prayformojo said:
Chris Butcher commented, "For Halo 2 we had our sights set very high on networking. ... Going from having no Internet multiplayer to developing a completely new online model was a big challenge to tackle all at once, and as a result we had to leave a lot of things undone in order to meet the ship date commitment that we made to our fans."[31] With only a year to go until release, Bungie went into the "mother of all crunches" in order to finish the game;[32] in a 2007 interview, Jamie Griesemer, one of Halo's design leads, said that this lack of a "polish" period near the end of the development cycle was the main reason for Halo 2's shortcomings.[33] Butcher retrospectively described Halo 2's multiplayer mode as "a pale shadow of what it could and should have been if we had gotten the timing of our schedule right";[33] the campaign mode's abrupt cliffhanger ending also resulted from the frenzy to ship on time. |
Doesn't say anything about MS forcing anything. Sounds more like they set a date for release that they told their fans (customers) that it would release and although they wanted to add more (which game dev doesn't want to add more? they always do) they couldn't, but they still tried their best ato cram as much as they can in there.
