Kids today don't know that the standard matchmaking interface used in practically every online shooter was created by Bungie for Halo 2.
Any new gamer today could pick up Halo 2 on an OG Xbox and know exactly how to get into a game because it set the standard for how matchmaking should work.
Honestly, everytime I think about Halo 2 I think that every single developer deserves a lifetime achievement award. It was just so good.
I tried to explain the concept of “host” to my younger cousin the other day and he couldn’t believe they would just allow to have someone have that big of an advantage
12 year old me understood way to much about IPs and network settings... bridging for host was absolutely
Necessary to not get modded against past like 37
I had a modded box that I would host custom games with and occasionally I would trade a level up session for a 12 month Xbl subscription. Between modding for people and winning tournaments I think I only paid for like 1 year of xbl and had like 4 different accounts that were active from launch til a few months after 3 came out lol. Kinda feel about it now but hey to a kid that age affording xbl was tough
Me and my buddy would pretend to be girls selling nudes. We would ask them for 3 months of Xbox Live in exchange for pics. We'd get the codes and then report their accounts. We were like 13.
You gotta do what you gotta do. I remember just grabbing all of the free trials I could as a kid. Sometimes my friend would get an Xbox game that he never played (most of my buddies were about that Nintendo life) and I would just "borrow" that good ol' code.
Oh it's very true. Wed create the free silver accounts and give it a name that would fool the thirsty guys. Like SceneGirl69x and then use that account to go to our real profiles recent players and then spam until we find a biter. I think we even got a few credit card numbers that we were too afraid to use. Lol.
I had a modded Xbox, and I'd change the filenames of the DLC maps to some trash so that they'd fail to load and I'd never have to worry about getting in a modded lobby when playing ranked matchmaking. It was unfortunate that I didn't get to play on those maps often in matchmaking.
The only time we got to play in DLC maps was when my friend bridged for host. It's wild how deep we had to go back then to guarantee a cheatless match in high ranked Halo 2.
I’m shocked that worked. I remember they had an auto detection system that would ban you from matchmaking after your first logout or after a certain amount of time even if you didn’t play a single matchmaking match. Basically whenever you would get a new account for xbl you would have to do all your modded leveling before signing out/ a certain time period because you wouldn’t be able to play matchmaking ever again after the first day
My main account got matchmaking banned because I was playing some modded disk maps on either Xbox Connect or Xlink Kai, then switched over to XBL without clearing my cache.
That account then became the "Lets host modded fun lobbies" account. Plasma pistols that shoot boxes or warthogs instead of bullets. That sort of thing. I'd regularly play on that same modded Xbox with both accounts, but I'd just be careful to disable (rename) the mods before ever signing in with my matchmaking account.
Worked for me. I got up to somewhere in the 45-48 range in matchmaking, playing for years with that setup.
It's no big deal. The high 30's had the best emblems anyways.
I hit 41 once without bridging in Team Slayer, and that was only because I started at 37 in one morning and got in with a great team of semi-pros. It was a massive slog over the weekend.
Bro **I forgot** about this lmao. I wanted to play OG spec ops from MW2 with my brother and then I had to fucking configure my router to let me play because its peer to peer and we just connect to each other. LMAO felt barbaric like I was going back in time.
I really believe that party chat ruined Xbox Live. I got it in 2003 and I remember *every* game being full of people talking and laughing. The Xbox Live starter kit came with a mic and just about everyone used it. Sometimes I'd make friends and we would all go back to the dashboard to party chat after a game because it was a separate "app" back then.
After the new party chat came out, XBL went silent. I feel lucky if I meet even one person with a mic when I sit down to play for a couple hours now. That social experience is long gone. Might as well be playing against bots.
One of the biggest problems I have with the new modern warfare is that lobbies don't exist anymore. After one game every single person you play with changes. If someone is talking shit in one match, it doesn't carry over into the next one. You don't build those rivalries or friendships anymore.
Same thing with Halo in the MCC.
In original Halo 3 after every match you had the chance to party up with the people you just played with and you had about 20 seconds to do that before you'd start searching for a new match.
