Halo 3 Impressions

[bomberooski]

Re: Halo 3 Impressions

Is their a decently solid group of Halo 3ers on this site?

[Candyman5]

Re: Halo 3 Impressions

Is their a decently solid group of Halo 3ers on this site?

I play from time to time. Just cant play to long, its fun but STRESSFUL......lol.

[Flawless]

Re: Halo 3 Impressions

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[Flawless]

Re: Halo 3 Impressions

Craziness right here.


One BILLION Served

And Counting

Saturday night, while many of us were stuffing food into our faces, plenty of folks were still playing Halo 3. At precisely 6:36pm PST, in a three minute and nineteen second game of Infection on Foundry, four players participated in Halo 3's one billionth match.

One Billion. It's a giant number, one that's difficult to understand without the proper context. Our first thought was to put it into perspective by comparing Halo 3's total games played with its predecessor, Halo 2, a title that we are still super proud of, and one that's topped the original Xbox LIVE Leaderboards since its launch through to present day - over four years of online gaming.

But there's a problem with that comparison. Halo 2 has yet to achieve one billion games played. As of right now, it's sitting pretty at 798 million total matches played. Surprised? We were.

Still, we wanted to find ways to help you (and us) better comprehend just what one billion games means in the grand scheme of things.

If each game of Halo 3 lasted only three minutes and nineteen seconds, mirroring the Infection game outlined above, the total amount of time played would eclipse sixty-three centuries. For those looking for more granularity, that's roughly 630 decades, 6,300 years, or 2,300,000 days.

But admittedly, that's working from a pretty rough estimate. No worries, we keep tabs on this sort of stuff. We recruited our database guru, RocketMoose, to provide us with some more accurate numbers. The data point he supplies below is a sum total of all player time spent in matchmaking. If ten players completed a ten minute match, the database would log 100 minutes of total playtime. This figure also does not include data from Custom or Offline matches.

Total Matchmaking Playtime: 2,023,153,340,764 seconds.

Yes, that's two Trillion seconds, or 64,109 years of playtime.

64,000 years ago:

• Neanderthal walked the Earth.
• Modern Man had yet to set foot in Asia.
• The Battle Rifle was Hitscan.

We couldn't have done it without you, our fans. Literally. Thanks a billion for all the good games and the continued community support. We're in awe of the success Halo 3 has been met with, but we're not done yet. Stick around and stay tuned, there's definitely more to come.

Love, Bungie.

[Beantown]

Re: Halo 3 Impressions

That is insane.

[WazzuRC]

Re: Halo 3 Impressions

That's absolutely insane.


EDIT: LOL Longhorn. I probably posted 5 seconds after you.

[Candyman5]

Re: Halo 3 Impressions

Wow, really? That is Insane!

Anyone get Halo Wars CE and get the Mythic Maps?

[Flawless]

Re: Halo 3 Impressions

I'm waiting for the map pack to hit the marketplace.

[JBH3]

Re: Halo 3 Impressions

Here at Bungie we are committed to occupying the time that you the gamer could much more wisely invest into more important aspects of life like showering, eating a proper diet, and getting a good nights sleep.

[Flawless]

Re: Halo 3 Impressions

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[Miles_Yuhas]

Re: Halo 3 Impressions

Mythic map pack coming on April 9th for those that don't already have it.

http://www.bungie.net/News/content.aspx?type=topnews&link=BWU_032009

[Flawless]

Re: Halo 3 Impressions

Mythic map pack coming on April 9th for those that don't already have it.

http://www.bungie.net/News/content.a...ink=BWU_032009

Nice. Looking forward to getting back into Halo 3 again when this releases. Hopefully, the Legendary map pack becomes free now, so the base is no longer fragmented, but of course, Bungie still hasn't got word from Microsoft if it will.

[Miles_Yuhas]

Re: Halo 3 Impressions

Nice. Looking forward to getting back into Halo 3 again when this releases. Hopefully, the Legendary map pack becomes free now, so the base is no longer fragmented, but of course, Bungie still hasn't got word from Microsoft if it will.

Yeah the legendary map pack has been very frusturating because it is a great pack, and its been out what feels like forever and its still not in Ranked Team Slayer. Hopefully with the release of the Mythic pack, we can get the legendary pack required in TS.

