71 replies
1d3h
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.
this is pretty much the only unanimous, uncontroversial absolute statement that can be made in the context of online gaming
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.
I'm a hardcore Quake/Unreal apologist, but you gotta hand something to Halo and Halo 2. Gorgeous shader-based graphics for the time, vehicles, absurd arsenals, wide-open maps, and 16 player(!!!) LAN play. It's a game that would have sold like gangbusters on PC, and was only that much more successful for being well-supported on console too.
One might even argue that the success of Halo is what forced arena shooters like Counter Strike and Team Fortress to evolve or die. There was more at stake after it released, and outside the competitive circles there wasn't much demand for the FPS equivalent of Wheaties.
Battlefield 1942 comes to mind as some predecessor close to what you describe
Hell, even Perfect Dark before that. I'm not one to defend Halo as the most-innovative, especially with the disproportionate amount of funding and manpower that went into it.
That being said, I think Halo deserves commendation for bringing a lot to the mainstream without compromise. The same people that casually enjoyed Halo were probably not also playing Goldeneye or Arma in their free time. And marketing be damned, Halo is fun even today. Hopping in a match of CE makes me lament how little team-based shooters have progressed in the past 20 years.
To me it's crazy to think how far ahead of its time in terms of emergent behavior was Battlefield compared to other games, besides battle arenas. Probably it wasn't the first one either, but it's the one that comes to mind.
Picking up a tank or a jeep is one thing, but going for controlling an aircraft carrier or a submarine? Even if the controls were really primitive, it felt amazing!
The destructible environment aspect in some of those games was so cool. Can’t breach into the objective? Take down the building. No other game is or was like that. Even new battlefield games have walked back a lot of that behavior.
Something about halo just feels like such modern game, even halo ce. It’s so weird to think this game was contemporary with golden eye or quake. I think it was the polish with the animations, sound, and the physics. You pull out the pistol and do that satisfying pull back and click on it. You throw a grenade and hear it arm and see it thrown. You see your teammates throw grenades. You throw a grenade under a warthog, it flips it and knocks the occupants out. Even just scoping in and out of the sniper was satisfying with the sound it made.
I have had tons of fun with Halo, but I am fixated on this “innovative” classification. It feels more like right place right time. Had Golden Eye been LAN play, would it have been termed as most innovative?
Edit: I should also give a shout out to Tribes for hitting a lot of those same notes
Halo 2 was basically synonymous with Xbox Live and everything that came with it when it launched (for better or worse). For example popularizing voice chat (including proximity!), rapid matchmaking, persistent parties between matches and gamemodes and player ranks and levels. They talk it about it a bit in the second half of this video.
https://youtu.be/YGSuPZVgxLg?si=cQZRaXJGaGFaKuL-&t=172
Halo 2's online multiplayer introduced (or popularized?) party-based matchmaking. So instead of having to coordinate all your buddies joining the same pre-existing server, you'd join up as a party and then drop into a matchmaking queue, which would set up a game against opponents, optionally taking a skill-based ranking into account. They even did a bunch of marketing around this, since it was a new concept at the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGSuPZVgxLg
UT2004 was released half a year before Halo 2 though.
halo 2 came out with xbox live and defined the experience. social lobbies, matchmaking, etc
Clans, ranked based play, integrated voice chat.
That last one was in other xbox live games before it, but Halo 2's Xbox Live brought online gaming to everyone's television room whereas before it was only on the computer.
you walked right past it
Wouldn’t that innovation belong to the original Halo then? Halo 2 was mostly iterative improvements.
The online multiplayer (party-based matchmaking, including ranked mode) was huge.
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
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#Developmen...
Wasn't H1Z1 a knockoff of DayZ first, which then pivoted to the Battle Royale format after the success of PUBG?
I'd probably give the crown to EverQuest (1.0) myself.
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.
I agree with you in general, but I think it has to be said that we also live in the era of things like the source for Unreal Engine 5 being completely and wholly available, along with a zillion tutorials and extremely well documented source. This is unlike anything we had, and better in basically every single way imaginable. In the hardware world there's Pi's, dirt cheap PCBs that you can have delivered in < 24 hours, and so on endlessly. It's like instead of breaking into a trailer, we've all been granted carte blanche access to a mansion.
But maybe there was something about how counter-culture and esoteric stuff was itself attractive precisely because of that. There was also a lot more reward for a lot less work, largely because so few people were doing it. Now if somebody wants to go learn Unreal then it's just a pretty mundane and common thing, and you'll also be largely incompetent unless you're willing to dedicate years to it. By contrast when I was a kid changing the text in a shareware installer was enough to wow my friends with my leet skills, and that's something that took about 5 minutes to do, and not that much longer to learn. Oh and then creating secret directories by naming them alt+255, and so on. Dumb stuff, but it soon enough led me to much more than parlor tricks.
