Halo 3 and The Art of the Telephone Game
This article is dedicated to all of those who are using the newly leaked EGM article to try and slam my “Halo 3 Co-Op Confirmed” article (which has surpassed 1,000 diggs). The hype artists out there are now screaming (and crying) that the new EGM article confirms Halo 3 won’t have online co-op and that myself, Jeff Bell, and others are wrong. This is not true. First of all, the EGM article, and EGM’s visit to Bungie, happened over a month ago, a lot has changed since then.
Secondly, my article never stated that the co-op in Halo 3 would be online (although I believe it will be). The reason for my original article was due to a throwaway comment said by Jeff Bell playing Halo 1 and 2 co-op with his son, and how with Halo 3, he’d now finally be able to play it all together with all three of his sons.
Then there’s this article, written by the guy who helped write the Halo 3 EGM cover story, here you go.
Halo 3 and The Art of the Telephone Game
So you obsessive Internet-using types have probably noticed, between poring over leaked scans of Harry Potter book seven, that certain information from the next issue of EGM has begun circulating the Internet. This is despite the fact that the next issue of EGM has not yet actually left the printer’s. The next issue of EGM will therefore be remembered as “The Deathly Hallows Issue.”
The Internet being the Internet, of course, word — that’s every word — spread far and wide the minute the scans went online. Having written half of the article currently being propagated across the world, I’ve been very interested to watch its spread. By “interested” I mean “frustrated,” and not just because I would have liked to have seen the fruits of my labor in person before it became yesterday’s news. Much more irritating is the way that people’s poor reading comprehension and hysterical assumptions have painted an inaccurate picture of the game with just enough credit to the original source to make it looked like the inaccuracies are our fault. And that is not cool.
The entire Internet has descended upon the EGM scans, buzzard-like, to carve themselves a little piece of the action/traffic. I accept that this is simply how things work now. We at 1UP sometimes partake of this shameful act ourselves! But look, Internet people, if you’re going to pick the bones of our cover story clean, please have some integrity about it. That means checking to make sure what you’re writing is actually correct. Yes, I know. Muckraking is easy traffic; sensationalize something and the hits just roll in. Fact-checking is time-consuming and difficult, too, and every second that you don’t have a story posted because you’re double-checking its accuracy is a second that someone else is getting Dugg up. But there’s a reason so many people have so little respect for bloggers, and crap like the OMG NO ONLINE CO-OP IN HALO 3 stories that have been filtering around for the past day is right at the top of the list.
The co-op element of EGM’s story seems to be the one thing that people are latching onto. Halo 3’s campaign mode won’t support online co-op gameplay, the article almost kind of seems to suggest according to a few summaries, making for headlines like “Halo 3 Co-Op Heads Offline.” Bummer, huh? After the awesome experiences we had with Gears of War and Crackdown, it really sucks that Bungie’s not putting online co-op into this game. Time to whip out clever photoshops that use “fail” as a noun! Maybe even some hilariously captioned cat photos that describe Bungie’s ineptitude with ironically poor grammar!
Except… Bungie hasn’t actually denied or ruled out online co-op in Halo 3. What the developers — Frank O’Connor in particular — did say is that they’re still working on it. They’re trying to surmount the technical challenges that are preventing co-op from being as polished as the rest of the game. They know people want it. They want to add it. But as of our interview with them, a month ago, it hadn’t come together yet in a satisfactory manner. That doesn’t mean it won’t happen, and in fact they’d like to make it happen. But they won’t include a half-baked implementation.
Personally, I suspect they’ll get the kinks worked out — and even if the game doesn’t ship with online co-op out of the box, that’s what updates are for. But that’s my speculation, which you shouldn’t confuse with facts. In this case, the facts are that Bungie wants to include online co-op and is working toward that end.
No one’s perfect — hell, I let a small factual error creep into the Halo 3 story, which Bungie seems determined to never ever let me live down — but it’s not hard to sort out the facts when you have our stolen text right there as a reference. All it takes is a little reading comprehension and the willingness not to rely on the Telephone Game as a source for news. You want facts, go find the source. Don’t rely on someone’s impressions of someone else’s write-up of an article that they read furtively before the scans were taken offline. That’s all it takes to elevate yourself from “slapdash dumbass blogger” to “aspiring journalist.”
But perhaps these amateurish hijinks are simply the way of the Internet now.