Halo 03 |News & General| OFFICIAL

[Pc_Madness]

The AI really does suck when it comes to driving I have to say. More often than not I'd be sat in the back of the warthog and the driver wouldn't move. The only way to move again was to get out and drive myself (N)

Or the driver will drive back to the start of the level and start going around in circles :angry:

[magik]

So the ally AI went from useless in H:CE in legendary, to somewhat useful in H2 back to useless in H3?

I'm seeing a trend here....

Wrong. The ally AI is definitely much better in H3 than it was in H2. Have you even played it? :p

[Spookie]

Remember that Halo 3 at it's core is a 'console shooter' in the simplest of senses. Don't expect anything out of the ordinary when it comes to team AI. Think of them as the away team in Star Trek and you get the idea.

[Guest]

Wait. You're telling me the ally AI is supposed to know how to drive? :rolleyes:

They're particularly fond of reverse. It's painful.

[Ayepecks]

*Waits for the first ever truly-elite experience. Ayepecks:The Videogame That Is Better Than The Rest*

You are a complainer and nothing more. Every time you talk about something, it's always design flaws and never what you actually enjoy.

You couldn't be further from the truth. Read all my posts, pal.

And stop putting words in my mouth, people. If you want to say something dumb, don't attribute it to me if you're going to say it -- attribute it to yourself. Nowhere did I say allies should be "omg uber k1ll3rz!!!111 d13 c0ven@ntttt!!!111", so stop pretending I did. I said it'd be nice if they were even remotely useful on Heroic and Legendary -- more than taking 2 shots and dying. I don't want them to do the work -- I just want them to help out and add to the story instead of dying in 3 seconds.

And I never said I was bad at the game, so stop implying that I did and finding cute little ways to act like I said it (this part is aimed primarily at magik and his God complex).

[stanley porkchop]

Ayepecks, I disagree with some of your complaints but I'm not going to be a baby about it like some of the others here. I think you made your point well enough. There's no reason to get into a fanboy tizzy over your opinion- especially when you stated it wasn't a bad game to begin with.

You had asked about the terminals. You need to wait for them to switch to their second message for the achievement to unlock. After about ten seconds of activating one, it will distort and the letters will change. Maybe that was the problem?

[SnowRanger13]

anyone clearify what the meta-games are?

http://www.bungie.net/News/content.aspx?ty...link=h3campaign

I'm looking to beat all the levels on meta-game if anyone wants to. The link above pretty much explains how to get all the points. You need 15,000 on each level to get the achievement

[Ayepecks]

You had asked about the terminals. You need to wait for them to switch to their second message for the achievement to unlock. After about ten seconds of activating one, it will distort and the letters will change. Maybe that was the problem?

Yup, you're correct :) I tried that yesterday and it worked.

[DrunknMunky Veteran]

Mark Rein Says Bungie "Nailed It"

Monday 1-Oct-2007 1:03 PM Epic boss says Halo ushered in the shooter console revolution

Mark Rein, vice president of Gears of War developer Epic Games, has been talking about the success of the Halo franchise and says it's all down to its execution more than anything else.

The latest issue of OXM in the UK features an article about the effect of the Halo series, and why it's become so popular after just three games. Rein is quoted as saying, "I don't look at Halo and go, 'That's the greatest graphics'. I don't look at Halo and go, 'Wow those are the coolest enemies ever'. I look at Halo and go 'They nailed it'. This game is so fun to play, everything works just right."

He continued, "It was the game that pretty much defined - I'm not going to say 100 percent because there were other games, Medal of Honor and games like that, that did such a good job as well. For me Halo ushered in the shooter console revolution. In other words, it showed everybody that, if you made a perfect shooter for the console, you would sell tons. So we owe Halo a lot."

Rein also believes that Bungie's shooter has done wonders for Epic's game engine licensing business too. "It's helped us move to console. It's helped our licensing business because we make an engine that a lot of shooters are made on.

"Halo to me is just perfectly executed. Halo 2? Same thing. Again, great execution. They took it and made it a little bit better and they set a new storyline... same thing, perfect execution."

Gavin Ogden

Source: CVG

[Ayepecks]

I definitely agree with Rein, at least as far as Halo 3 goes. I wasn't a huge fan of the first two -- they were alright -- but Halo 3's pretty fun. You're not going to really be "wowed" by the graphics or certain features, but it's just fun.

[goji]

I'm playing through this feeling this game is two years to late, as if this should have been H2 all along.

Nothing to fresh, however still enjoyable.

[DrunknMunky Veteran]

The Halo Effect

Rob Fahey 08:00 (BST) 28/09/2007

Microsoft's media strategy drives Bungie's latest into the headlines.

