Bungie Weekly Updates

[Wondermonkey]

CJ Cowan, our cinematics director, sends me the following enigmatic message: “If you have a moment, come and see the new coolness.” I kicked myself down the stairs, Sparta-style, and rolled up to his desk to see some recent cinematics passes. I’d sort of forgotten about them, since they’ve been crunching hard and quietly, and literally in a far corner of the studio. The progress is impressive, to say the least.

With Halo 3, as with halo 2 and 1, we’re using the actual engine for cinematics. It’s a conscious decision based on a simple philosophy – don’t yank the player out of the game, and dazzle them with graphics that are alien to their gameplay experience. Don’t get me wrong, some of my favorite cinematics ever do exactly that, and in my opinion, successfully – Final Fantasy, DOA, Tekken even, all use high quality CG renders to display their cinematics. And the results are fantastic. They propel narrative and they’re a reward for completing gameplay tasks.

In Halo 3 though, we made a deliberate and difficult choice. Believe it or not, it would in some ways have been easier to just storyboard this and hand it off to someone like Digital Domain to render into CG. Instead, we took the harder and seemingly counterintuitive route so that our Cinematics will blend, as seamlessly as possible with our gameplay.

Now for confession time: In Halo 2, we simply didn’t have the time or resources to make the cinematics the way we wanted them to be. They were compromised by deadlines and resources and while the results were heroic and herculean achievements of hard work and talent, they simply weren’t as polished or pretty as we wanted them to be. This time, no hurdles got in our way. Cinematics has had all the lovin’ it needs.

For starters, there’s a bigger team, a team that has had the final cinematic script for much longer, and now has access to vastly more tools, resources and technology than ever before. These range from new tools for rigging facial animation, to better lighting and camera controls. Most of the improvements are a solid blend of technology and manpower this time around, and we hope the fruits of that labor end up as succulent as they look now.

Seeing Sergeant Johnson’s face in the Halo 3 cinematics (there are differences in detail and post-processing effects) is a revelation. Using tools on site, our cinematics guys are able to achieve not only proper lip-syncing, but easily rig facial expressions too. In Halo 2, some of that was actually handled by programmers, including Sgt. Johnson’s, and I quote, “Amorous” permutation in the tank delivery scene in Halo 2. Now, there’s a running gag in game development called, “Programmer Art” where a programmer puts in some placeholder art until an artist can get to it. Bur programmer emotion? Surely that’s pushing some sort of envelope?

Well this time the emotions and lighting are being handled by a team of 35 animators and cinematics guys only. And they’re not scrubs. We have folks who’ve worked on movies like Shrek, King Kong, Gollum from LOTR and more. So, no compromises. It will still look like game engine (with the aforementioned enhancements, like depth of field and higher levels of detail) but it’s just going to be better.

Dialog is all recorded and implemented, but seeing the properly modeled and animated characters speaking it is a breath of fresh air. Recent builds have had low-res, unlit heads with broken necks speaking the lines, or worse, the line being automatically recited by a robot speech synthesizer. It’s actually pretty sophisticated until it tries to parse the word, “Mmmmhmm.”

Perhaps more enticingly, I watched storyboard and cinematics cheery, chirpy, cockney -blam!-parrow, Lee Wilson lighting a familiar character who never, ever looked so good. Too good in fact. “Yeah, guv’nor,” says Lee in his jarring Pygmalionesque pidgin, “She ort to ‘ave ‘er shaders fixed, or she don’t arf look nude. I don’t mind the raspberry ripples meself, but Mrs. Wilson would ‘ave a roight fit.”

And right behind him, Dorje, one of our amazingly talented artists, was putting the finishing touches to the skybox to end all skyboxes. Let’s just say it might have something to do with the amazing space battle Kurt Nellis (a genius who we swiped from ILM) is working on. Everything is starting to look polished and pretty.

That probably goes for the story too, but we would say that. I think the way our cinematics close this chapter of the trilogy will be one of the more memorable aspects of Halo 3, and put the bookends on a Campaign game that’s becoming something special.


THE GREAT HALO 2 MAP FLAP

So, after the poor fellows at Xbox Live learned some harsh lessons about how to implement new content internationally, across two different hardware platforms, two different billing systems, two operating systems and 35 different age rating systems, they’ve finally ironed out all the kinks in the somewhat flawed rollout of the Blastacular map pack. Everyone, with scant few exceptions, should now be able to download and install Desolation and Tombstone, the two new Halo 2 maps. But there’s more positive news on that front.

After launch, players quickly discovered a couple of geometry flaws in the maps (typical of the kind found in Halo 2) that enabled superjumping and created “invisible walls.” Well the good news is that in part, due to the systems we’ve set up to implement the maps on two hardware platforms, and thanks to heroic work by Certain Affinity (the maps’ creators), we are able to repair the more glaring flaws in these maps. We intend to do this in very short order, and almost immediately thereafter, roll them into matchmaking proper.

Now the inconvenience in this is that you will have to update the maps. There are a couple of things to consider here. . Everyone who paid for them already will not be re-billed. The fixed maps are of course free to previous purchasers.

That said, a few thousand players managed through a billing system bug, to get the maps for free. Some folks actually did this on purpose, some by accident while trying everything to get the maps to install. Neither group is in any kind of trouble, and both groups are considered blameless. Unfortunately, since the billing bug is fixed – when they get the updated maps they will be successfully charged the original four bucks they evaded first time around

Again, apologies for the inconvenience. The new maps are almost ready and we’ll give you full details about the timing as soon as Monday. Both the map replacements and the Matchmaking update are likely to happen next week, but will be separated by a couple of days to give players time to get the replacements.

THE LITTLE HALO 3 MAP FLAP

In last week’s update, I inferred by omission, that a mysterious and amazing new multiplayer map was created by Steve Cotton, our shrubbery expert, (just kidding Steve) but in fact, I should have pointed out that Steve created Jub Jub (lovely and incredible map) while the ginormous vehicle apocalypse map is the work of the equally talented Justin Hayward. He probably won’t mind me pointing out that the metallic inlays in the rock structures on that map are incredible, and I have been scanning them for Easter eggs. Nothing yet.


