I seem to recall some BS with Gears about how MS wouldn’t let Epic have a party system because that was going to be a major feature of halo3. Note: I have nothing to back this up and may be completely and utterly false. Even if I did read it way back when Gears came out, it may have been false then as well.
I remember Epic claiming they didn’t have enough people or time or some such to implement it.
…and that’s exactly the kind of “he said, she said” crap that’s been happening for a long time with this kind of a feature.
If CoD4 has it (and it looks like they will, albeit with a reduced featureset compared to Halo 3), and Halo 3 clearly has it, then I agree. It’s in Microsoft’s best interests to make sure that every adversarial multiplayer game has at least a party system, if not the other improvements that Halo 3 brings to the table.
Yep, it had something close to the Halo 3 system in beta. Check out the CoD4 demo now, if it has multiplayer.