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I do really wish the era of Xbox & Halo 2 modding returned in modern times. I owe that point in time to my career choice and still believe Halo 2 was the most i

I do really wish the era of Xbox & Halo 2 modding returned in modern times. I owe that point in time to my career choice and still believe Halo 2 was the most innovative online game of all time. Just buying a simple tool to load game saves and you could have a soft-modded Xbox in minutes. Now consoles blow e-fuses and prevent downgrades on top of tons of other security enhancements. Was a great read and trip back in time. Pair this with projects like Insignia launching Halo 2 support and its a great time for classic Halo 2.

Rinzler89 2y ago
>Just buying a simple tool to load game saves and you could have a soft-modded Xbox in minutes Because that era Xbox was just a PC built form COTS hardware instead of custom HW. You can still tinker just as well today with a PC, or a PC based console like the Steam Deck, why bother fighting with a proprietary console designed to be locked down? What would you gain? Access to a custom X86 hardware that you can buy for cheap on the market anyway?
- MegaDeKay 2y ago
  It is a stretch to call it just a PC built from COTS hardware. The NV2A GPU was a modified version on the NV20 and included the Northbridge. The MCPX Southbridge was custom. The DVD was customized for anti-piracy. The CPU is a (slightly) customized PIII. If it was all COTS, the XBox XEmu emulator would be further along than it is now. https://classic.copetti.org/writings/consoles/xbox/ https://classic.copetti.org/writings/consoles/xbox/
  - muziq 2y ago
    Didn’t the SouthBridge turn up in some Nvidia ATX boards ? I recall positively salivating on realising that one particular Nvidia motherboard gave us a hardware encoded Dolby digital signal, just like the Xbox..
    - justsomehnguy 2y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundStorm#Video_game_consoles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundStorm#Video_game_consoles
      - muziq 2y ago
        [dead]
Chabsff 2y ago
It's worth pointing out that what you are fondly remembering from a consumer standpoint was an absolute nightmare from the publishers', and not just for pure greed, though that definitely plays a role. Game consoles were (and still are to a some degree), by and large, toys. Toys that parents buy for their children with the expectation that they can be mostly left to their own devices with them. The ESRB/PEGI/etc. ratings system was put in place so that parents would be able to trust that they know what's in the toy without having to sit over the kids' shoulders every single minute they are playing. In a sense it's not unlike Mattel spending a lot of energy making sure their dolls and action figures don't pose any choking hazards. Allowing modding breaks that system, and by extension the accompanying trust. This is a big deal for a toy manufacturer. It's also why Hot Coffee was such a mess despite the content not being normally accessible. Parents don't want to have to care about technicalities. People like to think of this situation as a "think of the children"-type of hand-wringing, but it's actually more of a "think of the parents", who happen to be the ones with money. Again, not discounting the greed and DRM aspects of this, and it definitely sucks pretty hard for adult users of the systems, but it's far from all there is to it.
- bri3d 2y ago
  I've never heard of a parent being concerned about console mods, of all things, and I (as a parent) don't really buy this angle. The original Xbox's weak parental controls could be bypassed by pressing X Y Left Trigger X, a tidbit that was quickly distributed throughout my middle school to let everyone launch M-rated Halo discs. Presumably if publishers were actually pressuring Microsoft to make a child-safe device, they'd have come up with a more advanced protection mechanism than that. Modifiability/vulnerability would not affect my game console buying decision as a parent at all, provided the console had some form of cursory parental controls. I'd probably choose a console that didn't have such a simple bypass as the original Xbox, placed head to head with another console, but if my kid has to go online (!), learn about exploit development, and run some advanced tool to bypass parental controls, that's a valuable learning experience, and they were already on the Internet somehow, a much more dangerous place than an M-rated game anyway. DRM and cheating are the drivers for game console secure boot. Cheating is getting even more important than DRM, really, IMO - it's one of the places where consoles have a huge edge over PC gaming.
Jerrrry 2y ago
>and still believe Halo 2 was the most innovative online game of all time. this is pretty much the only unanimous, uncontroversial absolute statement that can be made in the context of online gaming
- piltdownman 2y ago
  Starcraft as the first eSport Game? WoW as the first mass appeal Western MMORPG? PUBG as the first Battle Royale and catalyst for Fortnite? Minecraft for defining a demographic as much as a genre? Dark Souls, Journey or Nier:Automata for redefining what actually constituted the role of 'online gamer' ? The path from Quake or Perfect Dark -> Halo 2 was no great paradigm shift compared to the five above imo
  - cbdumas 2y ago
    > PUBG as the first Battle Royale and catalyst for Fortnite? As I recall, H1Z1 actually came out before PUBG (though it has since faded into obscurity). A quick search on Wikipedia seems to back that timeline[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PUBG:_Battlegrounds#Development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PUBG:_Battlegrounds#Developmen...
    - sickofparadox 2y ago
      Wasn't H1Z1 a knockoff of DayZ first, which then pivoted to the Battle Royale format after the success of PUBG?
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
  What novelty did Halo 2 introduce? At a high level, it is just another shooter preceded by all sorts of experiments: Quake, Counterstrike, Team Fortress, Unreal Tournament, etc. Sure, it had tons of polish and was on consoles, but I never thought of it as genre defining.
  - Jerrrry 2y ago
    > was on consoles > genre defining you walked right past it
ravenstine 2y ago