FOG OF BORE

There’s fog in a few places in our game. But as I admired the effect (it’s volumetric and whatnot) I remembered that it’s kind of a processor hog. It used to be, back in the day, that you put fog in to save processing cycles (and RAM) because it meant you didn’t have to draw geometry that far. Now it’s used purely for atmosphere and realism. In one level, the fog is actually based on time of day and amount of visible sunshine. It’s not some simulated weather effect – just the way the artists planned it out for the level, but moving from cool fog to warm sunshine is kind of a nice feeling in a continuous level. And very appropriate to the spring feeling that has finally visited Washington State.

That fog on the first level is purely natural in origin, but there’s fog and there’s fog.

CLASS ACT

Robt McLees is filling the story bible (and bits of the game) with data about the various classes of Grunt, Brute and so on. There are a LOT. Luckily for the fiction, they all fit pretty standard military functions – infantryman, sniper and such. Gameplay is paramount, so this process is largely dictated by designers and artists. They’ll create a type of Grunt for an encounter; Robt’s job is to give them jobs, ranks and so on. Some of this will be visible; some of it tucked way in the dark recesses of the story bible.

Necessarily, because Halo 3 completes a trilogy, we’re going to be raising the curtain on more story background than ever before. That means fleshing out specifics that we simply never elaborated on before, and defining things more firmly in the universe. A lot of fan speculation will be confirmed or proven wrong in the fall.

DELTA HELTER SKELTER

It’s a little known, and ultimately pointless fact, that internally at Bungie, we refer to the Public Beta as the “Delta” since we already have an internal Beta. Confused? Don’t be. On May 16th, the veil of mystery and confusion will be lifted once and for all, and for three glorious weeks, you will be able to play the Halo 3 Multiplayer Public Beta on your own 360, in the comfort of your home and finally put to rest all the rumormongering and speculation about what the Beta contains. The code itself is about 99.99% complete, and it’s in the final test and certification stages (fingers crossed).

Naturally we’ve had our share of leaks from the internal beta, and while it makes us angry that some people want to ruin the surprise for others, the real joy of the Beta is in the playing. We hope you’ll agree. On the 15th, the day before the Beta goes live to the public we’ll update Bnet with a cavalcade of Beta related content, including FAQs, tips, tricks, map guides and more.

FRIENDS AND FAMILY FIESTA

You may have heard rumors, tales whispered in dark corners of mysterious taverns. Bearded men speak in icy tones of a legend. A secret level of Public Beta, called ‘Friends and Family.” Aye, such a thing exists. It is the same beta, sent out a few days earlier, to Bungie Friends and Family. We never revealed how you became a friend or a family member, and nor will we. Some of ye already know who you are and how you’ll be getting your invite. Others, in for a rare treat.

A selection of Bungie.net members – regulars all - has been picked using a semi-random process devised by our own Roger Wolfson and Tom “Achronos” Gioconda. Those lucky winners have already been picked and collated. Next week, on the evening of the 11th of May, they will receive a Friends and Family code, delivered to one place and one place only. Their PM mailbox right here on Bungie.net. Spread the word – a small percentage, but still a significant number of Bnet loyalists, are getting the Golden Ticket delivered straight to their Bnet PM mailbox.

For those of you who “win,” congratulations. And for those who find that PM Mailbox empty on the 11th, our commiserations. NOTE: These winners have been picked; the ONLY way to find out is by checking that PM mailbox here on Bnet on the 11th. Do NOT ask us if you’ve won or not. We can’t tell you. Do NOT try to create a new account – it’s already too late. Do NOT spam the forums. The matter is settled.

For everyone else, the same avenues for the normal Public Beta still exist – for most of you, that means playing via specially marked versions of Crackdown (still available in stores) and a few others won contests from their regional Xbox organization.

But it’s all so much. If only I had help.

LUKE WARM WELCOME

Next week, Luke Smith, formerly news editor at 1UP.com starts work here at Bungie Studios. He’ll be taking on all manner of new Bnet projects. Some we can’t talk about because they relate to uber-top secret game-related features. Some are straightforward – Luke will be reviving and improving our Emmy award winning podcast series.* He’ll be working on day to day content and becoming a familiar face around this here place.

But next week, he’s going to be immersed into Bungie like a French fry into hot oil. Luke is a well-known Halo fanbot, so if the process doesn’t fuse his mind and cause his face to auto-depilate, I don’t know what will. Which is just as well, since next week I am jetting off around the world to begin a Halo dog and pony show I’ll share with you from other shores. Nothing too exciting, but interesting.

This week is like, crazy secrets week. I have seen three things that are ridiculously secret. All Halo 3-related. All somewhat mind blowing. Well, one of them is quirky rather than mind-blowing. We will test out the power of those secrets on Luke’s face.

*Actual podcast came out once, and won zero awards. And we will have to redo the sweet-ass song we made.

And finally, somebody asked what Mister Chief would Luke like. THEY DID!

[Wondermonkey]

Frankie is in New York this week, so he sent this note to me 20 minutes before the Weekly Update was supposed to go up – apparently he’s busy in New York doing stuff and things.  

Bungie’s God of Love says: “So we’re setting up here in New York for a kind of media/fan/celebrity Halo 3 Beta launch event. Harold Ryan, Dave Gasca and myself are here in the city that never sleeps (because of the roaches, no doubt) setting up TVs, surround sound, networking and even an Xbox Live Vision Cam link to Finland. Don’t ask. 

The event itself coincides with the launch of the Friends and Family Public Beta, giving a small selection of lucky folks an early entry into the Beta. If you’re a regular Bnet user of good standing, you might want to check your PMs – Roger and Tom picked a semi-random collection of Bnet users and PM’d them codes for the Beta, so in theory, you could be playing today. For everyone else, you’ll join the fun on the 16th. 

