Yes! Weekly Bungie Update: Today!

Originally posted by Nu
Subjective. But hey! I\'m glad you at least went out of your way to at least back your claims with solid reasoning.

We\'ll see, eh?

ah well, hes still wrong

New info from the Oct OXM:

-You have an option to turn active camo on or off so power ups are back
-Quickmatch and optimatch games will change your stats but party-based games will not.
-The guass cannon is confirmed in the OXM and in multiplayer
-The scoripian\'s movement and turret turning speed are both toned down
-In the Banshee, pressing left on the thumbstick and A simultaneously executes a barrel roll (similar to Crimson Skies)and right and A makes the banshee do a backflip, etc.
-The FRG isn\'t gone, it was assigned to the B button.(Banshee)
-The beam rifle overheats after four successive rounds, not two.
-Along with the swords only gametype, there was a sword and pistol gametype (no, not duel wielded :P)
-The Wraith is in multiplayer and it is a bit overpowered (Bungie noted this in the playing time so it will be tweaked most likely.) It also has a boost.
-You can customize any gametype like Halo PC, even the spawn of the vehicles.
-Lockout was described to house the Flood and study them. Where is lockout located?!
-They "have plans for downloadable content...we want to always keep it fresh and alive and cool and changing it up for our fans"
-Health bar is out-Confirmed.
-Wraith, scorpian, and banshee can all be boarded.
-When boarding either tank, the spartan or elite throws a grenade into the hatch and watch the driver explode while you take the seat afterwords.
-Your level will determine who you get matched up against in Quickmatch and optimatch.

Only thing that really bothers me is the official confirmation that there is no health, and the Wraith having a Boost... But then again, the Wraith was slow as shit to begin with. If it still only doubles it\'s speed, it shouldn\'t be any problem.

But really, health... I\'m sure Bungie has been toying around with it long enough, but it still bothers me a bit. This is a drastic change from the original game\'s system. I was hopin\' they\'d leave it visible and have it recharge slowly...

Oh well. We\'ll see how it works out on November 9th.

20 minute, high resolution footage of MLG-folks playing HALO 2 can be found here. My impressions:

He was a good player, but you could tell that he was really busy taking in everything about the map, and wasn\'t being too attentive to his surroundings(or his motion tracker). Heh. Also, he seemed to avoid the Battle Rifle and missed his chance to grab a Shotgun!!... I haven\'t seen enough of the shotty in HALO 2. I hear it can blast opponents away and break away at the enviroment quite nicely.

Great video though, I only wish that it wasn\'t re-encoded to this quality. It only seems to be running at about 20fps... Seeing as how this is on BT and not coming from their server, they could have left the video as-is.

You can really get a feel for Zanzibar\'s layout by watching it... But yeah, I\'m sick of seein\' Zanzibar, man. Let\'s see some Lockout, or Waterworks for Chrissakes!

Originally posted by PS2_-\'_\'-_PS2
ah well, hes still wrong

This conclusion was based upon playing both games right? :rolleyes:

Lighten up, Phil! He was just messin\'! Show us a smile! C\'mon!

After listening to a couple of other fans on various forums, I\'m starting to appreciate the omission of the health bar a bit more. Basically, it\'s just to keep the action going, so you won\'t slow down too much after losing your health.

It sounds good, anyways...

I\'ve turned into a bitter bastard, just thought I\'d share the love.

I just watch that new video and God Damn!  

just watched the vid, im not going to b able to make up my mind if it wil b good or not until i play it - simple as that tbh.

And whats the point in no health bar - how the hell are u going to know when to get health! Or is there no health and its just a slightly stronger shield?

Originally posted by PS2_-\'_\'-_PS2
Or is there no health and its just a slightly stronger shield?

Almost got it. There is health, you just can\'t see it, and it replenishes when your shield recharges... And the shield is slightly stronger than in the first game, but so are most of the weapons, so it evens out.

Only difference here is that there\'s no lasting damage, and that you can\'t see your health once your shields are down. But, if you\'ve played with a lot of pros in multiplayer, you\'d know how rare it was to come out of as skirmish with just a little bit of health taken away because you\'re usually dead as soon as your shields are down(thank you, M6D Pistol!).

The change makes the game\'s pace a bit faster. Bungie stated this in an interview not too long after E3, I believe, and now I finally see what they meant by it. It\'s still pretty much the same as HALO.

the health replensihes! what the hell is the point in that!!!