The big difference is that people used to mod existing games. That allowed modders to leverage the game's engine, gameplay design, art, and even its existing playerbase.
Having a full-featured open-source game engine is great, but starting with that means starting at square one.
By obsessively enforcing copyright and "anti-cheat", we effectively bury the game-making process 6 feet underground. Every game is declared dead at the very moment of its release. Every decision its creators made up to then is set in stone. The game studio itself must exist in isolation, ignorant of the very world it is creating its games for.
It's no wonder that AAA studios are so out of touch with the people who play their games. Gamers are explicitly excluded from the creative process.
That's their loss. Meanwhile Minecraft is the most sold game ever, and Roblox is probably not far behind. (That one comes with its own issues, but hopefully children are sick of those by the time they become teens and are ready to move on to something more open ?)
One consideration is maybe stuff that's "hackable", i.e. immediately accessible, can be incrementally and reversibly modified, is more accessible to "play" while stuff that's extremely capable but has a high activation cost (setting up the environment, learning all the stuff to make something basic etc.) is more accessible only to "focused / goal oriented study" and this has all kinds of implications on who does it, who succeeds, under which circumstances etc.
e.g. my friend tells me you can open game.exe in notepad + change this value to walk on lava, then I fiddle with it and tl;dr make a map of my school, then get frustrated with limitations and start learning a game engine with some practical background on what these concepts are etc.
vs. I decide want to make a game because that's cool, I buy a book on game programming, it depends on these libraries, I install them, I install a compiler, the libraries don't work with the compiler/each other, ......... and give up because the grit in my life is reserved for stuff other than video games.
... like really, what is the overlap of people that are really mind blowingly creative as artists, and the people that are super type A driven to go through all this frustration up front? less friction, more better art
There's definitely that element, but I also think something missed by compartmentalizing hardware "tinkering" to devices designed specifically for the task. Nothing about a Raspberry Pi, for instance, is mysterious. If a person is going to buy one, they already have a significant level of interest and base knowledge. A kid's not gonna have one lying around and get curious about it unless their parent is a geek who owns those things, and even then said kid may have no good reason to even bother with one. Practically nobody today is opening up their laptop or their phone to mod it or even just see what's inside. I'm not saying the modern situation is bad, but a significant amount of it is artificial in a way that wasn't when the devices one would play with were the devices actually being used, and it's not clear to me whether what we have now is actually better in regard to inspiring future generations. Engaging with one's everyday hardware is an exercise in the power process that fewer and fewer generations are experiencing.
I started coding with an Action Replay cartridge. Press a button and you get dumped into a new context where can fully inspect the machine and running program, and can modify any of it.
That's easier it was later on Windows (which for 15 years was how 99% of people used computers) and anything after.
Action reply on a snes? I use to mess around with this too as a ten year old
CheatEngine exists on modern systems and can still do a lot of this, though modern game engines are less friendly to the simple "scan for the health variable and set it to 1000" workflow of yesteryear. However, newer versions of cheat engine include C#/monogame decompilers that let you screw around with some unity games
They’ve got, with wildly varying levels of skill and investment: unity, unreal, godot, or Roblox.
Not quite as fun as modding though.
I think adding your own touch to something you're more intimately familiar with helps ease people into it. Touching an asset file to modify a texture and instantly see the results in your favorite game is a lot more approachable (and appreciate-able) for someone starting out, I think.
100% agree
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 Similar projects exist for a ton of other classic games. It's jaw dropping what they're doing out there.
Yeah, I've heard of that decompilation, and have been more closely following the complete decompilation and PC port of Perfect Dark, which is pretty amazing.
I agree with you, but would suggest that the thing to focus on is the next layer of abstraction. The thing that barely works. Our generation screwed around with the PSX and Xbox, the Wild West era of the internet, etc. Now the most obvious thing I can think of that is the same level of not done is AI. Yeah there’s a higher barrier to entry, but look at that guy the other day that posted about improving performance by dynamically pruning a model. Or half the crazy shit on huggingface. Generative video and image AI seems to have a lower entry barrier too.
Again I’m not saying you’re wrong. It just seems like the thing that’s always the most prime for screwing around with is the thing at the bleeding edge. There’s still some fun to have.
I would look elsewhere. SBCs like Pi Zero costing peanuts, myriads of few dollar sensors enabling all kinds of easy to hop projects, virtualisation, cheap (if non gaming) x86 hardware, much better OSS landscape, much more learning resources, GPT to help with questions... it can be easily seen as paradise as well.