The event here in New York is the sister to a near-identical one happening in San Francisco, which is being helmed by Brian Jarrard and Lars Bakken. Ours will feature a pretty nice mix of Sports stars, celebrities, journalists and perhaps more importantly, community members. We made sure to sprinkle in a few loyal Halo fans so that it didn’t turn into a giant ego-festival. And besides, we want to see their reactions. 

Now, if you didn’t make it into the Friends and Family Beta this way (and in all likelihood, you did not) then fret not. Next week you can play via Crackdown and you still have plenty of time to go pick up a Crackdown, or a Gold account, or an Xbox 360 or whatever piece of the puzzle you might be missing.  

The Halo 2 Maptacular pack got rolled into Matchmaking this week. A few of you emailed me “strange occurrences in matchmaking” alerts, for which I am grateful, but it’s actually a normal facet of a recent matchmaking update. Eventually – and this is really scientific and technical, so bear with me – the bits of data get vibrated into the correct dataholes, and the Matchmaking algorithms start to catch the beat. Discrepancies will be eliminated over time. 

Luke Smith is back at the ranch, holding down the fort, because he’s the king in the castle. I am out of building analogies. Here’s a little introduction to the mammalian miracle that is Luke Smith, former news editor at 1up.com, and now content minky here at Bnet.

Luke, answer these questions or I shall destroy you:”  

Fine, I’ll answer your questions, jerk.

Q: Luke, welcome to Bungie. Tell the fans (and your enemies) what you’re going to be doing and what you USED to do.
A: For the last year, I was the News Editor at 1UP.com, now I’m the Content Editor at Bungie Studios. In the simplest terms, I’ll be giving you more to read and listen to about Bungie, its IP and its staff.

Q: In your own words, without describing any specific function or feature of Halo 3, describe the most mind-blowing thing you’ve seen. This is a TEST. Marty’s office. How has the transition been, from intarweb supastar, to game development agent provocateur?
A: It’s been a transition filled with many hours of Halo. It eases the pain.

Q: Which is better, cat meme, or Reirom-speak?
A: That’s like asking “Which is better, chocolate or peanut butter?”  The trick is to make them into a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup.

Q: Which element of the public beta is your favorite, and why?
A: The Spartan Laser. Despite Mr. Jukes’ video yesterday and the massive shedding of Internet tears about how “overpowered” folks think the Laser is, it’s not overpowered, it’s an elegant weapon from a more civilized age.

Q: Honestly, what is your least favorite thing about Halo 3 beta.
A: There is a profound lack of Jub-Jub in this Halo 3 beta.

Q: Tell the fans about your Halo vehicles theory.
A: Nerf vehicles lolz.

Q: Who is the best player at Bungie?
A: I’m not sure yet, I’ve heard rumors, stories and myths – but I have yet to see with my own eyes. Regardless, the best of the best will unite like feral robot cats and combine into a sword-carrying bipedal monstrosity. That implement of destruction will be dispatched on Humpday Challengers.

Q: Throw down a gauntlet at your previous employers in the style of a Renaissance Faire LARPer.
A: After I left Ziff Davis, they started hiring people BASED on their Halo 2 rank. So the next time we face EGM/1UP, they'll have a small army of recently hired "interns" playing for them. How can you LARP to something like that? You know who I hear looks pretty good in LARP gear? Multiplayer and UI producer Joseph Tung and that dude they named the Zanzibar's Froman tower after, Luke Timmins.  Maybe we should ask them.


Enough with the Q&A bizness. Today at Bungie.net we put up a small army of screenshots taken straight from the public beta – which as a shaved, Scottish, New Yorkster pointed out above (in between filling his face with stanky hot dogs from sketchy streetside vendors and beating up on press in Halo 3) – opened up her arms to Friends & Family this morning.  Next week, we'll roll out a ginormous heap of beta-related goods, guides, and information about what condition your condition is in. 

 This was the last thing Frankie said to me: “Luke, do a Mister Chief. And make it good. Else, destruction.”  

OK, since tons dudes asked ‘U just started at Bungie did ur brain melt from Halo 3?’ I’ll let Mister Chief answer that.  

---

Head ablaze, but Frank's absence prevented a full mind-melting.

[Wondermonkey]

Frankie is still flitting across the European Commonwealth showing Halo 3 (due September 26 in Europa) to various ratings and approval boards. This means the Weekly Update rests on my shoulders. As mighty as that sounds, all it means is that I am tasked with writing a brief, slightly humorous (depending on your funny bone) introduction to Frankie’s 1,500 word missive on Germanic tribes, Doctor guys and Betas going live.

All of that is followed by significantly less funny outro accompanied by a dismal facsimile of Mister Chief.

Here’s the message from Frankie’s bottle:

The Beta is Live!

The Halo 3 Public Beta went live to the general public on Wednesday, and things couldn’t have gone smoother! Everything worked exactly the way it was supposed to and…oh no wait a minute! It wasn’t!

For a while, we were as helpless as you guys, and probably just as PO’d. To be honest, there’s little we could have done differently – we sprang into action the second it happened, made calls, started helping where we could and so on, but the best laid plans of mice and men sometimes collapse in a steaming pile of bork.

This was just such an occasion. If we could have done anything differently, we’d have warned players specifically that a rollout of this scale might run into problems. We got lots of mails and calls from folks expressing outrage, that they’d taken the day off school or work to play and that their day was literally ruined.

Much as you guys will still be steaming mad at the tech folks in the backroom, I have to express my thanks to them for working hard to fix it in what (under those difficult circumstances) was a very short time. Now it might have been a short time to make a complex fix, but it was probably an eternity to some gamers.

Our mea culpa – and the generosity of Bungie’s Studio manager, Sparky, actually gives you three extra days to play and as Sketch pointed out, two of those are a weekend, so that might salve some of the wounds of work and school truants.