For better or worse, in a lot of ways, I think the last decade of developers have done a lot to kick the ladder out from underneath them. One of the reasons I'm a software engineer today is because I could easily examine webpages to see how they work, tinker with the memory of programs, open up hardware to see what's inside (relatively low risk of destroying the device), and so forth. And yeah, back in the day of Halo PC, modding the levels taught me a lot about what goes into the game. Knowing what a "BSP" is can be a pretty useless piece of trivia, but it made me feel smart and capable of understanding more. It's still possible to get into tech and learn things today, but I have a hard time seeing how this can be accomplished by genuine tinkering. Software is way harder to crack/debug today; certainly not impossible, but the barrier of entry is much higher. Plus there's a ton of moving parts that go into getting software to work securely on not just mobile but modern desktops, adding another layer of hassle. You can still examine what a webpage is doing, but even that has changed significantly; so many websites today are div soup (yes, worse than in the early 2000s) to support JavaScript monstrocities that are also minified and obfuscated. When it comes to games, you can almost forget it in some cases because they're so heavily dependent on content streaming from servers. As far as hardware goes, you've either got to face various security hoops that can brick devices, use a heat gun to unglue the bezels on certain things, and face a lot more risk in permanent damage. All of these changes were made for a reason, but we've also taken the fun out of everything. Even game modding really wasn't what it used to be in spite of some of the tools available today technically being better than those in the past.
- coldpie 2y ago
  I agree with your concern, but I'm quite happy to see what's going on in the retro emulation & decompilation/reverse-engineering scenes[1]. A lot of that is being done and is driven by "the kids". It's an appealing, easy, and low-risk entry point for newer developers who want to dive into low level stuff, and it even has a bit of a "fuck the man" bent to it, which is fantastic. You're right that the environment is different from what we grew up with, it was always going to be. But I think the kids will find their own way. [1] If you haven't been tuned in, check this out, it's the goddamn Super Mario 64 source code in C, reverse-engineered from the game ROM: https://github.com/n64decomp/sm64/blob/master/src/game/hud.c https://github.com/n64decomp/sm64/blob/master/src/game/hud.c Similar projects exist for a ton of other classic games. It's jaw dropping what they're doing out there.
Zardoz84 2y ago
Modding it's pretty alive on PC.
huntedsnark 2y ago
> Halo 2 was the most innovative online game of all time In what ways exactly? Competitive online FPSs with strong modding communities were already more than a decade in full swing on the PC.
- hombre_fatal 2y ago
  Some things Halo 2 had off the top of my head that aren't related to gameplay: - Matchmaking. Almost all games at the time made you manually join lobbies, and now we take matchmaking for granted. - Persistent party. You'd invite your friends to your party and then start the match-making process. During the whole process you could chat with your friends, and when the game ended, you were still a party and could talk to each other. - Chat. Everyone had an Xbox Live headset which came with the service. So everyone was a participant of party chat, in-game team chat, and even "proximity chat" with the enemy. With Halo 2's chat systems + Xbox Live headset ubiquity, it was a highly social game. - Split screen online. All of the above worked with playing with a friend in split screen. Your friend could come over and you could start Team Slayer matchmaking in split screen which was awesome—the game would have to find two more teammates—, and your guest could even chat. Something that could never be done on PC really. These dominated the old "look for and join the server" model of past FPS and, frankly, I could never go back to that. Gameplay wise, Halo 1 had most of the innovations that Halo 2 capitalized on but Halo 2 moved to the pure shield-is-your-health-bar system and removed health packs. After each battle you didn't have this scramble for a health pack just to get ready for the next confrontation, so the pacing was better than arena shooters imo. Finally, Halo 2 didn't need to be the global first on each bullet point to be innovative. But it was probably the first game to have all these in one package. There was a lot of UX polish in setting this standard which you can tell because most games don't reach it even today.
  - babypuncher 2y ago
    A lot of people lament the death of community run dedicated servers, but I'm with you here. I don't miss trying to find a good deathmatch UT04 server that wasn't either super high ping, loaded to the hilt with obnoxious mods, or stuck running Rankin 24/7, only to give up after 40 minutes.
DonnieBurger 2y ago
I still play Halo 2 on PC all the time, multiplayer included. There's an active community thanks to Project Cartographer: https://halo2.online/home/ https://halo2.online/home/
- AgentME 2y ago
  It's also still officially supported and popular through the Halo Master Chief Collection which is available on Steam.
- MarkyC4 2y ago
  (not to be demeaning, but) Why? Halo 2 is playable, with first party support, via The Master Chief Collection today. They've even kept the button combinations (BXR, RRX, etc)
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
giantg2 2y ago
"and still believe Halo 2 was the most innovative online game of all time." I think we can all agree it's multiplayer was better than the current halo infinite.
- wsc981 2y ago
  I never player Halo 2 multiplayer, but both me and my brother loved Halo: Combat Evolved multiplayer. Was awesome back in the day (I played it on a Mac, by brother probably on a PC). In my opinion it was the best FPS that I played, I'd put it above Unreal Tournament, Quake 3, Doom & Marathon. However, at some point it seems there were many aimbots in the game, which ruined the gameplay for me.
Larrikin 2y ago
I think this ignores the fact that technology will continue to march on and that the tinkering at the cutting edge will always allow for fun stuff. In the time period you talk about modding consoles and games was hacking on the cutting edge. Before that you had the phone phreakers and even before that you had people who were seriously into radios. I think its already happening with the current crop of LLMs, generative AI, and just all the various ML models that have been developed that and another generation has already started doing the same. Right now they are attempting to keep that locked behind corporate doors but we already have Llama locally thanks to a leak. Thats to say nothing of the budding AR that is also coming. The idea of putting goggles on my head with a computer that makes up the story, graphics and projects them onto the real world would have sounded crazy to me when I was knocking people out of AOL chat rooms with a concon.