I agree and have the same feeling we've lost something as so much computer-centric tech has become relatively inaccessible in the name of 'security' (although much seems like efforts 'secure' business models or IP). As you observed, the tech has also evolved in ways which make it relatively undiscoverable through casual tinkering. Although perhaps we suffer from a generational perspective bias, I think there really was a 'golden era' of computer tech hobbyist accessibility and discoverability.
When Did the 'Golden Era' Begin?
I'd peg it as starting around the late Usenet era. Interestingly, there was definitely a time period in consumer computer tech when it was too early. I know because I started "too early" and missed being a teenager in the golden era because I got my first computer as a teenager in 1981. It was a Radio Shack Color Computer with 4K of memory, a 0.9 Mhz 8-bit 6809 processor and storage via an external cassette tape player. Fortunately, the ROM BASIC on that model was perhaps the most evolved 8-bit ROM BASIC Microsoft ever made (vs the early Commodore & Atari flavors) and Radio Shack did a fantastic job on the large, well-illustrated color manuals.
Unfortunately, 1981 was too early because no one in my family's extended social network had ever touched a computer. So, beyond the BASIC manual in the box, I was on my own with my new computer. While there were a few big magazines like BYTE on news stands, very little in them applied to my computer. I eventually discovered a couple of zine-style publications at a distant big news stand. Although they were essentially overgrown stapled newsletters printed in B&W, they became my lifeline because they had articles written by hobbyists more advanced than I, as well as mail-order ads for cassette tape-based software. This was the key that unlocked the mysterious realm of assembly language for me when I ordered a $12 homebrew monitor program written by some random guy who took out a classified ad. The local library didn't have any books relevant to my new microcomputer, local colleges only offered computer courses under the math dept and those were focused on mainframes and COBOL (I think back then 'real' CompSci was limited to Ivy League and top tier tech unis). Even large bookstores had nothing useful to me I could order other than Osborne's 6809 CPU book which was really an architecture and instruction set reference manual mostly incomprehensible to an isolated teenage hobbyist starting out.
A few years later 300 baud modems became cheap enough for hobbyists to acquire but it took another year or so for BBSes to emerge which were targeted at my computer (most BBSes prior to that were run on CP/M hardware and focused on one platform (not mine)). So dialing BBSes focused on my platform involved long-distance charges which meant short calls. Another year later FidoNet connected larger BBSes and national-level info began to circulate and my local hobby scene stayed pretty much like this for a few years. New info centered around zines, local computer club meetings, mailed tapes & diskettes and short BBS calls. Info was available but it was scarce and you had to work at getting it.
That's why I think the true golden era truly took off in the late Usenet period. That's when anyone could subscribe to a ~$10/mo service providing 1200 baud access to Usenet feeds in their local area code. Before that, unless you were at a university studying CompSci or worked at a uni or large tech company, Usenet was a magical land you only heard about on BBSes or at user group meetings. When random home hobbyists got direct access to the firehose of high-quality, global Nerdverse content that was the Usenet CompSci feeds it felt like the Enlightenment dawning. From there the transition to the early web was pretty natural since a lot of early tech-centric websites were much like a BBS ring. We didn't need search because they mostly linked to each other and people were running them as a hobby so few had ads other than maybe a sponsorship from an ISP or modem company (usually just paid in free service or hardware). Fortunately, the tech hobbyist web wasn't impacted much by the 2001 dot com crash since it was never about revenue. Up until the slow decline gradually started in the mid-2000s, it was pretty great - flashing BLINK tags and all. Honestly, we didn't even realize how good we had it, or imagine that it might someday end.
When Did the 'Golden Era' End?
Having lived through the pre-Golden Era, the early days and through the end, I think the seeds of the Golden Era's slow decline were planted when the modern web business began to emerge from the ashes of the dot com crash. Although things were still pretty hobbyist-discoverable in desktop OSes and the web through 2010-ish, troubling signs were on the horizon. For those paying attention, the rapid dominance of iOS in the late 2000s was ominous. Apple's business model required a walled garden app store and their concept of users was not as active explorers but as purely passive eyeballs for media and app-snacking. Even though a few app developers did well in the early app store, the fundamental model relegated them to the role of sharecroppers working Apple's farm with Apple's tools and selling only to Apple's store (with no access to their app's end-users).
In all, entry-level, home-based tech hobbyists got almost 20 really amazing years in the 'Golden Era' from roughly the late 80s to the late 2000s. It would be wonderful if in the distant future that period is known as "The First Golden Era" but right now it's hard to be optimistic. While there is still an enormous amount of hobbyist info available online and more emerging, it's in a context of equally increasing locked down areas and ever decreasing discoverability (though open source and Github-like sites are notable exceptions).