There's almost a sense of festival around the launch of Bungie's long-awaited Xbox 360 iteration of the Halo franchise. We won't see official sales figures for the UK (or, indeed, most other territories) until next week, but Microsoft's Shane Kim already seems on the verge of exploding with joy over $170 million first day sales in the USA, with various retailers also being rolled out to express how ecstatic they are over the figures.

Suffice it to say, then, that Halo 3 has done really rather well - critically, it has scored over 90% from almost every specialist publication in the Western world, and commercially, it seems certain that its launch day is the biggest ever recorded by a videogame.

Consequentially, it may well be the biggest launch day for any media product in history - although the caveat here is that this applies only to the dollar figure. Halo 3's comparisons with other videogame products are eminently valid, but the success of the game in comparison with products in other mediums is inflated by the high price-tag of videogames.

Bring it back to actual unit sales, or the basic number of people who engage with the product on day one, and the figures don't hold up. It's wonderful that so many people are willing to go out and pay a large amount of money for a great game - but while back-slapping is certainly in order, let's not kid ourselves that this represents a "mass-market" phenomenon on the same scale as a huge movie or music release.

This is where the Halo message gets slightly confused. The game sits on a peculiar middle ground between Microsoft's two key ambitions for the Xbox platform. On one hand, the game itself is quite clearly a hardcore gamer's dream - wonderfully polished, crafted and presented it may be, but at heart it is still a heavily multiplayer focused first-person shooter where you play a space marine taking on an alien invasion. For the core audience of Xbox 360 owners, there couldn't be a finer product.

On the other hand, the "media event" status which Microsoft has carefully crafted for Halo 3 speaks volumes about the firm's desperation to break out to a more mainstream audience. Months of forward planning by the company's PR and marketing divisions has seen Halo 3 being widely reported upon in the mainstream press, with television, radio and newspaper reports focusing on launch events around the world.

In London and elsewhere, launch parties were arranged with a coterie of "celebrities" for the tabloid papers to take pictures of. The queues outside retailers were the subject of news reports, and major news outlets cast the net far and wide to try and find anyone who could explain something about the game on air. My own Halo 3 launch day started at 5am with an interview on the BBC's World Business Report - which ended with the rather bemused presenter asking earnestly (and, frankly, somewhat hopefully) whether videogames were "just a fad".

That, in a nutshell, is where the cracks start to show in the Halo 3 phenomenon. This is not a game for the mass market; it's not the kind of game that will encourage casual players or non-gamers to engage with the Xbox 360 or even with gaming in general. In fact, fantastic though it may be, it's not even really a game that will appeal to anyone who doesn't specifically enjoy the first-person shooter genre.

It is annoying, certainly, the much of the mass media has approached the launch of such an anticipated game with a "look at the crazy gamers!" tone in its coverage. It is frustrating to see features on the London launch which focus on the fact that Pharrell Williams looked "bored" rather than on the excitement of the gamers who turned up, referring to them only in condescending terms.

However, it's not surprising to see this reaction. Unlike last year's media frenzy around the Wii, the Halo 3 launch isn't something that can be easily expressed to the non-gamers who cover this subject for the mass media. The Wii is a genuinely mass-appeal product, simply because its appeal can be summed up in simple anecdotes that easily sell the features of the system to a wide audience. Halo 3, however, is a gamers' game; a refinement of a genre whose appeal is almost exclusively to existing players.

Continues..

[Gabureiru]

I liked it a lot. And it's true what Rain sais, to a point that I didn't pay any attention to graphics, or framerates, technical stuff like that. What I really loved was how much fun I have playing all three games. I've played them over and over again without getting bored.

Can't wait for Halo Wars, anyone know how that game is going???

[PL_ Veteran]

Whilst the 360 does need to broaden it's horizons to appeal to the more mass market gamers, I don't think Halo 3 is actually harming their image of everyone being included :/

[Deaf Spacker]

Well I gave in and got the collectors edition today, as expected the game disc was loose inside but it's not scratched as much as I feared. Dunno whether to get a replacement disc or not :unsure:

I'll start playing now :D

[x-scratch]

well after playing halo 3 since the 28th im gonna be trading that game in asap not even worth having in my house anymore almost all the people i know is trading the game in anywho im not dissing the game i just can not get into the game at all

[DrunknMunky Veteran]

Sci-Fi, Serendipity Spawn Halo 3's New Weapons

By Clive Thompson 10.01.07 | 12:00 AM

"Lemme pull out the big gun," says Tom Doyle, a weapon designer for the videogame Halo 3.

On the LCD screen on his desk he's playing an early copy of Halo 3, and the main character, the Master Chief, is hefting a huge tubular weapon. Doyle presses the trigger, and it generates a thin ray of red laser light on a nearby vehicle -- which abruptly transforms into a searing bolt of power that leaves the vehicle a smoking wreck.