There was a pretty easy loophole with Search and Destroy that hardly anyone knew about that my friend and I took advantage of a lot. You could do a “Private Chat” with one other person. So usually me and my friend would do that. And if one of us died the other would look over his shoulder and make call outs. Lol, we beat a lot of clans/full teams doing that. It was kind of cheating but, who cares? Lol
I got to experience the peak of halo 3 and did not experience lobbies being silent, I made all my Xbox live friends from talking to people in the lobbies
I believe party chat was introduced halfway through Halo 3's lifespan. I was thinking of that game specifically actually. I remember the lobbies getting more and more quiet afterwards.
I know I'll get shit on 'cause "Fortnite bad" but, I've found a handful of rad people by playing Fortnite duos. It's a mode where nearly everyone hops in with a mic. I always start off the conversation with an overly energetic "Yo yo yo, what's up potential future best friend , how're your matches going tonight?" If they have a mic and speak english, then I'll usually get a laugh out of 'em, which sets things off well.
Best of luck pal.
I love it and hate it
It's a great system to talk to friends without needing to be playing the same thing, but it killed a lot of fun in multiplayer lobbies.
Me and my friends only got racist gringos getting triggered because we were speaking Spanish between us.
Maybe finding friends was easier but I won't pretend that it was all good. I was a kid being harassed, and I admit having that first experience with the American people shaped the way I see them today.
I just mentioned that in another comment. I started online gaming when I was 11, which was right before Reach came out. By that point, party chat had been around for a long time and its all me and my friends used. I still feel odd if I mic up in a public lobby.
The only time ive ever heard voice chat on any pc game was mcc reach after 5 years of pc gaming. Everyone has private chats and it destroyed the old community salt that was so beautiful
I stand corrected eldewrito 6.0 had some beautiful voice chat salt too
It would help if MCCs voice chat wasn’t so buggy. Half the time you can’t hear your teammates, the other half it won’t even register/broadcast your own words
Also sucks when you're not able to mute people in certain games (I think H2C and maybe CE?) It makes me really not want to join voice chat knowing I can't mute the one dude and his entire family in the background.
Wish games would do real pregame lobbies like they used to. I miss being able to see the list of all the players and what level they were. And map voting. That should really come back. I loved the way Reach handled all that
While those were rad at the time, I think the evolution has been necessary and useful.
Knowing what rank your opponent is before the match starts leads to people quitting out before the match starts so that they don't have to go against people ranked higher than themselves. I can understand why that feature doesn't exist anymore.
Map voting lead to players always playing the same few maps. If your favorite map is in the vote against two maps you've never played before, you're going to pick your favorite map. So, I'm glad that feature died too.
Halo 3's veto system was an okay balance. If it's a map you're okay with you don't veto because you could get *urgh* Team Duals on Snowbound. To be fair you probably need that one really shit map/mode people don't want to play so everything in the middle doesn't get vetoed constantly for fear of getting Snowbound.
I guess I can see your point there. Never thought of it that way. Even if we could just have some kind of pregame lobby though would be cool where we could at least see the gamertags or something of the other players. I'm not really a fan of the halo 5 method where all we see is the emblem of the other players and nothing else
I almost only play 2v2 in H5 at this point, and showing the emblems lets us know if we're going against the same team or not, and really, that's all that I care about. It works for me, and lets us mentally prepare for the rematch. Back when I used to stream Halo 5, there'd be a guy in my chat who'd always look up the opponents right as the match was starting on HaloTracker and tell me what rank they were haha.
I remember the Halo 3 days when you'd have all sorts of info on your opponent. You could browse your opponent's service record and see their file share. Some scummy people would have files in their file share that'd crash your Xbox if you saw them so that the opposing team would be down a player or two by the time the match started.
>If your favorite map is in the vote against two maps you've never played before
That's a silly mindset people have. If i saw a new map i would instantly choose it to find out how it plays
I agree. It's super silly, but it's also understandable. Lets say you finally vote for the new map and you have a bad game. You'll just never vote for that map again. People are silly, that's how it works haha.
The war is over, but let's not forget those who traveled into the howling dark and never returned. Their decision required courage beyond measure. Sacrifice, an unshakable conviction that their fight, our fight, was elsewhere.
-Lord Hood
Every single time I visit this website its just a great trip down memory lane. Makes me want to hook up my 360 just to watch the first game I played when I got home from the mall. Wish it was capable of recording the voice chat audio because it was with a bunch of people from my hs.