Some folks are still having the odd issue with the Beta – occasionally not seeing text for the interface. There’s an easy fix for that problem, repeated here for reference:

No Text in the UI Fix:

• If you encounter this issue, you can fix it yourself by doing the following:
  
• Restart your Xbox 360
  
• Boot up the Halo 3 Beta
  
• While the Halo 3 Beta is loading, immediately press up on the D-Pad and hold the A button until you see the Bungie logo. If you perform this correctly a dialog box will appear confirming maintenance has been done to your system.
  
• Resume the Halo 3 Beta!

The “Game Over” screen problem – and some of the issues with file sharing and slow matchmaking – were related to our servers being overwhelmed and should be drastically improved by the time you read this. The great thing about a Beta test is that it helps everyone identify these types of hiccups BEFORE the final game ships. So, thanks everyone for slamming our back-end infrastructure. This is the precise reason we needed such a large scale beta in the first place.

And again, we’re sorry for the inconvenience and headaches from the past two days and we hope the fun you have playing the game makes up for the drama.

For the folks complaining about the Rule of Three emails (and not receiving them), we tried to help as many folks as we could last night (Sketch's fingers have calloused over from all of the codes he typed and mailed to people, last night) but it we were overwhelmed by sheer volume. We are working with Microsoft to find a solution, but there's nothing we at Bungie can do for you going forward. Please refrain from emailing BnetBugs@microsoft.com regarding the 3 Way to Play issues - we are unable to help any further. As soon as we hear more from Microsoft, we'll have an update for you at Bungie.net.

One last note on the beta. Tons and tons of dudes have asked questions on our forums about the Beta, but before you run to the Internet with your head on fire, check out the Halo 3 Public Beta guide, many of your questions are answered there.

---

Doktor Spieler!

So I’ve talked about the USK before.. Actually, last time I mentioned it was about this time during the production of Halo 2. Die Unterhaltungssoftware SelbstKontrolle is the German video game ratings board. That’s where I’ve been all week – touring Europe to get Halo 3’s age ratings Now, the USK gets a lot of flak. Which is almost entirely unfair.

Marek Klingelstein (or Von Klingelstein, as he laughingly refers to himself as), who’s effectively the lead reviewer at this government-linked ratings board, keeps a wall of unfair press clippings above his test station. The number of mentions of David Hasselhof is the most astonishing part. Apparently David Hasselhof is our (America’s) automatic response to anything German culture does. He claims of course, that David Hasselhof isn’t anything like as big as we think. But maybe Marek just isn’t on the cutting edge of German music fashion.

He also has a picture of David Hasselhof hugging some puppies, so the jury is still out on that one.

Most of those clippings contain stories about “banned” games, but in fact, the USK doesn’t ever ban games. If a game, for whatever combination of reasons, fails to meet their criteria for violence, or -blam!- content or language (but mostly violence) they simply don’t rate it. Even then, that doesn’t mean the game can’t be sold.

Gears of War is perhaps one of the most famous examples. The USK could not rate the game in Germany because of the violent content, so they simply did what their mandate demands – they gave it a “no.” Microsoft then took that opinion seriously and did not release the game in Germany – their choice. This is often the simplest and best option, since press and public reaction can make selling an unrated game very difficult.

The game instead went on sale in the much more lax Austria, fully localized in German and legally available for import into Germany. Of course, not being available for sale in Germany is problematic for developers and publishers – Germany is a big market of dedicated gamers – but sometimes it’s more annoying for the consumer. However, as I mentioned already, it can be imported in a correctly localized version from loads of retail and mail order places. And German consumers are savvy and prepared to do just that.

Gears of War was one of the biggest ever console games in Austria – thanks in large part to import orders from Germany.

The process itself is perfectly fair. They look at violence in its proper context – is it war? Crime? Adventure? Is the gore necessary? Defensible? Punished? Rewarded? Marek leads a team of reviewers, who’re kind of like philosophical beta testers. They certainly make recommendations and suggestions and pass on useful context, but in the end, the decision comes down to a panel of government and civilian experts. Including the aforementioned Doktor Spieler.

He heads up the USK, providing guidance and management, and running an interesting office (which starts to become enormously busy at this time of year) and he has access to one of the most comprehensive libraries of video games you’ll ever lay eyes on.
As anyone with a vague understanding of German will know, “Doktor Spieler” is English for “Doctor Gamer.” This might sound like a kind of flippant nomme de plume for someone with such a serious responsibility, but I LOLd. It’s not a crazy nickname, or a branding exercise. It just happens to be his real name. He’s a Doctor. And his real surname is “Spieler.”

For Halo 3, we simply played through the entire Campaign, bugs and all, and thanks to the fact that our game is still a ways away, it was pretty buggy. However, all of the content was there, every mission and character and encounter – and the graphics, while far from polished, were correct to those that will be seen in the final game, certainly as far as gore and so on are concerned.

In these cases, the USK gives you a “preliminary” rating, meaning that if the final game they see differs significantly, they can (and occasionally do) change the rating. Funnily enough, although I’m not going to share our preliminary rating at this time, one thing that concerned the USK was “atmosphere and scale of encounters.” To which I say smugly, “ganz gut!”

Incredible Berlin Facts:

• Berlin is awesome


• Berlin has too many Kebab places


• They put creamy dill sauce on everything in Berlin


• Hot chicks ride bicycles wearing short-shorts.


• Dudes do too, so it’s nasty


• When they knocked down the Berlin wall, teenagers moved all its graffiti onto other buildings.


• Everyone in Berlin has 12 friendly dogs.


• A burrito purchased in Berlin is definitely wrong, but still tasty.


• People in Berlin really do consume significant amounts of sausage.


• Berlin is hopelessly flat, and the giant famous TV tower is in the center, and therefore not terribly useful as a landmark except for telling you how far you are away from it.


• All the toilets have push button flushes set into the wall.