Example: Playing at the weekend with some frineds - snipes - Blood Gulch. My friend shoots some guy and then he runs round the back of the base - i know hes low in heath and it wont replenish obv by the time i get near him so i know hes gonna die -this wont b the case in halo 2.

u know what i think is gonna happen? people are gonna be so used to halo and how great it is that the change is going to b so great the original halo players wont like it, they should bring out and add-on pack with new levels, weapons etc rather than change the whole gameplay structure

Originally posted by PS2_-\'_\'-_PS2
Example: Playing at the weekend with some frineds - snipes - Blood Gulch. My friend shoots some guy and then he runs round the back of the base - i know hes low in heath and it wont replenish obv by the time i get near him so i know hes gonna die -this wont b the case in halo 2.

Psst--

... (work on your headshots. :eek:... )

u know what i think is gonna happen? people are gonna be so used to halo and how great it is that the change is going to b so great the original halo players wont like it, they should bring out and add-on pack with new levels, weapons etc rather than change the whole gameplay structure

All the folks who\'ve played so far have stated completely otherwise. Really, everyone who\'s played the demo have stated that it(the health/shield system) feels no different from the first game.

Thirty Third update, originally posted at Bungie.net

Bungie Weekly Update - Friday, August 27th 2004

Although there\'s more than a month of actual mind crushing work left, this week is a real milestone in my mind, and so we bring you a special, extended update, because Halo 2\'s campaign mode is not only playable, it\'s fun. Actually, fun is the wrong word – since some of the levels left me sweating, awed and terrified by turns. Caveat: As well as an employee, I\'m still part fanboy, so read this with that in mind.

BUS STOP

I\'ve been getting up very early, coming in and playing the latest test build. It\'s always full of surprises. One bizarre way to tell how advanced it is is to look at the buses. They started as large oblong crates, completely flat but with the candy-cane default texture that\'s used for unfinished objects. One morning I loaded it up and the candy cane texture was gone. Replaced with a sort of vaguely instructional "Large Dias" emblazoned across it. A few weeks later, it kinda looked like a crate with wheels. Then, a passable bus. This morning, it wheels, glass, and does something very cool if you lob enough grenades at it. It\'s a bus. Keanu Reeves would drive it. But like, you can\'t really drive it. Before you ask.

Surrounding the bus, which I admit is kind of a boring thing to watch over a period of months, is some dramatically detailed city environment and architecture. You\'ve already got some idea of what the landscape of Earth City looks like, thanks to the year and a half old E3 demo, but there are varied elements to the city environment, and there are plenty of graphical and environmental surprises in store for you. You\'d be surprised what a difference a few power cables make.

BUILD QUALITY

The system kind of works like this: We have a general resource at Bungie where the latest builds of the game are located. One is recommended as stable by the test department, while others may have been built to test or debug a specific problem. The testers get the stable build and rampage through it, looking for any problems, "bugging" them (that is, saving their exact position in the game, noting what the problem was, and entering it into a database.) and then play on, looking for problems.

Parsons has asked Brian and me to get stuck into that process as well. He thinks I\'m basically stupid though, so while Brian has been asked to look for "clipping errors, instance geometry problems and physics anomalies," Parsons told me to "watch out for colors that aren\'t pretty," or "scary things that make you want to go wee."

Speaking of Brian, he\'s getting married today. So congrats to Brian from everyone on the team, except the hardcore dudes who\'re all like, "Dude, you\'re gonna be so whipped man," and "this is the end of the party, brah!"

Harold the test manager, who\'s as evil as Carrot Top\'s Y-Fronts , explained that he\'s basically been staying until 3am and then arriving again about four hours later. He\'s opening and closing bugs at a ferocious rate. One horrible thing he did this week to the test team was open 478 bugs at once, using an automated process. That far outstripped the entire output of the rest of the test team. You could hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth. Still, they were minor fixes. Hundreds more will be opened and fixed between now and the game\'s ship.

MANUAL TRANSMISSION

Speaking of ship – the game will leave these hallowed halls weeks before it arrives in stores. It takes a long time to manufacture and distribute that many games. I\'m no logistician, but I reckon they\'re going to have to make DOZENS, no, HUNDREDS of copies of the game. With that in mind, I am pleased to announce that the manual, one of the few things pertaining to the actual game that I have anything to do with, is complete and going through its last round of revisions.

