Life in the Halo community rolls on. The Halo Multi Player Zone site has posted up days two and three of its interview with some notorious webmasters in our community. Rampancy.net's own contribution is made by Narcogen. The Brit-owned & operated Multi Player Zone sites require you to log in before viewing anything, of course.

A few of you who've been around RHL lately, especially late at night, have heard me occasionally mumble something about Planetside. (Amid my other Nocturnal rantings) It's been extremely frustrating, because this inevitably led to someone asking me for a URL and I haven't had one; until now, my only source of information was PC Gamer's December 2000 issue. Planetside both owns the cover and is the first to be featured in a mega-preview of upcoming massive multiplayer games. Here's a quick blurb from the article:

A big element of the game will be vehicles, which are essential for travel over rough terrain and for speedily carrying you back into the fight. The vehicle we got to see in action was an armored, gun-equipped dune buggy (which looked, I must say, like it had jumped right out of Halo). The physics of Planetside are much more action-conscious than thuddingly realistic, so the buggies handle like the vehicles from an arcade racer.

That's right, you heard me say massive multiplayer. Planetside is being done by Verant, the nuts who put out EverCrack... albeit by a totally new team, none of whose members did work on EQ. It will be a massive multiplayer FPS, set in a persistent world, and has been kept under the covers for quite some time. Until now, that is. Verant has announced the existence of Planetside, and launched its official homepage. Also, HBO was the first to post about Daily Radar's informative interview with Kevin McCann, the producer and lead designer of Planetside.

Some of you in our community have at times expressed the hope or even the expectation that Halo might be such a game, so this might be something to keep your eye on. Not quite as pretty as Halo, Planetside will support up to 30,000 gamers per server and is designed around a mercenary system of sorts. We'll have to see if it will be plagued by some of the same things which turned a number of gamers away from EQ. No word yet on whether there will be a Mac version. Perhaps if enough of you expressed an interest...? The game is slated for the Summer of 2001, according to PC Gamer.

Some of you will remember that, when he was with the now-static fansite TotalHalo, fAt1 interviewed several of the webmasters in the Halo community. Now that he has come to work at the Halo Multi Player Zone (login required) fAt1 has tossed out another round of questions. This time, our own Narcogen took a turn on Rampancy.net's behalf. Head on over to see how some of our community's leaders responded to HMPZ's questions.

Matt Soell from Bungie Studios has given us his Halo update for this week. And here it is!

This is another art-heavy update because the various reconstructive programming tasks are still not finished. This one might have been a little longer but I am severely pressed for time today. So, let's go!- Marcus showed me one of the interiors heТs working on. The interiors are put together in a very rough form Ц just enough to get the basic outlines of the space down Ц and then refined. Over the course of this process, the level transforms from something that looks like it could have come out of Marathon into...well, into a level that looks like it came out of Halo. The artists are testing out how big the levels can be, what sort of balance to strike between geometric and textural complexity, that sort of thing. The level Marcus showed me was HUGE: we looked over a ledge and saw an enormous underground labyrinth. Then he showed me the concept art Eddie drew of what the level will look like when it's finished. If youТve ever seen storyboards for a well-designed science fiction movie (Aliens, for example) youТll have an idea of what some of the Halo interiors will look like. (Not in terms of Giger-esque weirdness but in the sheer complexity and scale.)- TheyТre testing lighting stuff, although a lot of it doesnТt work yet

Sounds like it could use a few throw pillows, though.

In a move that can be summed up in only six letters, OMGWTF, Microsoft this morning announced that Halo will in fact be an XBox only launch title! The PR was very short and two the point:

REDMOND, WA. - Haaa, suckers!

The move apparently comes after an enormous hellrift opened below the offices of the now resettled Bungie Studios. A contractor sent to assess the damage reported "a terrible stench of brimstone and misery, the shrieking of a billion damned souls as they escape into the firestained night!", which he followed with lots of incoherent screaming.

On the scene, some inside sources report an "evil, red glow" emanating from the eyes of Bungie's developers, while another reported that her child had been stolen and eaten by an as of yet unidentified employee! Calls to Microsoft headquarters to confirm these reports have been met with maniacal laughter and attempted phone traces... we suspect they're onto us, and will be relocating soon. God be with you.

Louis Wu over at Halo.bungie.org alerted us to Matt's weekly Halo update, which this week graces their pages. This week's update is just full of meaty detail, the bulk of which we won't repeat here, you'll just have to go to halo.bungie.org and read the full report.

Here's a tantalizing tidbit, however:

- Jaime is speccing out the various net games as completely as possible. Again, we can't say too much here because who knows how many of them will actually end up in the game. We're trying to cover all the usual bases but there may be some unusual (read: brand new) game types as well. There are also some interesting ideas being tossed around for how to scale net games up for larger numbers of players, though exactly how many players we're talking about is still entirely up in the air.

I'm sure everyone at Bungie is frightened about just how many different ways that one mention of larger numbers of players might be interpreted. Perhaps it's time to head to our forum and take a few doses of your favorite mind altering substance and pontificate on possible Halo netgames.

The update also includes lots of other information about weapons, art, and other stuff, including a new member of the Halo team, producer Rick Ryan. Welcome, Rick!