• Berlin has a four storey David Hasselhof museum, called Das Hasselhof HeiseMusischeundknightrideren palazenplatz*


• The longest German word is a word for a steam boat captain’s hat. I do not have enough RAM to type it. I do have enough RAM to question why that needs its own word.

*No, of course it doesn’t. You great balloon.

After that, it was the simpler, but similar process for the UK. Forms are filled, demonstrations are given and ratings or recommendations are awarded. In the UK, there are actually two boards to visit – the Video Standards Council in sunny Borehamwood which actually supplies the famous PEGI European ratings, and then the BBFC (British Board of Film Classification) which supplies a specific British classification. How did we do?

Well, you’ll find out in September.

Luke, could you put some stuff in about the Banhammer?”

---

The Return of the Banhammer

We’re not going to explain how the hammer gets swung or what happens to you when it does swing, instead, as our population on Xbox Live continues to climb we’re offering some quick pro-tips courtesy of Multiplayer Producer (and Duck Hunter) Joseph Tung, on how to avoid the Hammer’s wrath and keep your Kleenex free of salty tears.

Q: Since this is a beta, we’re not going to be pulling out the Banhammer for glitches and exploiting (in fact, that’s what we’re hoping you try and do), but we have fabricated the banhammer for a reason. What could jerks get into online that would result in a visit from Ninjas?

A: There are a number of Bungie employees out there playing the Beta everyday with their fingers on the Banhammer. We aren’t going to ban people for friendly trash talk, corpse-humping or polite requests for more chocolate milk, but racist or otherwise offensive language or behavior will earn you a ban (duration of our choosing) to contemplate repentance. Likewise offensive gamertags will get reported to the Live team for forced name changes. Considering the limited duration of the beta, people may want to try to generally be nicer when they play.

Q: But, but, that was my little brother playing?

A: Sucks to be you (and, presumably, your little brother).

Q: If someone is yelling upstairs telling mother to bring them another Hot Pocket, is there a fix for this annoying bug?

A: We’ve made it a lot easier to mute the whiners and singers (though personally, I have been known to enjoy a good tune). At any time (pre-game, in-game, post-game) you can select a player in the roster and choose to mute the annoying ones immediately.

Q: Joe, you play a lot of Halo 3, regale us with a tale from Jerkdom and tell us what happened to said infractor.

A: Last week one of the kids in our pool of Friends and Family had a racist gamertag. I reasonably suggested that he change it and he reasonably suggested that I blam! off. When I let him know he was heading for a ban the dude was like, “GUESS WAT I WORK FOR XBAWKZ SO ENJOY YOUR BANZ.” Genius.

While you’ll evade the Banhammer for trying to uncover a double melee during the Halo 3 Public Beta, don’t forget it’s dull thud with collapse your brainspace if your Xbox 360 has modded content on it. Additionally, remember to use the Xbox Live feedback to report jerks and their infractions against your fun.

If you do manage to uncover a double melee, get standby'd, jump out of the map, or something else breaks your experience,  log in to Bungie.net and report it in the official (and heavily policed) Beta bugs threa here.

While Frankie was in Deutschland, Mister Chief was in a mountainous region looking for his hammer. He found it.

[Wondermonkey]

Beta’s nearly over kids. One more week and it’s all over. But we’ve learned a lot so far, and we still have some time to gather more data and make sure that we’ve collected as much as humanly possible. But we’d just like to expose this interesting nugget from this morning – so far in the short couple of weeks the Beta’s been live, players have totaled an extraordinary 40,766,495 games. To clarify, each unique Gamertag constitutes a “game experienced by a player” so a game of Double Team can in fact count as four games, depending on whether or not guests are in. But holy mackerel! Over 40 million games in two weeks. I knew I should have got this attached to my PayPal account.

RP and Rep. Both subjects of contention this week on the intarwebs. RP, because folks were shocked, shocked to discover that their RP would drop if they quit games a lot. There is a solution we’ve been working on to avoid this problem – it’s called, “Don’t quit games all the time, moran.” Easy for us to say, since sometimes quitting is necessary (house is on fire) or desirable (your teammates are jerks.) But if you don’t quit, you won’t lose the RP.

People giving you bad rep feedback however, is out of our hands – that’s all Xbox Live. But we will say this: If you play against an aggressive player who kicks your butt and you’re mad about it, instead of giving him a bad rep, put him on your avoid list because of his incompatible skill level. Don’t wreck his rep just because you’re frustrated.

And speaking of bad habits – here’s the top ten that we’d like to see eliminated:

10. Scavenging other people’s kills – if you didn’t kill him, you have no business crouching on him.

9. Vetoing casually – Think twice before vetoing a game you only half dislike. Murphy’s Law states that the next choice will be worse.

8. Taking off in the Hog alone – You may as well drive around in a huge magnetic target.

7. Talking trash to teammates – Yelling at strangers is bad enough, but do you think yelling at your compatriots will make them play better? Drink some chocolate milk and shut your cretinous noisehole.

6. Blasting your music at us – Yes, you’re hardcore. You love mad rhymes and phat beats. We don’t care. Turn it off. We already muted you, you spaz.

5. Insulting the room before the teams are chosen – Now I don’t want to cooperate with you.

4. Shooting me specifically, with the Needler – Stop it. I hate you.

3. Racism, abuse, foul language – We muted you already. So now you’re just a sad idiot yelling into a vacuum. Actually, go right ahead. Maybe a relative will smack you or get you the help you need.

2. Insulting Gamertags – Obviously Live can’t automatically detect every idiotic Gamertag you come up with, especially with your L337 combos, so how about this: Just quit being a moron.

1. Going to the bathroom while playing – this gem was found on a Halo 3 post in another forum. Names have been hidden to protect the guilty:

I never quit, but sometimes I have to poop, so I take the controller into the toilet with me. I move the sticks and press buttons, but I can't be held responsible for my actions during these brownouts.

Luke's been playing this game a lot, but he swears it's for a purpose.

