Okay, I have officially come to the conclusion that Halo 2 on-line is a pile of poo. Off-line you have a very technical, slick-looking offering. You have a similar beast on-line but what makes it so annoying is the people that play the game. I am sure that these people are just a minority but they seem to be a minority that I consistently come across!
Take last night as an example. I logged onto a big team battle. After the game configured itself the pre-game lobby came up and the first words to be uttered were “faggot” and “f***er” as a slagging match was in-progress between two very young sounding american yoofs. Whem balam interjected one of them responded saying “I’m going to f*** you up”. Nothing like Xbox Live to foster international relations 🙂
In the game things were no better. The name-calling continued along with general abuse. Balam was immediately betrayed by a member of his own team. Soon after people started to leave the game in their droves. This made it a totally uninspiring experience.
One would like to think this was a one-off but it was not. In a gaming session lasting say an hour, you can guarantee to be abused at least once. I usually end up muting the offending characters but that takes time and you can be killed while doing it, because each player has to be dealt with separately. The other option is to unplug the headset. If you are playing with a friend of course you can no longer talk to or hear them.
I think future releases of Halo 2 should address these problems. The development team should introduce a “mute other team” button. Also when playing in small teams you should be able to talk to team members regardless of where they are in the map.
Halo 2’s success has spawned a huge number of obsessive halo-geeks that walk its maps, in utter ignorance that actually, the game is just not as brilliant as the hype surrounding it.
Okay that’s my whinge over.