The manual is a complicated beast, since it has to be complete before the game. So matching features and interface details is tricky. The UX team (User eXperience) in charge of manual production has been a dream to work with, and you can tell they\'re used to creating manuals for works of progress. The manual is also a good example of how detail-oriented Bungie is. It should, if we do our job right, be a cool thing in itself, with one or two surprises for people when they first open their copy on Nov. 9th.

It\'s also been going through a ton of translations by our localization group. Occasionally I\'ll get email questions from other countries asking for detailed explanations, like, "What do you mean by \'Nipple\'?" and "What does, \'Where the sun don\'t shine mean?\'"

Every major language gets its own version of the manual, and there are even four Nordic language versions of the text, so you can imagine how much work that takes. Be sure to let us know, if you\'re French, Spanish, German, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Norwegian et al, how cool you think it is in November. Or stupid. Whichever you decide.

HEADSHOT HEAVEN

Nathan and the animation crew are making final tweaks and modifications to the in-game animation – for example, there\'s now a very nice player reward for good headshots (not excited about saying this), but much of their work in the last stretch will be creating entirely new animation for the cut scenes and cinematics. Although all of the cinematics happen in the game engine, the cinematic events contain motions, movements and events that simply don\'t exist in the largely hand-animated game code. They\'ve also been handling and managing the contract animators.

So the animators have a hefty, but rewarding task ahead of them (with constant dips back into turning game animations) as they make the cinematics dramatic, foreboding and occasionally funny. Recently, the animation on the cinematics has increased exponentially. Characters that formerly slid down corridors now walk or skulk. Characters who once stood static above their script captions, are now eerily lip-synched to real, acted dialog. Poor old Joe Staten, he\'s been putting this cinematic stuff together forever, but he and CJ get no props in the weekly update, because everything they\'re working on is plot-related, and therefore secret.

The voice stuff in the cinematics is astonishing. We\'ve picked some brilliant voices for the game. My favorite voice sounds like (but isn\'t) John Hurt (we should ask Joe about this) and the sheer variety of voices is outstanding. This becomes especially important in scenes where there is more than one alien character – it becomes easy to identify who\'s speaking by voice alone, which in turn lubricates the drama. And it is dramatic, I guarantee it. It helps now that the voices are lip (or mandible) synchronized, and of all the graphical improvements over Halo, cinematics may have benefited the most – if only because they were done under fierce time constraints for the first game.

MARKET THIS

Cam and the marketing team have been going all-out, with new consumer events, trade shows and demos in the works. TGS is coming up soon and Bungie will be there in some form, showing off Halo 2 to Japanese press and gamers. Cam also had the pleasure of doing the first consumer gameplay demo at Leipzig in Germany. Brian and I did the second (kind of) with a mini tournament at an MLG event last weekend. Both events used the E3 Zanzibar build, which now looks kind of old and crumbly to us.

Actually, we were very pleased by the reaction of the Japanese and Korean press when they played the beta build at a recent press event. I got the feeling they really enjoyed the competitive aspect of the game and would literally cheer when a skilled player pulled off some cool stuff, like vehicle-boarding or especially violent swordplay. Hopefully they\'ll enjoy the new multiplayer stuff we\'ll show at TGS too. I think the old stereotype that the Japanese don\'t like first person shooters is either fading, exaggerated or plain wrong – since some of the guys and girls who visited us from Famitsu and other magazines, were pretty good players.

Cam\'s been tracking weird Halo 2 mentions in the media, and noted that famous chick magazine, "Jane" ran a piece on the game in its September issue (go buy it guys!) saying, “The Halo 2 game is finally here.  Tough-chick Cortana is still calling all of the shots.”  And running a nice little shot of everyone\'s favorite hologram.

ART ATTACK

Lorraine is SWAMPED. I mean, hardcore swamped. Since Zoe left (and moved outta town, and got her work ripped off by some jerk on eBay) Lorraine is the sole go-to girl for art needs. That means marketing, PR, advertising, internet and random jerks from the street all demand art and assets from Lorraine. She\'s posing 3D max models, fixing huge Photoshop files and still trying to find the time to make new screens for the launch time frame.

She\'s been hustling on our coffee table art book, which should be available at game launch, and features lots of really cool concept art and stuff from Halo with a little Halo 2 thrown in for good measure.

33rd update continued in next post...

33rd update continued here...