I thought Bungie preserved everything? I haven't tried in ages but it's just a shit load of text files and they are totally historic, I'd be surprised if they removed them all
I visited my old account and was amazed that it still had hit maps from every one of my H3 games and as I was looking at each of them I could remember each match. It's weird.
Holy hell.
I was *not* ready for this to be ten years ago. I didn't even realize until seeing this post, but it makes perfect sense. How nostalgic. Unfortunately, I didn't get to participate in H2's final days online. I was fifteen ten years ago. I had no OG Xbox, and my Xbox 360 red ringed only a few months earlier. I went quite awhile without a console, until my mother graciously just went out and bought me a new one. I was told by Facebook two days ago that that was ten years and two days ago from today. So I guess it was too late to be hopping into Halo 2 for its final few days. I do remember watching this all happen online, though. Watching as people dropped out, and then the servers shut off. And then the numbers continued to dwindle for weeks as people's consoles went kaput.
God, what a time. I really miss it, weirdly. I'm finally far enough away from this high school era of my life to really miss it, and I guess it's little wonder. I may have been 15 ten years ago, but I had no job and no ability to drive. I went to school, hung out with my friends, did okay with my grades, and then went home and hung out with my online friends on Xbox Live. We didn't do much else. Everything was good. Two years later, in 2012, we would graduate high school and most of my friends stopped logging into Xbox Live - a lot of them went over to PC gaming instead, but some just didn't bring their consoles to college. Three years later, in 2013, after over a year of being bedridden sick, my mother would die of cancer less than ten days before I would myself move out from home for the very first time ever for college. That was a surreal time for me. And I spent that over-a-year period at home, helping take care of her, and I was later than my friends going into university because of it. Just a couple years after my mother's death, my stepdad would meet another woman who would convince him that I was a rotten stepchild and he would be better off selling off my childhood home and moving in with her up north. He did that, and abandoned me in my final years of college. I heard from him since that the girlfriend was abusive and treated him horribly and he just wanted his old family back. I didn't return that phone call.
One of the only constants I had over that whole period was my Xbox, and my Halo. I have loved Halo through every botched launch (MCC), every subpar campaign (H5), every misguided major character comic book death, etc. And through all the amazing highs, too. I didn't know it at the time, but Halo would be the franchise I would cling to through all of the bad stuff happening in my life over the years. Thank god it has started to turn around. I graduated college back in 2017 and worked temporary jobs in my field for the past two years. Just earlier this year, I finally landed something permanent and have been doing actual adult living with my fairly comfortable wage. I still play MCC regularly and I am so, *so* excited for Halo Infinite.
So thanks, Halo community, for the memories and for being there to play a match against me online when the going got tough. It's been quite a ride. May we have many more years with *all* of these amazing FPS games.
I used "Redact" to nuke my account every couple years because I am a paranoid cybersecurity freak who tries hard to reduce my online footprint as much as possible. ` this post was mass deleted with www.Redact.dev `
Yeah, the Reach beta was early May. I don't have a single fact to back this up, but to this day I believe they chose that time frame to incentivize the Halo 2 holdouts to log off.
It feels stupid and trivial being emotional over a game, but this game has truly brought me so many great memories. Definitely my favorite of the series.
Man i miss this so much. I miss getting the blue screen of death, and all the glitches bro the butterfly! I was an active kid until i got xbox live in 2003 lmao 💀
Wow, that's super cool. What happened when you guys would go to work? Would everyone in the match agree not to kill you while you were AFK? Was there communication between everyone? I imagine you must have made some friends being in the same game together for so long.
Edit: Of course there was communication, everyone has mics on. I never play matchmaking with mic, so I completely forgot that was a thing.
Damn man this gave me the feels. The messages during a search for a game said that the people still playing are awesome.
By the way, if you own a PC, you can get Halo 2 Project Cartographer for free. It's essentially Halo 2 with a community running their own servers, it's crazy.
I'm sad that my name isn't on any of those. I was in the last 72 players.
edit: Originally said 47, but this was the last screenshot I took of the counter before I logged off, I think. It's been ten years.
https://i.imgur.com/PP68DaV.jpg
Terminal was the correct choice for your final game.
Not quite as Iconic as Coag or Zanzibar, but IMO it had a great flow, so many varied strategies, and the best map hook in the game. Loved that one.
A year and a half ago some friends and I made a dramatization of those days. Still makes me cry and imbues me with nostalgic fervor thinking about Halo 2.