Rinzler89 2y ago

>Just buying a simple tool to load game saves and you could have a soft-modded Xbox in minutes Because that era Xbox was just a PC built form COTS hardware instead of custom HW. You can still tinker just as well today with a PC, or a PC based console like the Steam Deck, why bother fighting with a proprietary console designed to be locked down? What would you gain? Access to a custom X86 hardware that you can buy for cheap on the market anyway?

MegaDeKay 2y ago
It is a stretch to call it just a PC built from COTS hardware. The NV2A GPU was a modified version on the NV20 and included the Northbridge. The MCPX Southbridge was custom. The DVD was customized for anti-piracy. The CPU is a (slightly) customized PIII. If it was all COTS, the XBox XEmu emulator would be further along than it is now. https://classic.copetti.org/writings/consoles/xbox/ https://classic.copetti.org/writings/consoles/xbox/
- muziq 2y ago
  Didn’t the SouthBridge turn up in some Nvidia ATX boards ? I recall positively salivating on realising that one particular Nvidia motherboard gave us a hardware encoded Dolby digital signal, just like the Xbox..
  - justsomehnguy 2y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundStorm#Video_game_consoles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundStorm#Video_game_consoles
    - muziq 2y ago
      [dead]

Chabsff 2y ago

It's worth pointing out that what you are fondly remembering from a consumer standpoint was an absolute nightmare from the publishers', and not just for pure greed, though that definitely plays a role. Game consoles were (and still are to a some degree), by and large, toys. Toys that parents buy for their children with the expectation that they can be mostly left to their own devices with them. The ESRB/PEGI/etc. ratings system was put in place so that parents would be able to trust that they know what's in the toy without having to sit over the kids' shoulders every single minute they are playing. In a sense it's not unlike Mattel spending a lot of energy making sure their dolls and action figures don't pose any choking hazards. Allowing modding breaks that system, and by extension the accompanying trust. This is a big deal for a toy manufacturer. It's also why Hot Coffee was such a mess despite the content not being normally accessible. Parents don't want to have to care about technicalities. People like to think of this situation as a "think of the children"-type of hand-wringing, but it's actually more of a "think of the parents", who happen to be the ones with money. Again, not discounting the greed and DRM aspects of this, and it definitely sucks pretty hard for adult users of the systems, but it's far from all there is to it.