MULTIPLAYER MADNESS

Chris Carney, he of all things multiplayer is, and Parsons will HATE me for saying this, nearly finished. Multiplayer is almost complete. From 2pm today, when some final lightmaps are applied, the multiplayer game will be all but content complete. That means the maps are finished, the layouts complete and everything after that will be fine-tuning and testing.

Chris says that the multiplayer team will even have some time (a rare commodity) to go in and do some extra tweaks and additions they didn\'t think they\'d have time to do, including res-ing up some textures, sharpening some graphics and improving some visuals just for the hell of it. Of course, there\'s still lots to do in terms of testing and tuning of gameplay on those maps, but some of the new levels are amazing.

The use of big, big maps is going to make for some very interesting scenarios. One particularly massive map has enough indoor and outdoor locations for totally different game styles to break out. There could be Banshee dogfights going on in the sky, shotgun deathmatches in a building and sniper matches on the rooftops, all while Warthogs race each other around the same level. It is considerably bigger than the relatively large Zanzibar.

There\'s even an indoor space big enough for vehicle fights and full of potentially explosive moving objects. Which ought to make for some interesting and pyrotechnic matches. And all told, the biggest spatial innovation in Halo 2 multiplayer, is the increased use of asymmetrical maps, which makes objective-based gametypes, like CTF, all the more fun. Also, asymmetrical maps tend to "feel" more like real places. The varied architecture and geometry in Halo 2 MP tends to be much more realistic than some of the very simple, older maps from Halo.

Dave Dunn and the environment guys are also reaching a stage where they\'re not really creating new art or objects, merely fixing problems with existing spaces. Asked which of the levels was the furthest from completion, Dave paused, reflected, ran his hands over his plush new Mohawk, and said, "Well really, there isn\'t a space in the whole game that hasn\'t been \'touched.\' There\'s a couple of things here and there, but mostly we\'re fixing bugs."

PERFORMANCE TUNED

The most visible ongoing process from here on out, will be performance tuning. Lots of things affect frame rate, stability and general performance, and these are going to be addressed until the last possible moment to make for the best possible experience. Increases come from all over the place. The engineers and designers are making very specific speed increases with code changes and tweaks. Moving objects, fiddling with AI, everything has an effect on speed and frame rate so performance increases are coming from all over the place. My favorite bit of performance overall, is the loading speed. Like Halo, we load bits of levels on the fly. In Halo there was a brief pause. In Halo 2, there\'s no significant pause at all, at least, not one that I noticed.

MUSIC MAN

Marty has been busy, stressed and busy. Now that the game is in a state where he can properly score it, he\'s been pretty much locked away in the studio. When he does pop out, he looks much older than his 26 years would imply, and it\'s usually to ask about paper towels – something that\'s becoming a sore spot around here.

Anyway, there\'s music in the game. Music! For the first time, the compositions are being dropped into the missions and the difference is astonishing. A previously exciting and fun mission now takes on mysterious overtones as the music foreshadows events that are about to happen, or suddenly kicks into overdrive when the crap hits the fan. Before joining Bungie, I was a huge fan of the Halo music – not just the actual melodies, but the way they integrated with the pacing and the drama. I have to say, I\'m a bigger fan now.

Although there are some familiar cues (as with any good movie sequel) there\'s an awful lot of completely new music here, some of it associated with new characters, some with new environments, but all of it perfectly suited to what\'s going on.

But lord knows, the last thing Marty needs is unqualified praise, so maybe I should point out something mean to even it out. Hmmm. Yeah, where\'s the Halo 2 ringtone Marty? Get on the stick you lazy communist.

One last thing - A big shout out to the Fable team this week, as their game shipped to manufacture, and the first reviews started rolling in. It\'s getting great scores, and, speaking personally as somebody who never likes RPGs, I am loving it. Lots of action, and lots to explore, which is the way I like all my games.

And one last thing. We\'re going to be at PAX – the Penny Arcade expo on Sunday, so keep an eye out for us there, and make sure you have a great time, it looks like they\'ve got a lot of cool stuff lined up.

 
And one other last thing. Mister Chief is off this week, replaced by his brilliantly-named evil counterpart, Evil Mister Chief.

Decided not to bold the really interesting parts, because there were so many of \'em!...

... Plus, this week\'s update was damn big. And I didn\'t feel like goin\' through all of that so early.

The Covenant Beam Rifle is a huge sucka:

That looks pretty cool.