Halo: Reach

[frostbyte06]

Re: Halo: Reach

If you're a regular at Amazon they have a better deal. You get a $20 game credit for ordering. Also if they lower the price up until the end of the release date you get that difference as well.

Amazon Link

[Flawless]

Re: Halo: Reach

Blood Gulch, Falcon, Hologram Armor Ability, 2 new Warthog variants, view at the end, and "Go outside the canyon, Comic-Con 2010".

Some are speculating that this is a Forge map. The bases, teleporter, and some of the rocks have a placed look to them, as their not lightmapped and don't cast shadows - just like objects in Halo 3 Forge.

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...

[Steel5]

Re: Halo: Reach

Big surprise, and it looks awesome. The map is unbelievably big, the tank that fires a round into the canyon wall at the end is VERY far away!

[Flawless]

Re: Halo: Reach

I can't even see that tank.

The huge wall behind the first base is removed at 3:18-3:20, so yeah, Forge is involved here. Looks like it will be an enormeous space set on Halo that will work with everything from creating your own maps within the space (including Blood Gulch), Firefight, Invasion, and whatever else. It would be a massive Invasion map from the looks of it, but the Falcon certainly needs much more room than the Invasion map Boneyard that was in the Beta.

[Steel5]

Re: Halo: Reach

I can't even see that tank.

The huge wall behind the first base is removed at 3:18-3:20, so yeah, Forge is involved here. Looks like it will be an enormeous space set on Halo that will work with everything from creating your own maps within the space (including Blood Gulch), Firefight, Invasion, and whatever else. It would be a massive Invasion map from the looks of it, but the Falcon certainly needs much more room than the Invasion map Boneyard that was in the Beta.

I think that that huge wall can be placed to make this map classic blood gulch. This certainly looks like this could be there ultimate map as you say. Invasion, big team battle, firefight, etc.

[Sandman42]

Re: Halo: Reach

Makes me feel nostalgic for RvB. I haven't watched that since they switched over to Halo 2.

[Flawless]

Re: Halo: Reach

Interesting to look back at some of the files people discovered during the beta. We could be looking at 5 more Forge maps:

aftship
ivorytower
launchstation
panoptical
spire
forge_arena
forge_ascension
forge_badlands
forge_gulch
forge_sanctuary
forge_island

And this from a previous weekly update sounds a lot like Ivory Tower:

And while we’re on the subject of getting glimpses, Ken Taya wants to know when we’re gonna reveal one of the multiplayer maps he’s been working on to our lovely at home audience. I keep telling him that Reflection just might be at the top of my Best Looking Halo Maps of All Time list, but he’s not happy with personal praise alone. He wants you to see it in its entire gob smacking glory. The warm wood floors, polished to a high gloss finish. The metal, the marble, and the mountains just outside the massive glass windows. The vibrant, turning hologram of planet Reach suspended above the central hall. The revelation that though this space has a spectacular new aesthetic – it’s all ensconced around a space you’re already intimately familiar with.

Did I tell you that when Marcus noted Reach’s multiplayer maps were taken straight from the campaign that we weren’t telling you the full story?

Ken tells me Reflection has the biggest cube map in the game. I have no idea what that means, but I’m not lying when I tell you that this sucker looks spectacular.

[Candyman5]

Re: Halo: Reach

Makes me feel nostalgic for RvB. I haven't watched that since they switched over to Halo 2.

Well if you havent watched it in a while watch this episode:
http://redvsblue.com/archive/?id=1344

Made my Jaw drop and was the funniest thing I have seen on it in a while.

[TracerBullet]

Re: Halo: Reach

Well if you havent watched it in a while watch this episode:
http://redvsblue.com/archive/?id=1344

Made my Jaw drop and was the funniest thing I have seen on it in a while.

That episode was amazing. I've been watching every week for awhile now.

[Steel5]

Re: Halo: Reach

Bungie Weekly Update
RC:

Currently the game is entering the RC process – in plain(er) English, we’re cutting our first Release Candidate. Now, the first Release Candidate won’t end up being the final shipping product, but it’s a significant step on getting Reach from us, to you, hopefully without leaking in France. Executive Producer and the man who brings out the worst in my mouth – and the best in my Halo play, Joe Tung offers some additional insight:

“The RC process can be favorably compared to passing a physical blockage. From the giant army of artists, designers and engineers that once fixed bugs with impunity now only a handful of people still have clearance to make changes to the game. ZBR can be a bit misleading because it suggests that you are done with bugs, but that isn’t really the case. You bounce from zero, ratchet up the bar, and take the worst offenders that would prevent cutting an RC. You start taking into account not only how bad an individual problem is, but how mainline it is – in other words, is it something that players will see in Matchmaking on standard map configurations in common gametypes? Or is it something that shows up with specific options on a particular map? Does it happen every time? Or does it require button mashing to reproduce? And so on.

