Matchmaking!

Halo 2 is awesome. It's a great game. But it's not so un-fucking-believable that there should be millions of people still playing the damn thing going on three years after launch. How the hell did this happen?

One word: Matchmaking.

The dudes at Bungie are smart. Like wicked retarded smart. I saw Chris Butcher give a talk at GDC and I felt like there were angry fire ants inside my brain as I tried to follow his presentation. They made the first great fps on a console. But with Halo 2 they didn't just put a ton of time and effort into improving the game. They put an additional ton of time and effort into how you get into the game.

This is the part of PvP gaming that is so often overlooked. Developers are spending so much time on the game itself that they're neglecting how players find and get into games. Server browsing is old and stale and makes me feel like I'm rubbing two sticks together trying to get a spark to light somewhere inside the vast ocean of the internets. It's a total crapshoot... you never know what skill level your opponents are going to be and people are constantly coming and going from the server that the teams are rarely balanced. And have you ever tried to get 3 or 4 of your friends on the same server on the same team? Fuck that noise.

The Halo 2 matchmaking system is all about playing with your friends against random internet jackholes who are roughly the same skill level as you. That's the real key to the system. Forming a party, playing a game with static, relatively even teams, and then coming right back to the lobby with your buddies with voice chat enabled the whole time. It's brilliant.

Hopefully as developers get their next gen technology ducks in a row they'll start to have a bit more time to spend on additional systems like matchmaking. But until then I guess I'm destined to continue running around the internets as a space marine wearing a damned BMX helmet.

-Brad!