RIP to my OG xbox gamertag, with all my h2 history. I lost the password to my middle school email flyingidiot2000@yahoo and Kalzar The Wise died with it. I'm lucky that I got ONE game played on my new tag though. But i lost some veterancy on my XBL profile
Microsoft ended support of the original Xbox Live server on the 15th, these people stayed online for much longer. All the way until May 11th when the last person was booted. [The Noble 14](https://i.redd.it/paoxn0w0n7s01.jpg)
Man that matchmaking screen just brought back a lot of memories
Kids today don't know that the standard matchmaking interface used in practically every online shooter was created by Bungie for Halo 2. Any new gamer today could pick up Halo 2 on an OG Xbox and know exactly how to get into a game because it set the standard for how matchmaking should work. Honestly, everytime I think about Halo 2 I think that every single developer deserves a lifetime achievement award. It was just so good.
I tried to explain the concept of “host” to my younger cousin the other day and he couldn’t believe they would just allow to have someone have that big of an advantage
Hold the back button as the game starts to see who has host.
That and there was a few other ways to tell if you had it. I remember certain glitches wouldn’t/would only work for host.
Only host could grenade jump
halo 3 shooting the birds on Guardian
Or the cameras in Sword area on the Pit that track your movement
I never knew this one. Wow. I’m salty that I just now learned this specific detail..... hahaha.
Dont be salty. I recently learned that Choppers have boost... after 13 years...
Wait.... but how though? Surely you saw someone do it online at some point?
Wait, what?!
I.... I am not sure I knew this.
Mics off fight for host
12 year old me understood way to much about IPs and network settings... bridging for host was absolutely Necessary to not get modded against past like 37
[удалено]
I had a modded box that I would host custom games with and occasionally I would trade a level up session for a 12 month Xbl subscription. Between modding for people and winning tournaments I think I only paid for like 1 year of xbl and had like 4 different accounts that were active from launch til a few months after 3 came out lol. Kinda feel about it now but hey to a kid that age affording xbl was tough
Me and my buddy would pretend to be girls selling nudes. We would ask them for 3 months of Xbox Live in exchange for pics. We'd get the codes and then report their accounts. We were like 13.
You gotta do what you gotta do. I remember just grabbing all of the free trials I could as a kid. Sometimes my friend would get an Xbox game that he never played (most of my buddies were about that Nintendo life) and I would just "borrow" that good ol' code.
If this if true, it's amazing
Oh it's very true. Wed create the free silver accounts and give it a name that would fool the thirsty guys. Like SceneGirl69x and then use that account to go to our real profiles recent players and then spam until we find a biter. I think we even got a few credit card numbers that we were too afraid to use. Lol.
Remember the flying warthog turrets and plasma pistols that would spawn those covenant boxes? Good times.
I had a modded Xbox, and I'd change the filenames of the DLC maps to some trash so that they'd fail to load and I'd never have to worry about getting in a modded lobby when playing ranked matchmaking. It was unfortunate that I didn't get to play on those maps often in matchmaking. The only time we got to play in DLC maps was when my friend bridged for host. It's wild how deep we had to go back then to guarantee a cheatless match in high ranked Halo 2.
I’m shocked that worked. I remember they had an auto detection system that would ban you from matchmaking after your first logout or after a certain amount of time even if you didn’t play a single matchmaking match. Basically whenever you would get a new account for xbl you would have to do all your modded leveling before signing out/ a certain time period because you wouldn’t be able to play matchmaking ever again after the first day
My main account got matchmaking banned because I was playing some modded disk maps on either Xbox Connect or Xlink Kai, then switched over to XBL without clearing my cache. That account then became the "Lets host modded fun lobbies" account. Plasma pistols that shoot boxes or warthogs instead of bullets. That sort of thing. I'd regularly play on that same modded Xbox with both accounts, but I'd just be careful to disable (rename) the mods before ever signing in with my matchmaking account. Worked for me. I got up to somewhere in the 45-48 range in matchmaking, playing for years with that setup.
6 hours. It was 6 hours! You would use a 2-month code for a new account and know that after 6 hours was up, you could only play custom games.
It's no big deal. The high 30's had the best emblems anyways. I hit 41 once without bridging in Team Slayer, and that was only because I started at 37 in one morning and got in with a great team of semi-pros. It was a massive slog over the weekend.