OMG Nerf This Weapon

Luke says: Regardless of the Public Beta, there’s an obvious and huge emphasis placed on testing Halo 3. So while you folks are doing a lot of usability testing, netcode testing, and in some ways exploring weapon balance in a limited sandbox where we dictate what toys you can play with , that testing doesn’t begin to plumb the depths of what our internal test team is going through.

Multiplayer producer Joe Tung and I have been playing regularly with six of the “best” testers. In this case “best” doesn’t mean best at bug filing, it actually means good enough at Halo to play competitively. When I started at Bungie, engineer Luke Timmins was calling one of testers “Magic Fingaz” because he was doing things with the controller that make BXR seem pedestrian. Then, we fixed those things. Sorry.

Anyway, this test group is supposed to play the game in a way that attempts to break maps, get to spots where they can’t be killed and use every single dirty trick (and invent new dirty tricks) in a book that hasn’t been written yet. How my newb skillz got tapped for this series of tests is a Moriarty versus Holmes mystery of near-epic proportions, but it probably has something to do with both my “non-essential to the game shipping” status and love of trash talk – and something about “needing to not be terrible at Halo 3 so we maybe win some Humpdays when the game ships.”

It’s impossible to stress enough how constant change is in Halo 3’s multiplayer. One week Jub-Jub has an empty room on one of its multi-tiered levels, the following week that room has Shield Doors and a new weapon in it, the week after that the room is empty again and then the following Tuesday, there’s a brand new piece of equipment inside to mess with.

But instead of testing general map flow and “fun” – which get looked at religiously in the regular Bungie Playtests – this group has been specifically looking at weapon balance and testing some of the stuff that U.S. enthusiast magazine Gamepro is set to reveal in a cover story that is making its way to subscribers, now.

Lots of folks both internally and in the Public Beta have pointed out that the Covenant Carbine has seen a tremendous increase in its effectiveness and that the Battle Rifle seems to be lagging behind it as a result. This week, Joe and I’s teams spent a night testing the Carbine versus the Battle Rifle – obviously they were functioning differently than they did in the public beta.

Two nights later, the MP team had taken our feedback and we reconvened to wage war with the rifles again. Both had seen subtle tweaks to things like damage and rate of fire and were performing differently from their “earlier in the week” and “Beta” counterparts. Are the tweaks finished? By no means. They’ll see tons of testing before we see them again and it’s entirely possible and extremely likely that they’ll have changed again by the time we see them next.

This constant state of flux makes watching your reactions to the beta more interesting, because while tears have been shed about changes or lack of changes to your favorite or least favorite weapons of all time, no weapon in the beta will perform exactly as it does now when the game ships. That could be because of subtle (and not-so-subtle) changes being made to the weapon itself or similar changes to other weapons in the game that affect the way the weapons in the sandboxes operate. But anyone who says the Needler is underpowered needs to lay off the meds. Come awwwwn.

Today, Bungie got another new employee. We call her "The Beverage Center." Inside her arms she keeps stacks upon stacks of ice cool beverages. Studio overlord Harold Ryan said she would easily be the 'hardest working team member for the rest of the project.' Here, go read more from Frankie.

Campaign is Coming

In September. But we’ve been playing all the way through the game for weeks now. Our favorite level at the moment (and it changes week by week) is the challenge presented by the very last level. Now the thing that sucks for us, is that we’ll never be able to experience the game properly. It’s just not practical or possible for us to sequester ourselves away from the Campaign game. We have to play it. But it’s hardly torture either. And we can’t tell you anything else about it.

Joe and I were taking turns at a driving challenge somewhere else in the game, created by Dan Miller, one of our Campaign designers. Now being backseat drivers AND backseat game designers, we gave him loads of awesome feedback. We can only imagine how grateful he was for it. In a very real way, he’s lucky to have us.

Speaking of driving, I was trying a speed run on one of my other favorite levels (earlier one) which has a spot you’re technically not supposed to get a vehicle across. This was slowing me down and cramping my style, so I used my top-secret new vehicle to nudge some bits of debris around to make a ramp. Massive justice! Leap achieved. When I reported this to that level’s designer, Chris, he was all, “Well dur, how come it took you a year to figure that out?”

Sketch and Luke, meanwhile, have been trying out Legendary. Sketch was playing through the first level, while Luke tried one of the middle ones. “Jackals are jerks!” and “Even Lee can’t throw a plasma that accurately!” are the yells coming from their monkeypit.



HaloClix is Also Coming!

Yeah, you read it right. A Halo based ActionClix game is coming in September, 2007. From the folks who brought you HeroClix, comes a tabletop game set in the Halo universe (featuring characters, scenarios and equipment from all three games) that requires skill, strategy and is basically great fun. We did a brief mention of this a while ago, but we finally have some color shots of some of the characters.

One of the most satisfying, fun and pleasant aspects of working with WizKids was just how much they “got” the Halo universe. The WizKids designers’ most fundamental task was to build a game that Halo players would appreciate and enjoy, taking elements of the fiction and the gameplay and pairing them correctly.

Which means you’re not just going to see another version of a Clix game with Halo characters bolted on, but rather a game that’s built from the ground up to support Halo themes and ideas. For example, there will be respawn points, accurate species specs and even the ability to swap weapons with teammates (a la Halo 2 campaign). But it still retains the classic Clix gameplay engine.

As with all the Clix series of games, you’ll be able to buy packs – in the case of Halo ActionClix, these will be $10 per pack and each will contain four game figures, four stat cards, a couple of dice and a startup map. Not bad for the price of a couple of Frappucinos.

During the game, two or more players can choose to field teams of UNSC or Covenant units, or mix ‘em up for highly entertaining, but probably non-canonical action! Series one launches in September and the complete set will contain almost 100 pieces. If you don’t know anything about Clix, it’s basically a really approachable turn-based board game that anyone can play. Read more here: http://www.wizkidsgames.com/wk_home.asp.