bri3d 2y ago
I've never heard of a parent being concerned about console mods, of all things, and I (as a parent) don't really buy this angle. The original Xbox's weak parental controls could be bypassed by pressing X Y Left Trigger X, a tidbit that was quickly distributed throughout my middle school to let everyone launch M-rated Halo discs. Presumably if publishers were actually pressuring Microsoft to make a child-safe device, they'd have come up with a more advanced protection mechanism than that. Modifiability/vulnerability would not affect my game console buying decision as a parent at all, provided the console had some form of cursory parental controls. I'd probably choose a console that didn't have such a simple bypass as the original Xbox, placed head to head with another console, but if my kid has to go online (!), learn about exploit development, and run some advanced tool to bypass parental controls, that's a valuable learning experience, and they were already on the Internet somehow, a much more dangerous place than an M-rated game anyway. DRM and cheating are the drivers for game console secure boot. Cheating is getting even more important than DRM, really, IMO - it's one of the places where consoles have a huge edge over PC gaming.

Jerrrry 2y ago

>and still believe Halo 2 was the most innovative online game of all time. this is pretty much the only unanimous, uncontroversial absolute statement that can be made in the context of online gaming

piltdownman 2y ago
Starcraft as the first eSport Game? WoW as the first mass appeal Western MMORPG? PUBG as the first Battle Royale and catalyst for Fortnite? Minecraft for defining a demographic as much as a genre? Dark Souls, Journey or Nier:Automata for redefining what actually constituted the role of 'online gamer' ? The path from Quake or Perfect Dark -> Halo 2 was no great paradigm shift compared to the five above imo
- cbdumas 2y ago
  > PUBG as the first Battle Royale and catalyst for Fortnite? As I recall, H1Z1 actually came out before PUBG (though it has since faded into obscurity). A quick search on Wikipedia seems to back that timeline[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PUBG:_Battlegrounds#Development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PUBG:_Battlegrounds#Developmen...
  - sickofparadox 2y ago
    Wasn't H1Z1 a knockoff of DayZ first, which then pivoted to the Battle Royale format after the success of PUBG?
0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
What novelty did Halo 2 introduce? At a high level, it is just another shooter preceded by all sorts of experiments: Quake, Counterstrike, Team Fortress, Unreal Tournament, etc. Sure, it had tons of polish and was on consoles, but I never thought of it as genre defining.
- Jerrrry 2y ago
  > was on consoles > genre defining you walked right past it

ravenstine 2y ago

For better or worse, in a lot of ways, I think the last decade of developers have done a lot to kick the ladder out from underneath them. One of the reasons I'm a software engineer today is because I could easily examine webpages to see how they work, tinker with the memory of programs, open up hardware to see what's inside (relatively low risk of destroying the device), and so forth. And yeah, back in the day of Halo PC, modding the levels taught me a lot about what goes into the game. Knowing what a "BSP" is can be a pretty useless piece of trivia, but it made me feel smart and capable of understanding more. It's still possible to get into tech and learn things today, but I have a hard time seeing how this can be accomplished by genuine tinkering. Software is way harder to crack/debug today; certainly not impossible, but the barrier of entry is much higher. Plus there's a ton of moving parts that go into getting software to work securely on not just mobile but modern desktops, adding another layer of hassle. You can still examine what a webpage is doing, but even that has changed significantly; so many websites today are div soup (yes, worse than in the early 2000s) to support JavaScript monstrocities that are also minified and obfuscated. When it comes to games, you can almost forget it in some cases because they're so heavily dependent on content streaming from servers. As far as hardware goes, you've either got to face various security hoops that can brick devices, use a heat gun to unglue the bezels on certain things, and face a lot more risk in permanent damage. All of these changes were made for a reason, but we've also taken the fun out of everything. Even game modding really wasn't what it used to be in spite of some of the tools available today technically being better than those in the past.