Also, hopefully Bungie stars sprinkling the mythic pack into playlists a bit faster than the legendary pack.

[Beantown]

Re: Halo 3 Impressions

I'll definitely be getting these maps and start playing Halo again when they drop. Good to see there is finally a date for that.

[Flawless]

Re: Halo 3 Impressions

Some interesting stuff out of GDC.


The Halo 3 Level You Never Played

Fans of Halo 3's online multiplayer are familiar with the Guardian map, a thickly forested area consisting of multiple Forerunner platform structures. At a talk at the Game Developers Conference today, Bungie producer Allen Murray mentioned that Guardian was at one point an entire level in the Halo 3 campaign that was cut due to production time constraints.

However, Murray did mention that the mission was home to a creature called, fittingly, the Guardian. A piece of concept art showed the Guardian as a deep green, angular machine-like object with a single glowing red eye at the top. It appeared to be a Forerunner construct and was reminiscent of an upside-down sword. According to Murray, you were able to fight the Guardian in the original level and could rip out its laser eye for use as a weapon.

But the removal of Guardian wasn't the only change Bungie made to the Halo 3 campaign during the middle of the production process. The Cortana mission, which takes place inside the Covenant capital city of High Charity, was once two separate (and considerably shorter) missions. Tsavo Highway, a vehicle heavy level in the Halo 3 campaign, was also originally longer and was also chopped to meet production schedules.

Bungie Still Working on Halo 3 Content

We've known for some time that Bungie is working on an entirely new intellectual property, and Murray noted that a development team is hard at work on that project. But that doesn't mean Bungie plans to close the book on Halo 3 after the ODST expansion ships this summer. According to Murray, the studio just finished a crunch -- a short period of intense production to meet a development milestone -- on ODST and another project, which he didn't name.

He could have been referring to the Mythic Map Pack, which was bundled with the Halo Wars Limited Edition in early March and will be distributed over Xbox Live on April 9. Or he could have been hinting that there's another expansion, multiplayer pack or surprise on the way.

"Halo 3 took two and a half years to make, and we're still working on it," Murray said. "We'll probably be working on it for two more years."

Murray's talk didn't delve into any details about Bungie's non-Halo 3 work, but the studio is definitely keeping busy. "We're working on multiple projects right now," he said.

Quality testing Halo 3

-Two years of consumer research. One thousand game testers. Thirty-five laboratory tests--close to double the amount many big-name titles have. Halo 3 was, according to Microsoft Game Studios Games User Research Group engineer John Hopson, the largest research project done by the division on a single title.

Hopson, whose group had been responsible for testing the previous two Halo games, said Halo 3 was by far the most complex task of the trio. Where the original Halo had only eight laboratory studies, which focused only on the first hour of gameplay, Halo 2 ramped it up considerably by having 25 lab studies that focused on the entire single-player campaign. But even this was to be dwarfed by the third game in the franchise, which covered both single-player and multiplayer for a total of 35 separate studies.

Early testing focused on usability and was conducted well before Halo 3 was in any serious playable form. Researchers would have one-on-one sessions with testers who would try out specific discrete aspects of the game such as menu navigation before moving up to testing key moments within the game. One of the first to be tested was the first Scarab tank battle.

In initial tests, researchers basically let players loose against a Scarab, dropped some weapons on the ground, and then waited to see what strategies they would devise to bring the gigantic walking tank down. From this, Hopson's group realized that most testers didn't realize the Scarab's weak points, so the developers at Bungie changed how the target reticle moved over the weak points to give players a better indication. Some audio clues--in the form of dialogue prompts--were also added to the final game to help push players in the right direction.

In fact, bringing the player experience closer to what the developer intended was the whole aim of Hopson's Game Research Group when testing Halo 3. He said his team didn't try to tell Bungie how to make the game, but rather asked them what their objective was, testing it on consumers, and then seeing how closely the two aligned.

One of the key tools the team used was a visualisation map that plotted out every place testers died on any given level, as well as what they died from. This, Hopson said, gave Bungie a better idea of how the game flowed, whether there were any difficulty walls that players were coming across, and generally how well the game was playing. And speaking of difficulty, Hopson revealed that all of the testing for Halo 3 was done on normal difficulty, as the research was aimed at what the average to below-average player experience would be.