Finally

Don’t forget, you can still win a Halo 3 Zune, complete with loads of exclusive content over at HBO. In keeping with the Zune’s broad Multimedia capabilities, the contest at HBO is multimedia focused. Contestants are asked to enter in one of the following categories:

Submission Categories:

1. Halo Song Parody - Using Halo as the theme, create a song parody based off any existing song you like. Entries will be judged on creativity, humor and execution.

2. Original Halo Song - Create an original song inspired by Halo! The sky is the limit in terms of instruments and musical genre. Entries will be judged on lyrics (if they exist), delivery and execution.

3. Halo 3 Beta Montage Video - Using the Halo 3 beta, create the ultimate montage video! Mix one part creativity, one part awesome game footage, one part audio and a dash of editing skills and make a video that will wow and amaze the Halo community. Entries will be judged on concept, originality, entertainment value and execution.

4. Halo Original Machinima Video - Using the Halo 3 Beta or Halo 2 or Halo 1 for that matter, create a Machinima style production. Entries will be judged on originality, creativity, entertainment value and execution.

Remember, you can’t enter here – Halo.Bungie.Org is hosting the contest, so head over there right now for a chance to win.

[Wondermonkey]

Last week’s update was miserably slim, because everyone was out of the office. To be honest, little has changed, nor is it likely to in the next few weeks. Lots and lots of travel and antics are distracting us from feeding you morsels of tasty info, so we’re forced to toss you scraps from the table.

This week, at least, I’ll endeavor to tell you what there is to know. First and foremost, the game went gold. The literal definition of this term is that the game is finished and ready to be manufactured. The broader, more lyrical definition is that an incredible team of talented geniuses just put the finishing touches to three years of herculean effort and shipped a concluding chapter to our trilogy, that everyone here is proud of.

Halo 2 was a fantastic game, evidenced by its review scores and the fact that about 300k people still play it every day. But it contained compromises we could never have been happy with. There were compromises that many would never have noticed nor complained about – and there were compromises you did notice and were entitled to complain about. After all, games aren’t free. Hard as we work to make them perfect, we never forget that they cost you money. We understand that we’re not doing you a favor. For your hard-earned lucre, we’re providing goods and services and we owe you the highest quality for both.

With Halo 3 however, there are no glaring compromises, and almost no invisible ones. We’ve not only executed on all the stuff we wanted to for Halo 2, we’ve executed on a bunch of stuff that seemed like pipe dreams three years ago. The shopping list of features is crazy. Campaign, 4 player co-op, Team Scoring, Saved Films, Forge, Multiplayer, File Sharing, the new Bnet. We already encountered a problem with this as we planned out review events.

The fact is that even if you end up not liking Halo 3, you probably won’t argue that it doesn’t contain a lot of stuff. I hope the reviewers like it, because otherwise they’re going to be pretty mad by the time they get done plowing through it.

And speaking of review events, they’re going on over the next week or two. Press in various regions will be invited to various locales to play the finished game – we can’t send ‘em out for logistical, XBL-related and security reasons, but we can provide a safe, well-lighted place where reviewers can play through the Campaign, play through co-op, make saved films, tinker in Forge and try out Multiplayer. Luke is getting back from one of those on Tuesday and here’s his report, redacted for top secrecy.

Euro Review Event!

Chris Opdahl and I are in London this week overseeing an all-too brief European review session for Halo 3. On Tuesday, Chris and I oversaw the set up of the "LAN/Multiplayer lab" this lab consisted of 16 machines linked over System Link and set into 8 on 8 pods. Each pod had headphones, a retail console, HDD equipped Xbox 360 and Halo 3. In another corner of the room was a 4 player campaign co-op area set up for four players at a time to play through the game. Additionally, each member of the European press had a Sharp HDTV in their room with a 360 and 5.1 Surround Sound headphones.

Press began to arrive at 9 a.m. on Wednesday morning, as soon as they arrived, Chris and I elected to have them start through the Campaign on Heroic and then they could take their HDD up to their room to continue playing in the comfort and privacy of their own space. As the room filled up, however, folks simply couldn't be pried away from the 360 for anything other than snacks, of which there were plenty of fancy-ish Eurosnax and bottled sodas and beer. The press wouldn't leave their stations and kept playing, the room was pretty silent throughout the day (headphones do that to a room). Opdahl and I started every player on Heroic and tracked their progress, one player started on normal and was blowing through the first four missions in the game -- however, from BLAM! to conclusion things slowed down DRASTICALLY, he finished "BLAM!" at midnight when we closed the lab.

Additionally, during the day I did a demo of Saved Films for a bunch of the reviewers, I showed them a playthrough I'd done that morning of BLAM!, mouths were agape when we examined the BLAM! explosion up close and letting the press watch the game through the eyes of the Covenant with some camera work seemed to open their eyes to the possibilities of Saved Films. I explained Screenshots and demonstrated them, and was pleased this morning to see members of the press going through their own campaign films from the day before and taking screenshots. I made sure to go around and save films from their campaign and multiplayer experience to try and make it as easy as possible for the press to check out these key features.

Earlier on Wednesday, Opdahl set up the exploding Behemoth in Forge, so I thought using a Saved film of that would be a good follow-up to a Forge demo that I did for folks in the early evening. It takes a bit for Forge to click, but I definitely saw some "honor games" being constructed in the morning. The Euroz seemed impressed with Forge, but it is so hard to explain without letting folks play themselves, it’s better to simply let them tinker.

At the end of the first night, each journalist took their HDD up to their room and presumably finished the campaign, the following morning a handful of them returned at 8 a.m. During the first day we talked about skulls and scoring and got some players to test it out, but in the a.m. of Day 2, players began to mess around with it on their own. A handful of guys wanted to play 4p co-op with skulls on, so I loaded up Sierra 117 on Legendary and turned on: Mythic, BLAM!, Thunderstorm, Tough Luck, BLAM! and one other. We started making our way through Jungle. The reviewer I was playing with was loving BLAM!, but we weren’t making as much progress as I liked, and I wanted them to see the AI and just how different the game feels, so I turned off BLAM! and turned on Catch. Everyone was laughing at chain grenade explosions and general carnage. The only skull I saw a player find during their first playthrough, was Mythic.