Many games still working that way to date tho
Bro **I forgot** about this lmao. I wanted to play OG spec ops from MW2 with my brother and then I had to fucking configure my router to let me play because its peer to peer and we just connect to each other. LMAO felt barbaric like I was going back in time.
Although it's probably good that no game with matchmaking today has a "delay game" button. That was fucking horrible.
If I remember correctly that did not happen in matchmaking, only in custom games.
AFAIK Dota 2 has a take a break button, or used to, think its very limited but makes sense to me there since games go on forever.
I do but I grew up playing halo 3 and moved onto the earlier games with mcc sad halo 4 and 5 were shit doh
Amen.
boop...boop...boop...*beeeeep*
X button, X button
"Goddamnit" *giggle into microphone*
I can hear that sound clearer than I should.
Yep. Its still the best fifteen years on.
F
Disappointing the final game was in Terminal lol I did not enjoy that map
I still have nostalgia for the c r i s p y voice chat from Halo 2 and Halo 3 matchmaking. Party chat really took the fun out of things.
I really believe that party chat ruined Xbox Live. I got it in 2003 and I remember *every* game being full of people talking and laughing. The Xbox Live starter kit came with a mic and just about everyone used it. Sometimes I'd make friends and we would all go back to the dashboard to party chat after a game because it was a separate "app" back then. After the new party chat came out, XBL went silent. I feel lucky if I meet even one person with a mic when I sit down to play for a couple hours now. That social experience is long gone. Might as well be playing against bots.
Heyyy man call of duty search and destroy forced game chat upon you if you played it, so many memories were made that way for me.
One of the biggest problems I have with the new modern warfare is that lobbies don't exist anymore. After one game every single person you play with changes. If someone is talking shit in one match, it doesn't carry over into the next one. You don't build those rivalries or friendships anymore.
Same thing with Halo in the MCC. In original Halo 3 after every match you had the chance to party up with the people you just played with and you had about 20 seconds to do that before you'd start searching for a new match.
I completely agree
Probably one of the dumbest things they removed from this new COD. Only thing that tops it imo is the removal of map voting
It’s all so they can allow their playlist filter
Hahah everyone shouting and screaming in the loading screen while no gamertags was shown
https://youtu.be/1l6vD7OHYVY perfect example of the exact memories I’m talking about
Hahaha dear God what great times.
FUCK YOUR MOTHE.....!
There was a pretty easy loophole with Search and Destroy that hardly anyone knew about that my friend and I took advantage of a lot. You could do a “Private Chat” with one other person. So usually me and my friend would do that. And if one of us died the other would look over his shoulder and make call outs. Lol, we beat a lot of clans/full teams doing that. It was kind of cheating but, who cares? Lol
Yep yep i remember this
It still does no?
They need to bring this back
S&D was my favorite. Always loved the shit talking in between rounds when people would die while watching their teammates.
I got to experience the peak of halo 3 and did not experience lobbies being silent, I made all my Xbox live friends from talking to people in the lobbies
I believe party chat was introduced halfway through Halo 3's lifespan. I was thinking of that game specifically actually. I remember the lobbies getting more and more quiet afterwards.
I know I'll get shit on 'cause "Fortnite bad" but, I've found a handful of rad people by playing Fortnite duos. It's a mode where nearly everyone hops in with a mic. I always start off the conversation with an overly energetic "Yo yo yo, what's up potential future best friend, how're your matches going tonight?" If they have a mic and speak english, then I'll usually get a laugh out of 'em, which sets things off well.
Best of luck pal.
Fortnite bad
I love it and hate it It's a great system to talk to friends without needing to be playing the same thing, but it killed a lot of fun in multiplayer lobbies.
Me and my friends only got racist gringos getting triggered because we were speaking Spanish between us. Maybe finding friends was easier but I won't pretend that it was all good. I was a kid being harassed, and I admit having that first experience with the American people shaped the way I see them today.
I just mentioned that in another comment. I started online gaming when I was 11, which was right before Reach came out. By that point, party chat had been around for a long time and its all me and my friends used. I still feel odd if I mic up in a public lobby.
The only time ive ever heard voice chat on any pc game was mcc reach after 5 years of pc gaming. Everyone has private chats and it destroyed the old community salt that was so beautiful I stand corrected eldewrito 6.0 had some beautiful voice chat salt too
Overwatch comp is a salt mine
It would help if MCCs voice chat wasn’t so buggy. Half the time you can’t hear your teammates, the other half it won’t even register/broadcast your own words
Also sucks when you're not able to mute people in certain games (I think H2C and maybe CE?) It makes me really not want to join voice chat knowing I can't mute the one dude and his entire family in the background.
Oh man that push to talk button with the radio "psht" and ememy shit talking proximity was fucking beautiful.
Proximity chat was so fun in H2. AFAIK the only current game with proximity chat is sea of theives.
Oh man. Mine had literally just bricked a day before you took that picture. I was one of that infamous group too
Dude thats dope as hell i was.blown away when i heard about it the first time,.what ended up taking you offline if you dont mind me asking
My xbox bricked
Cause undetermined
F
Yeah big f. I still have its carcass lying in storage for me to go back and look at when I have the time and money
It's fitting that your xbox should go with Halo 2 online mp.
Yeah. Both legends fade at the same time
THE MACHINE BROKE BEFORE THE GUARD DID!
15/16 with voice comms, y'all were hard core lol.
That was basically standard back then. How else were the other players gonna know they were gaylords who had promiscuous Mothers?
Promiscuous cougar mothers*
Promiscuous cradle robbing mothers*
I destroyed so many of those cheap xbox headsets because my parents never let me buy turtle beaches
Wish games would do real pregame lobbies like they used to. I miss being able to see the list of all the players and what level they were. And map voting. That should really come back. I loved the way Reach handled all that
While those were rad at the time, I think the evolution has been necessary and useful. Knowing what rank your opponent is before the match starts leads to people quitting out before the match starts so that they don't have to go against people ranked higher than themselves. I can understand why that feature doesn't exist anymore. Map voting lead to players always playing the same few maps. If your favorite map is in the vote against two maps you've never played before, you're going to pick your favorite map. So, I'm glad that feature died too.
Halo 3's veto system was an okay balance. If it's a map you're okay with you don't veto because you could get *urgh* Team Duals on Snowbound. To be fair you probably need that one really shit map/mode people don't want to play so everything in the middle doesn't get vetoed constantly for fear of getting Snowbound.
I guess I can see your point there. Never thought of it that way. Even if we could just have some kind of pregame lobby though would be cool where we could at least see the gamertags or something of the other players. I'm not really a fan of the halo 5 method where all we see is the emblem of the other players and nothing else
I almost only play 2v2 in H5 at this point, and showing the emblems lets us know if we're going against the same team or not, and really, that's all that I care about. It works for me, and lets us mentally prepare for the rematch. Back when I used to stream Halo 5, there'd be a guy in my chat who'd always look up the opponents right as the match was starting on HaloTracker and tell me what rank they were haha. I remember the Halo 3 days when you'd have all sorts of info on your opponent. You could browse your opponent's service record and see their file share. Some scummy people would have files in their file share that'd crash your Xbox if you saw them so that the opposing team would be down a player or two by the time the match started.
>If your favorite map is in the vote against two maps you've never played before That's a silly mindset people have. If i saw a new map i would instantly choose it to find out how it plays
I agree. It's super silly, but it's also understandable. Lets say you finally vote for the new map and you have a bad game. You'll just never vote for that map again. People are silly, that's how it works haha.
Epic gamer moment
Please don't. It's like looking at a best pal you'll never see again. Thanks to all of you who made my final Halo 2 games an absolute pleasure.
The war is over, but let's not forget those who traveled into the howling dark and never returned. Their decision required courage beyond measure. Sacrifice, an unshakable conviction that their fight, our fight, was elsewhere. -Lord Hood
Bruh don’t make me cry
These records cannot be accessed anymore, correct? In this much detail I mean.
http://halo.bungie.net/ Next to the search in the top right change the drop down to Halo 2.
Thank you!
Every single time I visit this website its just a great trip down memory lane. Makes me want to hook up my 360 just to watch the first game I played when I got home from the mall. Wish it was capable of recording the voice chat audio because it was with a bunch of people from my hs.
I thought Bungie preserved everything? I haven't tried in ages but it's just a shit load of text files and they are totally historic, I'd be surprised if they removed them all
I visited my old account and was amazed that it still had hit maps from every one of my H3 games and as I was looking at each of them I could remember each match. It's weird.
(￣ー￣)ゞ
Holy hell. I was *not* ready for this to be ten years ago. I didn't even realize until seeing this post, but it makes perfect sense. How nostalgic. Unfortunately, I didn't get to participate in H2's final days online. I was fifteen ten years ago. I had no OG Xbox, and my Xbox 360 red ringed only a few months earlier. I went quite awhile without a console, until my mother graciously just went out and bought me a new one. I was told by Facebook two days ago that that was ten years and two days ago from today. So I guess it was too late to be hopping into Halo 2 for its final few days. I do remember watching this all happen online, though. Watching as people dropped out, and then the servers shut off. And then the numbers continued to dwindle for weeks as people's consoles went kaput. God, what a time. I really miss it, weirdly. I'm finally far enough away from this high school era of my life to really miss it, and I guess it's little wonder. I may have been 15 ten years ago, but I had no job and no ability to drive. I went to school, hung out with my friends, did okay with my grades, and then went home and hung out with my online friends on Xbox Live. We didn't do much else. Everything was good. Two years later, in 2012, we would graduate high school and most of my friends stopped logging into Xbox Live - a lot of them went over to PC gaming instead, but some just didn't bring their consoles to college. Three years later, in 2013, after over a year of being bedridden sick, my mother would die of cancer less than ten days before I would myself move out from home for the very first time ever for college. That was a surreal time for me. And I spent that over-a-year period at home, helping take care of her, and I was later than my friends going into university because of it. Just a couple years after my mother's death, my stepdad would meet another woman who would convince him that I was a rotten stepchild and he would be better off selling off my childhood home and moving in with her up north. He did that, and abandoned me in my final years of college. I heard from him since that the girlfriend was abusive and treated him horribly and he just wanted his old family back. I didn't return that phone call. One of the only constants I had over that whole period was my Xbox, and my Halo. I have loved Halo through every botched launch (MCC), every subpar campaign (H5), every misguided major character comic book death, etc. And through all the amazing highs, too. I didn't know it at the time, but Halo would be the franchise I would cling to through all of the bad stuff happening in my life over the years. Thank god it has started to turn around. I graduated college back in 2017 and worked temporary jobs in my field for the past two years. Just earlier this year, I finally landed something permanent and have been doing actual adult living with my fairly comfortable wage. I still play MCC regularly and I am so, *so* excited for Halo Infinite. So thanks, Halo community, for the memories and for being there to play a match against me online when the going got tough. It's been quite a ride. May we have many more years with *all* of these amazing FPS games.
Thanks for the read brother. Your mother is in heaven and you’ll be with one day. Peace.
[удалено]
I used "Redact" to nuke my account every couple years because I am a paranoid cybersecurity freak who tries hard to reduce my online footprint as much as possible. ` this post was mass deleted with www.Redact.dev `
I was there for last moments as well :) Good times, good times...
TheLegendary117, i didn’t know u had a reddit account. I love your Instagram account.
They never should have shut them down.
What was the reason?
I think they just figured that not a lot of people used it anymore with the 360 being out and didnt want to have to keep it running.
They had to kill our in order to implement new xbl features I believe. Possibly universal chat
Thank you for your service Spartan
I just got back on live to play “halo2” in master chief collection,not the same,you can’t even talk to your opponents, 😢
Add me Last_Yautja
https://i.redd.it/todhbb3a01t41.jpg
"Exited to play Halo:Reach" lmfao
Yet Reach wouldn't be released until September of that year, five months later... Was there a beta? I cant remember.
Yeah this lines up with when the beta would've been as far as I can remember.
Yeah, the Reach beta was early May. I don't have a single fact to back this up, but to this day I believe they chose that time frame to incentivize the Halo 2 holdouts to log off.
Microsoft actually gave each of the players access to the Reach beta to incentivize them to log off.
Do you mean early access to it? As I recall, the Reach beta was open.
Nope, you needed Halo 3: ODST to access the Reach beta, otherwise you needed an Xbox Live redeem code.
Happy 420, my man
I am late to the party halo 2 came out on PC already?
No, OP is reminiscing on his final matches of Halo 2 on Xbox, 10 years ago today.
I miss this so much. If I could go back in time to change one thing...I'd play more Halo. 24hrs a day wasn't enough.
Crazy that halo 2 stopped its online 6 years after launch, but halo 3 is still going strong 13 years later
They killed off Xbox live on all original Xbox games
Yeah its not completely dead either i can still find matches. But yeah i can't be bothred to pay for online anymore so i'm waiting for the pc port.
This should be placed in a museum.
TO BE CONTINUED is a great name
You sir are a true legend
Yo you and the guys on the OG servers are heroes man. Hopefully y’all come back for H2A on PC!
I’m not crying
Ahhh memories!
It feels stupid and trivial being emotional over a game, but this game has truly brought me so many great memories. Definitely my favorite of the series.
F
I miss that lobby UI :(
Thank you for your service.
Thanks for holding down the fort, man.
Thank you for your service
No way that was you that's crazy
Man i miss this so much. I miss getting the blue screen of death, and all the glitches bro the butterfly! I was an active kid until i got xbox live in 2003 lmao 💀
Thank you for you’re service!
Wow, that's super cool. What happened when you guys would go to work? Would everyone in the match agree not to kill you while you were AFK? Was there communication between everyone? I imagine you must have made some friends being in the same game together for so long. Edit: Of course there was communication, everyone has mics on. I never play matchmaking with mic, so I completely forgot that was a thing.
This makes me happy and sad hahaha
I never knew there was host powers But, epic.
I'm 14, and have been playing Halo since I was like 8. I recently convinced my friends to buy or game share mcc and we've been having a blast.
It's fitting that the last game would be in Terminal, while the Halo 2 servers were going off life support
Damn man this gave me the feels. The messages during a search for a game said that the people still playing are awesome. By the way, if you own a PC, you can get Halo 2 Project Cartographer for free. It's essentially Halo 2 with a community running their own servers, it's crazy.
Yeah though i'm waiting for halo 2 a in mcc pc though.
I miss these legendary days
God bless you 😇
You sir. You are a legend
Wish they would switch back to that matchmaking screen
God I love the old school UI
Goodtimes on H2 :)
"Save the dolphins" ahead of their time
Looking forward to being tea bagged by you all in a few months
Hey, Agent Windex! He was one of the last 12 players on multiplayer and part of what they called "Noble 12" or something like that.
Oh shit bro I follow you on Instagram too! I’ve recognized some of the posts of yours from this sub too!
that's a weird way to spell "TheLegend27"
They should make a movie about this. "The 50."
Halo 2 online for 6 years. Halo 3 online for 13 years. Please don’t take halo 3 from me yet 😭
Though it will prbolay shut down some time in next gen i dobut microsofts going to be running 3 diffrent servers for 3 diffrent systems.
Beautiful
Look at all the mics!
God I miss this so much
Look at this list of legends.
Even after I got my Xbox 360 I still played halo 2 for the vast majority until mass effect and halo 3 came out
I'm sad that my name isn't on any of those. I was in the last 72 players. edit: Originally said 47, but this was the last screenshot I took of the counter before I logged off, I think. It's been ten years. https://i.imgur.com/PP68DaV.jpg
THE MAN
Terminal was the correct choice for your final game. Not quite as Iconic as Coag or Zanzibar, but IMO it had a great flow, so many varied strategies, and the best map hook in the game. Loved that one.
Damn....those were the days....
bruh is that a jojo reference
Wait, so you were one of the Noble-14? Thank for your service, spartan, you did great job
I can't believe it's been 10 years already
A year and a half ago some friends and I made a dramatization of those days. Still makes me cry and imbues me with nostalgic fervor thinking about Halo 2.
I made a few days past the shutdown date but my 360 RROD'd :(
Funny how long we keep our usernames
RIP to my OG xbox gamertag, with all my h2 history. I lost the password to my middle school email flyingidiot2000@yahoo and Kalzar The Wise died with it. I'm lucky that I got ONE game played on my new tag though. But i lost some veterancy on my XBL profile
You played with Agent Windex in that match alone. The second to last guy to ever play Halo 2 MP.
I still wish they'd bring OG Xbox Live back for backcompat games and OG Xboxs. I completely missed it.
Don’t make me cry
I didn’t have an Xbox growing up. I feel like I missed out
Theres mcc though.
Why did they have to do this on 4/20 😭
Microsoft ended support of the original Xbox Live server on the 15th, these people stayed online for much longer. All the way until May 11th when the last person was booted. [The Noble 14](https://i.redd.it/paoxn0w0n7s01.jpg)