Maybe this is why retro computing and retro gaming are booming now with new people who never experienced it the first time. It's a place where that unique Golden Era ethos, vibe and community still exists. Last year I went to a local user group meeting for Amiga computers, which is what I had mid-80s to early 90s. I met a bunch of enthusiastic Amiga users who hadn't been born when I bought my first Amiga. It was strange to feel both "old" and "OG Cool" at the same moment but also heartening to feel that same open community vibe still beating. :-)
I think you're making the classic mistake of thinking that because your on-ramp isn't available anymore there are no on-ramps anymore.
I read an extremely similar comment two decades or so ago about a dev saying that no-one would learn computers anymore because everyone now used GUIs instead of CLIs...
Yes modding might be harder nowadays, but you have things like Scratch and Hedy, or the freely available Unreal/Unity dev tools with asset stores.
I think it's also the fact that back in the day shit usually didn't work, so it was expected to need to tinker with it.
To be fair you have to realize how much more dependent the global economy is on software nowadays. Halo was a Bungie product, and when Bungie left as Microsoft took it over yeah, the product had loftier business goals that needed to be protected. Smaller devs can't really reach critical market saturation anymore like they used to.
You can criticize where things has gone with MTX but I don't think that was a choice by the game developers. I also think it's a generational thing as you and I are now too old to spend all day fucking around with some game we played a ton. I'm sure the kids of today are tinkering with minecraft/fortnite/whatever replaced those games.
Also to me it's a bit of wanting to try and put the tooth paste back in the tube. When we were teenagers modding Halo we maybe didn't fully understand the impacts it had on the game's community and the overall experience. As an adult I just see how games like Call of Duty appear to be constantly losing the fight against hackers, and using over engineered matchmaking algos with SSBM to try and maximize the typical user's gameplay experience. But I can't regain my naivety and be one of the many younger adults who probably don't even really notice these issues, the way I didn't when I played Halo 3 on Xbox Live which had boosting, standby, and stealth servers.
In what ways exactly? Competitive online FPSs with strong modding communities were already more than a decade in full swing on the PC.
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.
Don't forget the post-game carnage report, which, while first present in Marathon, was refined and provided the best post-multiplayer-game stats of any game I've seen, even years later.
The telemetry bungie used to popular stats on their website is better than pretty much any modern game today outside of like CS2. I will caveat that by saying modern practices require you put things behind an api with a paywall of some sort, but they had freaking action heatmaps in 2004.
One thing that halo and some other games do is let you thumb through the last matchs stats while the next map loads. Valve games just throw you a map loading screen you’ve seen a thousand times.
It was not only interesting and fun to look at but also informative- you could learn things about them maps from them, in an era before YouTube.
For real, I used to love the amount of detail they put on bungie.net . It really is still unmatched even today, as far as I've seen. So good <3
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.
Oh wow, I had totally forgotten about server hunting.
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 think a lot of that camaraderie and sense of community has moved to places like Discord and Reddit.
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.
Games like tf2 make parsing community servers pretty easy. You can do things like set ping cut offs, only look for nonempty and not full servers, look for certain numbers of people playing, certain maps or gametypes, and include or exclude keywords like certain modded gametypes.
I had interpreted the parent comment to be about gameplay, but those are all fantastic points about matchmaking and the related QoL improvements. It absolutely is taken for granted because I forgot Halo 2 was the first to do _all_ of that well, and in one complete package.
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.
Hot Coffee was in GTA: San Andreas, a game that a “Mature” rating in the US i.e. only for people of ages 17+. They cut Hot Coffee to get to Mature from Adults Only (18+). Kids shouldn’t have been anywhere near these games if parents cared about what they were looking at.
German GTA: SA (and VC) was even more cut. No dismemberment, no blood, no money from corpses.
Austria imports...
Getting GTA San Andreas from the pawn shop was the happiest moment in my pre-pubescent life, and it had nothing to do with the mature aspects of it.
At the risk of repeating myself. The issue with Hot Coffee was that it cast a huge shadow on the ESRB system itself.
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.
They did. For the next generation. They updated their model of "child safe".
Cheating is only a concern for a tiny minority of games (which, admittedly, are played by a not as tiny but still minority of gamers).
DRM (and similar locks) is a plague over general purpose computing, and therefore our liberal democracies themselves.
Maybe they could just set mods behind parental controls. The mod community is a good incubator for what you should maybe add to the game in the next release.
>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?
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/
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..
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/
(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)
It's also still officially supported and popular through the Halo Master Chief Collection which is available on Steam.
"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.
Modding it's pretty alive on PC.
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.