coldpie 2y ago
I agree with your concern, but I'm quite happy to see what's going on in the retro emulation & decompilation/reverse-engineering scenes[1]. A lot of that is being done and is driven by "the kids". It's an appealing, easy, and low-risk entry point for newer developers who want to dive into low level stuff, and it even has a bit of a "fuck the man" bent to it, which is fantastic. You're right that the environment is different from what we grew up with, it was always going to be. But I think the kids will find their own way. [1] If you haven't been tuned in, check this out, it's the goddamn Super Mario 64 source code in C, reverse-engineered from the game ROM: https://github.com/n64decomp/sm64/blob/master/src/game/hud.c https://github.com/n64decomp/sm64/blob/master/src/game/hud.c Similar projects exist for a ton of other classic games. It's jaw dropping what they're doing out there.

Zardoz84 2y ago

Modding it's pretty alive on PC.

huntedsnark 2y ago

> Halo 2 was the most innovative online game of all time In what ways exactly? Competitive online FPSs with strong modding communities were already more than a decade in full swing on the PC.

hombre_fatal 2y ago
Some things Halo 2 had off the top of my head that aren't related to gameplay: - Matchmaking. Almost all games at the time made you manually join lobbies, and now we take matchmaking for granted. - Persistent party. You'd invite your friends to your party and then start the match-making process. During the whole process you could chat with your friends, and when the game ended, you were still a party and could talk to each other. - Chat. Everyone had an Xbox Live headset which came with the service. So everyone was a participant of party chat, in-game team chat, and even "proximity chat" with the enemy. With Halo 2's chat systems + Xbox Live headset ubiquity, it was a highly social game. - Split screen online. All of the above worked with playing with a friend in split screen. Your friend could come over and you could start Team Slayer matchmaking in split screen which was awesome—the game would have to find two more teammates—, and your guest could even chat. Something that could never be done on PC really. These dominated the old "look for and join the server" model of past FPS and, frankly, I could never go back to that. Gameplay wise, Halo 1 had most of the innovations that Halo 2 capitalized on but Halo 2 moved to the pure shield-is-your-health-bar system and removed health packs. After each battle you didn't have this scramble for a health pack just to get ready for the next confrontation, so the pacing was better than arena shooters imo. Finally, Halo 2 didn't need to be the global first on each bullet point to be innovative. But it was probably the first game to have all these in one package. There was a lot of UX polish in setting this standard which you can tell because most games don't reach it even today.
- babypuncher 2y ago
  A lot of people lament the death of community run dedicated servers, but I'm with you here. I don't miss trying to find a good deathmatch UT04 server that wasn't either super high ping, loaded to the hilt with obnoxious mods, or stuck running Rankin 24/7, only to give up after 40 minutes.

DonnieBurger 2y ago

I still play Halo 2 on PC all the time, multiplayer included. There's an active community thanks to Project Cartographer: https://halo2.online/home/ https://halo2.online/home/

AgentME 2y ago
It's also still officially supported and popular through the Halo Master Chief Collection which is available on Steam.
MarkyC4 2y ago
(not to be demeaning, but) Why? Halo 2 is playable, with first party support, via The Master Chief Collection today. They've even kept the button combinations (BXR, RRX, etc)

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

giantg2 2y ago

"and still believe Halo 2 was the most innovative online game of all time." I think we can all agree it's multiplayer was better than the current halo infinite.

wsc981 2y ago
I never player Halo 2 multiplayer, but both me and my brother loved Halo: Combat Evolved multiplayer. Was awesome back in the day (I played it on a Mac, by brother probably on a PC). In my opinion it was the best FPS that I played, I'd put it above Unreal Tournament, Quake 3, Doom & Marathon. However, at some point it seems there were many aimbots in the game, which ruined the gameplay for me.

Larrikin 2y ago

I think this ignores the fact that technology will continue to march on and that the tinkering at the cutting edge will always allow for fun stuff. In the time period you talk about modding consoles and games was hacking on the cutting edge. Before that you had the phone phreakers and even before that you had people who were seriously into radios. I think its already happening with the current crop of LLMs, generative AI, and just all the various ML models that have been developed that and another generation has already started doing the same. Right now they are attempting to keep that locked behind corporate doors but we already have Llama locally thanks to a leak. Thats to say nothing of the budding AR that is also coming. The idea of putting goggles on my head with a computer that makes up the story, graphics and projects them onto the real world would have sounded crazy to me when I was knocking people out of AOL chat rooms with a concon.