> 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.
In what ways exactly? Competitive online FPSs with strong modding communities were already more than a decade in full swing on the PC.
- 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.
I kept a list of "good" servers (based on ping, map rotation, who played there, mods, etc), but when they were empty finding somewhere else was a complete pain.
I miss the camaraderie on some of those dedicated servers, but I know I wouldn't be able to get into something like that these days.
I have a group that regularly plays Overwatch together every Friday. Whenever more than 5 people show up, we play custom games. The workshop is surprisingly powerful, so it even gives us some of the experience we used to get with mods for games like Quake and Unreal.
When we have 5 or fewer people though, we really appreciate the game's matchmaking, even though it is far from perfect. It is a lot better at creating balanced matches than any server auto-balance feature ever was, while always keeping us on the same team.