become the standard until the next big idea rolls around). Being able to leap straight into a fun, fully populated game sounds like it will be easier than ever before, and that's awesome. I'm obviously looking forward to November 9th (as are plenty of friends who I'll be sure to put in their respective places), and this just solidifies what was sure to be already great online play. And I didn't even mention the four-player splitscreen online play. Jeez.