Chris and I did a bunch of Interviews with European press, many of which will likely be translated into things like "Luke said there would be campaign Forge in Halo 17" and "Chris says that the love story between Cortana and the Master Chief is a key theme in Halo 3" -- oh, wait, of those two things one of them actually was said.

Thanks Luke!

The US review events are happening very shortly and fairly close by, and we’re really excited and terrified to set those up. So far, all of our events have been under either our literal or ostensible control. We’ve decided what to show and when to show it. In a review scenario however, we can’t interfere. We have to let the players access every single corner of the game at their own pace. All we can do is be on hand to answer questions. It’s really scary.



One of the things I am personally really excited to show reviewers, or anyone who’s interested really, is the all-new Bungie.net. I think that we’ve outdone ourselves this time. Halo 2’s relaunch of Bungie.net blew my mind last time, in terms of detail and features, but the version for Halo 3 is a brain melter. When Zach, Chris or Tom demo the features to me, I have a genuine sense of disbelief. Watching someone take a screenshot in game and Autoname and Save it and then turn to a PC and bring up their Player Stats page on Bungie.net – and seeing that screenshot appear in their gallery almost instantly – is crazy.

Better yet, all you do is click on your screenshot preview and the giant version opens up (or saves to your desktop) and is ready for wallpaper, or emailing evidence of your awesome victory to your friends.



The File Share area is a dream come true. See a file you’re interested in, be it a Saved Film a Forge variant or a Game Variant – just flag it and it’s downloaded to your 360 automatically, next time you log into Live. We’re going to have more on Bnet stuff in the next couple of weeks, but here’s a couple of screenshots to whet your appetites. Note that these are not from the final build and contain a few graphical inconsistencies and debuggy early stuff.

In addition to review events, we also have teams deployed around the globe for all sorts of pre-launch PR activities. Steve and Francois just got back from X07 Canada where they showed off the Halo 3 campaign and saved films to members of the Canadian media. Joe and Carney finally completed their whirlwind tour of Asia where they made a stop in Taipei and Seoul to meet gamers and help promote the game. (Joe promises an in-depth report and photos for Bungie.net sometime next week) Sketch just got back from a trip to Leipzig Germany and the world's largest game show. Here's a quick report:

Games Convention Report!

As Frankie says, I just got back from a trip to Leipzig, Germany where Paul Bertone, Chris Opdahl and myself spent a few days amongst the crowd of nearly 100,000 gamers to promote Halo 3 and get recruits for the Bungie Underground Army. I was at the show last year under different circumstances - helping the Hired Gun team show Halo 2 for Vista. While the game may have changed, the show certainly hasn't. The Games Convention is one incredibly massive show. Unlike E3, this show is open to consumers which is awesome because we get to talk and hang out with actual fans rather than non stop media. Don't get me wrong, I like the media folks too and actually spent two solid days doing demos, but sometimes it's just nice to talk to the "real" people who help make Halo what it is today.

We met a ton of people over our 5 day stay and even though we could barely communicate with them, we all had a common ground in Halo and Bungie. I promised I would give a shout out to the guys from the Bungie.de fan community as well as the members of UCO (www.uco-portal.de). You may be surprised to know that in Germany the Halo fans are just like you are here in the U.S. - they ask about the Halo 1 pistol, about the disappointing ending of Halo 2 and attempt to pry the secrets of the Forerunners out of our brains. We also discovered that they are damn good at Halo 3 already, thanks in part to a lot of time with the public beta a few months ago.

We were setup out in the parking lot in two big tents with 16 stations of hands-on multiplayer. As people exited a giant Ferris Wheel (see Kotaku for a report on "Halo 3 : The Ride") they were treated to 7 to 10 minutes of play. Usually we had them playing Sandtrap, a huge map that's perfect for these large games. I spruced it up a bit and gave the German crowds world-exclusive playtime with "Sketchtrap" - my Forge modified version that includes Wraiths, Scorpions, Prowlers and a few more anti-vehicle weapons. Mass chaos ensues.

Paul Bertone and I, on team pink, spent the better part of Saturday destroying fans at Halo 3 - two teams of seven players each. 14 vs. 2. Just the kind of odds we like. Mind you we felt really bad about it but we were having too much fun to stop. We employed a few shady tactics but mostly we just grabbed a Wraith or Scorpion each and proceeded to dominate the map... and yeah, so maybe we destroyed all the other vehicles on the map before the players even got their hands on the controller but that was only a temporary disadvantage for them. At one point I had 38 kills before I died once. Over the few hours we played, I think Paul and I earned every single medal and accolade possible in multiplayer, including an "Invincible!" that I admit I'd never had the joy of hearing before.

Before we shut down on Saturday we played a few 2v2 matches against some of the fans we met - first on Narrows and then on Guardian. It was a really close fight - each match being decided by 5 points or less. If not for the fact that we knew the maps and weapons and they didn't, I don't think we would've fared so well. Before we shut down we decided to do one more match, but when they weren't looking I switched the lobby to Forge and quickly launched High Ground. Now if you aren't paying attention, you'd think we were just playing a game of Team Slayer on High Ground. And they did... until we started dropping fusion coils on their head and I gave Paul a sniper rifle and proceeded to fly him around the map, "flying carpet style", as he rained down death from above. We gave them a small taste and then it was time to close shop.

Paul and I came back on Sunday but Chris stuck through and ran the show all day Sunday by himself. We've yet to see him but I hear he eventually surfaced in London to help Luke with the review events. In closing I'd just like to thank all the fans who supported us at Games Conference and all over Germany as well as the fine brewers of delicious German beer and the GC officials who set the policy on the allowable levels of nudity for "booth babes." See ya next year!


Thanks Sketch! And finally, it wouldn't be an update without...



p.s. only 25 more days to go!