"The Spartan Laser," he says with satisfaction. "One shot is all it takes."

The weapon may be fantastical, but like many Halo 3 weapons, the designers at Bungie Studios -- the company that makes Halo -- actually based it on a real-world object: The Galilean telescope beam expander. Doyle and his colleagues happened upon the Galilean laser while reading journals devoted to upcoming military weapons, and watching shows like FutureWeapons on the Discovery Channel. The research, he says, is intended to guide their design by making sure that the weapons are sci-fi but also vaguely plausible according to the laws of physics.

"A lot of our stuff actually is moored in reality," Doyle says. "It's like Star Trek -- it's pseudoscience."

Halo 3 is well on its way to becoming a top-selling game -- pushing more than $170 million in copies on its very first day. That's partly due to the attractive new array of weapons in the game. Halo's gameplay has always been centered around making strategic decisions on the fly -- figuring out what gun will best win a fight. When Wired visited Bungie this summer, the designers were frantically putting the final tweaks on a sizable task: creating twice as many weapons as in the previous Halo.

"For us, the question was, how do you make it new and fresh for people who have been playing Halo 2 for three years now?" said Jamie Griesemer, Bungie's lead gameplay designer.

For Halo 3, Griesemer said, they made several central decisions. Many of the new weapons have costs associated with their benefits: The Spartan Laser may pack a punch, but it takes a few seconds to charge, which leaves the wielder vulnerable.

Griesemer also decided to reduce the clip size on many guns, so that players will have to more quickly dispose of weapons and try out new ones. This, in particular, will shake up the multiplayer online games, which previously suffered when a single, talented player picked up a gun with a huge ammo clip and executed dozens of players before running out of bullets.

Bungie's designers also decided to insert equipment that didn't kill enemies, but simply changed the way a battle played out. That included "power drains," which suck away the defenses of anyone who strays near, and gravity lifts that let players bounce up to higher levels.

Some of the equipment came about through happy accident. One of the most popular new tools -- the "bubble shield," a pocket of temporary protection from weapons -- nearly didn't make it into the game. Bungie's designers had been bandying it about as a concept, but didn't fully commit to developing it for the game until it was featured in a TV advertisement last December. The ad showed the Master Chief throwing down a bubble shield -- with its distinctive, honeycombed shape -- to survive a missile attack.

It looked so cool that Bungie's employees immediately were sold on it. "Everybody went, 'Hey, hmm, that bubble shield is really awesome," said John Staten, Bungie's cinematic director.

The ultimate goal, Griesemer said, is to give players such a range of options that they develop fighting techniques the Bungie designers themselves could never predict.

This summer, the Bungie guys saw it happen. They were playing a game of "capture the flag" on a multiplayer map, and their favorite technique was to use a gravity lift to bounce over the ramparts into the building containing the flag.

But then a journalist came over to play and figured out a new trick: He shot his way into the building, grabbed the flag and used a gravity lift to bounce his way out. The Bungie crew all stared in surprise.

"Then we were all like, 'Of course, no ****! It totally makes sense!'" said Brian Jarrard, Bungie's head of community relations. "But in all those hours of playing, we'd never thought of it ourselves."

Source: Wired

[Deaf Spacker]

Well I gave in and got the collectors edition today, as expected the game disc was loose inside but it's not scratched as much as I feared. Dunno whether to get a replacement disc or not :unsure:

I'll start playing now :D

Screw it I'll send in the scratched disc to be replaced, when sending it to Microsoft will a CD case in a padded envelope suffice?

[+Audioboxer Subscriber²]

[magik]

^ :rofl:

[+vlsi0n Subscriber¹]

awesome comic :yes:

[+Audioboxer Subscriber²]

The Top 7... Unanswered Questions in Halo 3

Make no mistake - Games Radar loves Halo 3. But while the game may have excellent graphics, music, missions, multiplayer, coop and editing tools, it fails to deliver one crucial element. Closure.

This may have been the end of a trilogy, but it certainly did not feel like the end of Halo. Plot threads remained loose, characters were left in limbo and the fight did not seem entirely finished. With no more sequels announced (yet), what's a puzzled and perplexed fan to do?

Source: http://n4g.com/xbox360/News-71548.aspx

[Tech Star]

I beat the game yesterday and I think it was way too short and there will be another Halo. :)

[Elliott]

I beat the game yesterday and I think it was way too short and there will be another Halo. :)

The game, on a good difficulty level, is about 12 hours. That's too short for an FPS? I though Half-Life 2 was shorter. :p

[magik]

^ Exactly. It's a very good length on a respectable difficulty level (read: Heroic or higher) as many reviewers have also stated. It doesn't really make sense to go play it on Easy or even Normal and then say it's too short... come on now. :rolleyes: