unforum

[No.]

JeBus Holy Unnecessary Expletive. Don't make me tell everyone you eat your own poop.

You seem to be under the impression that "math" is a verb.

It CANNOT be a demo because there are less than 5k people who are taking part in this game.


You say that it isn't a good way to get it out to the masses, and that's my diggety dang point!

This ISN'T for the massses. This is just a fricking game for the obsessive freaks who check out every single web address they see in movie trailers.

EDIT: For unnecessary language - SG

[krystyn]

While I've really enjoyed the puzzly stuff we've seen, this game is hardly big, right now. We have ONE in-game website discovered so far, and an associated blog at blogspot.com.

The response has been impressive, but not surprising, given the demographic and the delivery method.

I think there's many ways to look at this situation, and pretty much any of them are fair game, within reason.

[Roc]

No: You need to come off it, the Story is wholly and utterly Halo-universe-related. You're starting to sound quite like a troll.

ARGs take money and time to make, and the big ones thus far have been advertisements for products, through setting the ARG in the same fictional reality as the product itself.

If this ARG wasn't solely designed as advertisement for the Halo franchise, what is it for then? Who paid the theoretical giant sum of cash to advertise www.ilovebees.com for a half second during Microsoft's cinematic trailer?

[walshicus]

[kombucha]

My £0.02 on the grand reason for all this:
1. How embarassing would XBox Live crashing on November 9th be to microsoft? Unless they're hugely confident they've got to be thinking about a multiplayer demo/stress test.
2: This is Halo2. We are playing it now, we just dont realise it yet. What I mean is we are "fighting" a covenant AI and this is all woven into the storyline of the game in a way we dont know yet.

[NACIONAL]

i think that it could be more than just a demo... i my deeper thoughts i really believe that this is something bigger... i think it is the announcement of a new Bungie game... based more or less in the halo universe.....

[Steph6450]

Or, August 24th will be a big deal....*in the game*! For instance, another in-game site. Or two. Or three. Why does everyone think it's going to be a demo? Or a trailer? Or anything related to the real-life product? It's far too early in the game for that kind of payoff.

I think some people are far too quick to jump to Halo connectons. Yes, obviously, there is SOME connection. It was advertised on the trailer. But, with the AI game, it took MONTHS before there was any discernable link between The Beast plotline and the A.I. plotline. And even then, it was all very subtle. You could play The Beast and know nothing about A.I. Likewise, I am pretty sure you can play this without knowing anything about Halo.

As Sean Stewart said about The Beast, "the Game would never admit it was a game." Now, I know we don't know for a fact that he's writing this, but I'd bet he is. And, if that's the case, we are not going to see anything as obvious as an actual reference to Halo....well, ever, maybe. And if so, only at the very end. There will probably be stuff that Halo-knowledgable people will be able to appreciate, but that's it. If anything, this website probably exists in the Halo "universe". To give us a demo, or a trailer, or anything like that would be right-out admitting that "okay, this isn't REAL".

Why can't we just take the game for what it, at the moment, seems to be? An independent story, a cool, freaky, mystery story, that will develop over the course of maybe months. Halo will probably come into play at some point, but it will be like what The Beast was to AI. Knowing both of them greatly enhances the experience of the other, but each can stand alone.

[Scumbag]

Its bound to be something like a demo or something.

There's only X many people 'in the game'. But you're not counting a far larger audience, the kind of audience a gamer tends to completely forget about:

The Casual person. In this case, the casual gamer.

They see the ilovebees.com link in the theater ad. They don't really care to look up the site. Then later on, they look on IGN, or Gamespy about the thing.

So, they do a quick check of it. There's some times counting down.

Now, 5,000 people are pouring over every single dingle fact on ilovebees.com.

But there's 5 or 6 times that amount of people that will remember enough to check when the Networking Throttling is eroded. Same amount for when the medium will Meta-whatever. And definitely when the Wide Awake and Phyiscal line'll be correct.

Instead of nothing, the casual gamer will have a Halo2-related situation in his mind, over the course of multiple weeks. That, my friends, is a Good Thing for the casual gamer.

Us? We're irrelevent. Its a given that we're going to buy Halo 2.

This ARG is a way to get the casual gamer interested in Halo 2 before it comes out, while simultaneously letting Bungie devotees to have another Cortana Letters or Enkidu Terminals to pour over for a while. To assume anything else is... well... bordering on rampancy.

[Max Damage]

If the Unifiction people were irrelevant, how come they got invited to this game before the trailer was released online?

This is an ARG first and foremost, and marketing second. If it were straight-up marketing, then it would be at least partially comprehensible to the casual viewer, but as it stands, it seems like it takes a MENSA membership and a PHD in some obscure doctorate to figure this mess out.

[Scumbag]

[Roc]

So long as this ARG provides a good mystery and a good story, who cares?
The mystery is the ARG and any META tie-ins (demo/trailer/etc) are irrelevant with regards to the mystery.

[eMouse]

Ultimately, the people running the ARG get their money from the company or advertising agency. So it's tied to a product. Now, it's possible that it is tied to the Xbox in general, and Halo 2 was just the first trailer to have the 'ilovebees' version of the Xbox insignia.

Alternatively, it is tied specifically to Halo 2. But who says that this ARG is only going to last until August 24th? Halo 2 is scheduled to release in November. They'll probably want to advertise it through the holiday season. There's also the possibility of downloadable content for Halo 2, some of which could be premium. So neither of those dates are necessarily 'the end' for this ARG.

It's very possibly that Microsoft could schedule some sort of real world promotional event that 'just happens to correspond' with August 24th. At the same time, the ARG will probably have some sort of significant event.

It's not necessary for the two to reference each other, although the real world event will probably hint at the ARG in some way. It's a matter of getting the public worked up in anticipation over a particular date. All you have to do is be 'coincidental' and you can catch the attention of a lot of eyes.

[Anton P. Nym]

[eMouse]

Nuts! I thought that if it was an Xbox campaign, and not specifically Halo, they might at some point use Xbox Live, since it's a big centerpiece for the Xbox experience. I was thrilled when I put ladybee777 into the friends interface and it asked if I wanted to send a voice message!

After thinking about it, and going with something simple, I recorded a message and hit send...

'Gamer tag not found'!

Oh well, was a nice idea.