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Halo 3, as it is the concluding third
of a trilogy, plops players into the middle of an adventure
that began back in 2001 with Halo: Combat Evolved. For folks
just starting Halo 3, there’s a ViDOC (video documentary)
on the story of Halo up to the events of Halo 3.
Journey’s
End
Snowsports
While most companies have Holiday parties
before everyone vanishes for the holidays, here at Bungie,
we have our annual shindig sometime after everyone returns.
Ours hasn’t happened yet, but the Bungie Princesses,
Davina and Shauna, have been working tirelessly on planning
the soiree. But talking about eating fried finger foods and
drinking Fanta would be pretty boring, so, around the same
time as the Holiday party will be the Bungie Winter Pentathalon.
For a single day the studio is divided
into smaller teams for participation in a hyper competitive
series of events. The Bungie Pentathalon is a lot like the
Olympics for the Digital Age. There’s sweaty men, heaving
bosom (man bosom), feats of strength, and a rarely-discussed
second competition. Folks may remember getting a glimpse of
the Pentathalon on the Halo 2 Limited Edition bonus disc –
it was the part of the documentary where you saw blindingly
white guys (including pasty Asians and sickly black dudes)
seeing the sun for the last time before Halo 2 would ship.
In addition to being indoors, this year, the teams will be
divided by tenure. (Last year, I’m told the teams were
“random” with the best players “randomly”
ending up on the same team and “randomly” winning).
This year, the Grizzled Ancients, Old Skool, Middle School
and Newbies will dividing lines for who will serve on which
team. Regardless of your position in the company, it’s
all about how long you’ve been here – so someone
like our new Design Lead, Christian Allen, plays with the
Newbies. The logistics of breaking down a growing studio like
Bungie into four teams based on tenure is still a work-in-progress
(that’s a long way of saying “No rosters to announce
right now”), but we’ll have more on what games
will be featured in the Pentathalon (in addition to Halo 3)
soon. Rumor has it that multiplayer music-making will be a
part of this year’s competition.
Wait, They Don’t Lub
U Like I Lub U
Maps coming in the nearish future have
long since taken shape and are starting to have neat polish
items show up, things like decorators, sharper textures and
high res lightmaps are gracing us with their presence. Also,
weapons, power-ups and equipment are nearing their final (pre-Community
Forged) resting places.
While I was running around O.K. Corral,
Frankie and Robt McLees’ conversation ground to a halt
when they looked at my monitor. They remarked that what I
was playing looked like an area from Campaign. O.K. Corral
reminds me a little bit of Seattle, actually. Not necessarily
aesthetically – it’s not full of Emerald and Traffic
– but thematically. O.K. Corral is a bit of an intersection
between technology and nature. A dilapidated building that
resembles an observatory (primarily because of the just-added
God Rays streaming through a broken skylight) is at map’s
center. This small, multi-level structure has a variety of
ways in and out and connects to both bases on this small-to-medium
sized asymmetrical map. O.K. Corral takes place in a small
canyon so one side of the map features flora and the other
side has the architectural failures of humanity.
There’s a pretty broad variety
of lighting on O.K. Corral, from the aforementioned God Rays
to dark tunnels, nooks and crevices where much of the illumination
comes from the lights on Spartan armor.
With a bunch of elevated firing platforms,
choke points and multiple ways in and out of the respective
bases, O.K. Corral will be ideal for Team Slayer, Oddball
and Capture the Flag variations.
Purple Reign, another map, coming in
the foreseeable future, isn’t asymmetrical at all. It’s
a brand new, small, arena style map that we hope some of our
more competitive-focused players will enjoy.
It is chock full of weapons suited
for mid-to-long range combat and there are long sight lines
across the map from both of the somewhat enclosed bases. The
bases themselves have one way windows on the second level
– much like the windows in a police interrogation room.
From inside a base you can see out, but from outside of the
base your view is obstructed.
There are elevated walkways connecting
the bases to a two-level structure at the center of the map.
These connecting walkways are too tall to jump to from the
floor but there are a bunch of small columns dotting the floor
plan that you can jump on and then easily hop up to the walkway
for a better vantage point or to grab a rifle from the walkways.
Frank talked about the third map in
the last Weekly Update before his Holiday in Jersey, in case
you missed it because you were out shopping, here’s
what he wrote: “But I can also guarantee that my all-time
favorite ever Halo map will be included too, if yesterday’s
playtest was anything to go by. A large map with some vaguely
familiar features just rocked my world. It was AMAZING fun.
Any time I am in an hour long standoff against an equally
matched team and it never becomes frustrating, is evidence
enough for me that we are onto something special.”
Updatus Automatica
Work continues on AU1, which is a fancy
way of saying Auto Update 1 or “patch.” There’s
a bunch of stuff we’ve been looking at ranging in various
levels of complexity and we’ve been taking boxes home
and testing changes pretty regularly. These fixes range from
complicated to simple (for example: The known issue with the
Elite Commando Shoulders). We’ll obviously have more
on AU1 as we continue testing and we’ll detail the changes
when we can. As of this writing, files in your file share
WILL NOT be affected by the Auto Update, that was a possibility
we mentioned in the near-immediate in the wake of Halo 3’s
release and currently Files and things in the File Share aren’t
being affected negatively by the Auto Update. At least for
the moment.
Additionally, the Auto Update, like
others for other games, will be required to play the game
on Live, however if one console has the Update and another
one doesn’t, system link play will still be possible
between the two boxes.
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