The result is that, day by day, hour by hour, the number of fixes we take decreases, while the stability of the game increases. Matrices that chart the playability of missions which were once red across the board now come in green nearly all of the time. For everyone on the team that is already locked out, a good amount of co-op campaign, firefight and multiplayer is being played. We are knocking on the door of our first RC and may even have it by the time you end up reading this. (editor's note: Nope, not till Saturday)”

Achievements:

A Monument to All Your Sins – Complete each Campaign Mission on Legendary – alone.
Banshees, Fast and Low – Hijack a Banshee during the Reach Campaign.
Yes, Sensei – Earn a First Strike Medal in a Matchmaking game.
A New Challenger – Complete all of the Daily Challenges in a given day.
Make It Rain – Purchase an item from the Armory that requires the rank of Lt. Colonel.

There will be 49 total Achievements in Reach. Twenty-three of them are Campaign-specific Achievements. We set out to make sure that each Campaign mission has its own ‘special’ Achievement, like:

If They Came to Hear Me Beg – Perform an Assassination against an Elite to survive a fall that would’ve been fatal.

Achievements were bucketed into five different groups, Campaign (23), Firefight (7), Multiplayer (4), Training (6) and Player Experience (9). Some of the Training Achievements can be earned in both Campaign and Firefight.

New Medals:

Rejection – Armor Lock and survive damage that would be fatal.

How it works: Armor lock and survive single, incoming damage types that have the ability to kill a player at full shields and health, like a Rocket, or a Sticky grenade.

Protector – Save a teammate by killing his foe.

How it works: We track damage done to players by other players, even if those players don’t generate kills. In Protector’s case, after a certain amount of damage has been done to a Player A by Player B, if Player C kills player B, he earns the Protector Medal. Player A receives a message (in the same place as messages like You sniped JimmyAwful) that says PlayerC saved your life.

Showstopper – Kill an opponent while they are performing an Assassination.

How it works: Assassinations (which have had many names internally throughout development) have a strike frame where the kill occurs. This enables players on the receiving end of an Assassination to be saved if their assailant is killed prior to the strike frame. Enter, the Showstopper Medal.

[Steel5]

Re: Halo: Reach

Hey tomorrow is Friday and Urk is still out of the office tending to diapers! I'm back at the helm (with some help from Luke) and I'm going to go ahead and semi-scoop myself...

Tomorrow's update will have a ridiculously huge Q&A with Chris Opdahl (he answered basically every question that was asked of him), I'm going to acknowledge the RvB video with some insightful tidbits, obligatory latest status of the project and team, show off some new treats coming your way via Reach AND... wait for it... drop exactly 66 new screenshots into the body of the update. Probably even drop another achievement detail or two into the mix as well.

And the Comic-con panel is just a week from today which will yield new info and a plethora of media capture and screens...then a big megaton not too much further out with the fruits of this week's big media preview visit... I can haz hype now?

-DREAM MAKER

Brian's post about tomorrow's update.

[Flawless]

Re: Halo: Reach

Nice. Lots to look forward to. The "big megaton", Forge 2.0, Bungie Aerospace? The two may even be the same. If it's Forge, well, we know what that means.

...

Sweet fan made trailer for Reach:

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...

Looks like a new Birth of a Spartan live-action trailer is being filmed. This one featuring Kat.

[Steel5]

Re: Halo: Reach

The floodgates of info are going to open up next week.

The media preview visit was a full day with hands on across two campaign missions, forge, firefight and competitive multiplayer. There will be a ton of screenshots including direct feed video of parts of the day (mp related only). Some content Is allowed to be released next Thursday, the rest (campaign+) is embargoed until early August. Muliple U.S. and Int'l magazines and websites participated.

Perhaps tempering my own hype train is a good idea - Im referring to the breadth of coverage and new content and juicy campaign coverage, not an announcement of three extra bonus discs including HD remakes of the Halo trilogy and a suit of wearable MJOLNIR armor

Also I just realized that with all the nonstop pr travel and our office move starting we may be blocked from doing podcasts for a while. yesterday I noticed our gear was already partially torn apart.

Is there one or two specific achievements Luke should reveal the name and description for today?

[Flawless]

Re: Halo: Reach

Bungie Weekly Update

First let’s talk hologram. It’s simple to use – point your reticule where you’d like your holo-self to run and then press the left bumper to activate it. A spitting image of yourself, sporting the exact same armor, colors and weapon, will emerge and run directly to that point and persist for about 10 seconds or until killed. Your hologram can also do fun things like take a man cannon which can result in some crazy shenanigans. Holograms can be used in multiplayer, which has become one of my recent favorite things to do, in addition to tricking the AI in campaign or Firefight. The other day we played a game where pretty much everyone used holograms and it feels awesome to trick someone else but damn does it feel stupid when you fall for one yourself. I hear one of Sage’s tricks is to point straight down so his hologram stands perfectly still but then HE runs in a perfectly straight line to dupe his opponent.

