Halo Online & ElDewrito thoughts and concerns.
Today, 343 Industries alongside Microsoft announced that they would be taking “legal action to protect their property”. I wanted to post my thoughts and clarify some things the community seems to think.
First things first, where does ElDewrito go from here, and what happens now that legal action is being taken? Microsoft and 343 Industries have requested that development on the mod cease for the time being. Its a temporary pause, according to them, and should eventually resume, but no one knows when. In the meantime, ElDewrito will continue to operate and be playable as normal, and if you don’t have it yet, its still possible to get into it, its just a little bit harder now. I’ll explain more on that later, though for now, do know ElDewrito itself, as a mod, will remain online and playable. You’ll continue to be able to rank up, and you’ll continue to be able to browse servers, and play the game. The mod has not been DMCA’d, or otherwise taken action against. You can still download ElDewrito’s updater, which installs the mod, via the subreddit.
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I have sort of mixed opinions on this matter, in terms of the status of the project now. I believe that, as a company, and a corporation, taking down ms23 was the correct move, however, I believe there are ways they could’ve done this better, to allow the continuation of the mod, and continue a future of Halo on PC. The first thing they could’ve done, is allow the mod to exist, with the current Halo Online files, by temporarily closing the source code to ElDewrito, while still allowing the developers to work on the mod. This would allow bug fixes and changes to occur, without potentially “screwing over” Microsoft and 343 Industries (though its clear screwing them over wasn’t and still isn’t the intention). I believe that as a company, as a corporation, this was the correct decision, but I wish they would’ve let the mod developers continue work on the mod itself. At the very least, this has opened Microsoft and 343 Industries eyes to the PC community for the game that exists today, and hopefully Halo 6, and Halo games to come, and maybe halo games of the past, return to PC.
With all that said, here’s how you can get into ElDewrito now that the major hosting is gone. You’ll want to google around for Halo Online’s MS23 build. You want the offical, Russian game files. They should be around 2GB in size all together. After you have these files, you’ll want to get the ElDewrito updater from the Subreddit, linked above. Copy the updater and its configuration file to the root of the directory with Halo Online’s files in it. This means the folder with “eldorado.exe” in it (you may not see the .exe extension). Run the updater and wait for verification of game files, then click update. This will probably take some time. Once the updater completes, the game is now installed with ElDewrito in it. Run “eldorado.exe” to start the game. Keep in mind, the default server browser may be broken, laggy or slow, theres a fix for this, which is also on the subreddit.
Thats all for now, I hope this has been some use to you in getting into the world of Halo on PC, using Halo Online, and ElDewrito, as well as provided you some information on the future of the project. Keep in mind you can read Microsoft and 343 Industires full statement regarding the subject on Halo Waypoint.
Thanks for reading.