This week we hosted a slew of worldwide media folks for a big hands-on preview with a huge chunk of Reach. During their stay our guests got to play two and a half campaign missions, several new MP maps, a new game mode and Forge. The bad news is that most of the fruits of that visit, including all of the campaign coverage, won’t be surfacing until the first week of August. The good news is that some of what we showed will actually be coming out next week including a boat load of new screenshots and even some direct feed video. Did I already mention that next Thursday was shaping up to be HUGE?!

The highlight of the visit for me though was the occasional chance to jump in as a seat-filler for multilayer when a journalist had to step away to conduct an interview. I realized it was actually my first time ever flying the Falcon in multiplayer and man was it awesome. This particular map is huge and centered around an enormous spire that stretches up into the heavens. My battlebro spawned in one of the gunner seats and we began to climb. I hit "RB" to lock altitude and then we circled the tower, raining death and destruction on anyone foolish enough to step out onto the balcony. Finally our teammate yells "I’ve got the core, I need a pick-up!" Rather than wait for me to actually land, he jumps onto the top of our Falcon and proceeds to surf his way to victory. Great stuff.

You’re looking at – in condensed form – every item that is visible to players in the Armory on Day 1. The word ‘visible’ is particularly important because it underscores an important couple of notes about how the Armory functions in Halo: Reach.

More items become available as players Rank up.

As you Rank up in Reach – via Credit earn, not via Skill a la Halo 3 – there will be more customization options made available to you. Many of these aren’t even visible initially, but you’ll be able to see them as you progress.

Additional items become available based on Purchases players make.

You’ll notice in the below images that some Helmets don’t have attachments at all – well, they all do – you’ll just need to acquire the Base variant in order to see what’s available next. Furthermore, last Spring’s Halo: Reach Beta had the prices of helmets increase as you acquired more variants. In many cases, in the shipping game, the reverse is true – the initial Credit investment is in the base helmet, and adding augmentations to it is cheaper than the actual base variant was. That said, there are certainly some aug combinations that significantly change the helmet and those are priced accordingly.

[Flawless]

Re: Halo: Reach

More from the weekly update:

Fan Q&A with Reach’s Campaign Design Lead, Chris Opdahl. Full Q&A to be released next week.

What are your favorite missions from each Halo game? Is there a level in Reach that you think will be an instant fan favorite?

Let's see, favorite levels from the previous Halo games: Halo 1 - Silent Cartographer, Truth and Reconciliation, Attack on the Control Room :: Halo 2 - Outskirts, Delta Halo :: Halo 3 - The Ark, The Covenant :: ODST Uplift Reserve.

One of the most exciting parts of Reach is that so many of the missions vary things up. This means that a bunch of them will be different people's favorites, based on their tastes. We have infantry missions, vehicle missions, exploration missions, slow burn missions, crazy action missions, and (if you watched the E3 presentation) there is a mission that takes you places you have never been in a Halo game. I expect there to be a lot of online discussions with greater than and less than carrots (< >) discussing Reach Missions. That said, here are some of the acronyms that are likely to show up in a lot of people's favorites:: TotS, LNoS, Ex, NA, LW (and another that would give away too much if I acronym-ized the title).

Some of the things I have heard from people at Bungie lately:

1) This is the best friendly AI driving we have seen in a Halo game.
2) (In a three player co-op game with multiple skulls on) Nearly every Elite kill requires teamwork with baiting, flanking and assassinating. It’s really interesting.3) My Wife was incredibly invested in that character. (one of the engineers playing at home in co-op with his wife)
4) ******* this game is a lot of fun.
5) Cable's little tweak where the suicide Grunts get an upwards impulse before the grenades go off is a nice touch.
6) Where the *blam* did that Elite go?

How did advances in programming efficiency, resource use, etc, affect campaign scope? Did the resource people inform the campaign people "you have X processing budget, use it wisely" or was it more like "we campaign people want to do X, Y, and Z, so give us everything you've got?

We absolutely could not have made Reach without all of the Engineering magic that went on. The sheer volume of code changes and how much more we can do because of them is staggering. We have imposters, AI LOD, a new memory management system, networking (both synchronous and asynchronous), neuticle system, Big Battle flocks, new flying vehicle behaviors, stimulus system, new damage model, physics updates and improvements, perception models, lighting model upgrades… And that is just the few things off the top of my head. All of those together allow us to make moments that we have never been able to do in a Halo game. We are also able to achieve a visual fidelity for those moments (at the scale of a Halo encounter that you have come to expect) well beyond what anyone has done before on a console.

The process is a little bit of both. We start by planning out what we were thinking for the game, at which point we start to bring in all the people who have to sweat and bleed to make it happen, and have them pass along a sanity check. Is this possible to accomplish? What sorts of sacrifices will need to be made to achieve this? What sort of Engineering and Art resources will need to be dedicated to this moment? Is that moment worth those resources? We then answer those questions and begin to flesh everything out. Along the way we always course correct as elements get out of scope or the design changes or the initial idea needs to be fleshed out further. We are constantly evaluating and reevaluating what we are making over the course of the project. Then we get to the end and we make the hard calls (which often means cutting) to get everything working and under budget, and what needs to get cut or changed to make that particular moment (or the entire game) work.