Rumors of further delay in Halo 2's release are being fueled by changes in the expected dates published by EBGames and GameStop. Remember again, though, none of these are official, and it very likely means nothing at all. Nothing, we tell you, NOTHING. Thanks XboxSolution.
After posting a few of my personal viewpoints in a recent thread, I have finally decided to catalogue my ideas for public opinion. These ideas will be formed from an ongoing series of blogs that will be refined and broken down into simple sequences of information. Refining and extrapolating of individual ideas will occur on a regular basis, but hopefully I can maintain a focussed and informative dialog from my ramblings.
Overview:
The basic idea is to create a realistic combat modification (mod) that places human soldiers fighting alongside Spartan class models. The difference here is that human soldiers lack shields and would likely be more vulnerable to death. Likewise they would also be faster than your normal Spartan. Spartans act exactly like the Master Chief, but are limited to say 1 per every 4 players on the Human/Spartan side (possible server-side setting).
As I would prefer to avoid class-based structuring I think it would be necessary to incorporate a skill based system in the game. This would work by encouraging players to assume roles and then gain improvements based upon their performance within that role.
An example would be a basic class sniper. Imagine a player that picks up a sniper rifle and then proceeds to gain kills with his new rifle. As the player gains kills using his sniper rifle, he also improves his reload time and decreases his body movement while scoped-in.
Instead of limiting the player to the class of sniper, the system works to encourage players to work together and support one another. This is not to say that upon dying you lose your abilities, so a player could and should take multiple roles upon themselves throughtout a battle in order to improve their own skills.
Pilots/drivers could allow their vehicles to take more damage before being destroyed based upon the distance they travel in them. Gunners gain more accuracy from their weapons while hitting targets from a vehicle. The structuring is somewhat free-form in this regard. If medkits could be equipped you could even add a field medic role into the mix, etc. There could even be smaller bonuses for players such as increased speed or stamina (if running is possible) for traveling a given distance on foot.
As many of you know Halo was a huge sucess, and I feel that the main reason for it, besides the many ways to kill someone, was the story and its characters. I mean who doesn't like watching those interludes and such. Myself having read the books behind the series can see the many shortcomings in the game, would of loved to have seen the Battle for the Butte as described in the book by the Helljumpers but anyway back to the point.
Deimos Fawkes at Subnova wrote today that the server outage that coincided with the appearance of the second Halo 2 Update in their forum is actually the result of hardware problems with their scavenged-parts webserver, and not a connectivity or bandwidth issue.
[image:6677 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0]Frankie has put up the second Bungie Weekly Update over in the forum at Subnova. We've archived it in our Halo 2 Updates section. Here are some highlights:
Frankie's impression of a Prophet.
Weekly Update, Friday Jan 23rd
Holy crap! Last week was apparently just a slow introduction to the whirling vortex of thrills that is Bungie. Now I've been flung in at the deep end, and all the allowances they make for n00bz have been thrown out like bad milk. It's a weird combination of frenetic, stressed, exciting and fun. Like being kicked in the groin by a fairy made of peanut-flavored light. Approximately.
I also just took a close look at a Prophet for the first time. I didn't realize it was a Covenant deal. I just glanced at it and I thought it was HotTubGuy*. I even invented a whole mythology around him. Like, that maybe he'd knocked an 8-Track stereo into his hot tub and traveled through time. Shows what I know.
Anyway, I've been witness to a tremendous amount of Halo 2 related activity this week, and I'll tell you what I can about it.
Rams tipped us off to the second part of Banshee Ace's look at Halo 2 over at Battleground Halo. This one brings the series to a conclusion, and hints at a lot of things that might (we hope) get into Halo 2, as well as some things everyone has already seen.
Banshee Ace over at Battleground: Halo has put up the first part of their Halo 2 Round Up, dealing with what they think may or may not end up being included in Halo 2; this one focuses mostly on vehicles and weapons. Thanks Rams.
[image:6662 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0]Everybody's new best friend, Frankie, has put up the first Halo 2 Weekly Update, and the first fansite to get the nod is (not surprisingly) HBO.
Lorraine has been super busy. A beautiful poster that I wish you could see*, has been created for product placement. That means that if Freddie Prinze Jr. is in a movie about teenagers or baseball, he might use that poster on his wall. We'd be disturbed but we can't control that stuff. She's also recently approved paint jobs for the new Grunt action figures. More interestingly, Lorraine is making design decisions about the new Halo 2 action figures. Not too much we can say there without revealing plot points, but they're going to be epic.
*Or you could just look at my artist's impression of it. I had to give him a lightsaber because guns are hard to draw. Lightsabers are as easy as snakes.
Weekly Update:
Intro.
We'll get to the update in a second, but I wanted to just tell you what my first week was like before I dunk you into the fiery vortex of the Bungie experience.
So, after my first real week at Bungie I can honestly say that part of my new morning routine is the application of an adult-sized diaper. Let me explain.
Before I started here, Brian Jarrard, our Community Manager and Pete Parsons, our Studio Manager, were rightly insistent on secrecy. Before I was hired, I knew practically nothing about Halo 2. Sure, I knew about the bits you may have read in OXM or EGM magazines, and I had some background on where the development process was at, but I didn't know any secrets.
I guess I was expecting to slowly absorb the development pace, learn a few tidbits here and there and figure out what I could from spying on Bungie monitors when artists and designers weren't looking. It's because I was still thinking like a sneaky, good for nothing games journalist. So imagine my surprise (delight?) when Brian and Pete deliberately tried to blow my mind during my first hour as an employee.
I was taken on a tour of the building, stopping at various stations and departments with the ostensible goal of "just bringing me up to date." Brian looked just a teensy bit amused, but Pete's face was split by a hideous rictus grin, the kind that you might see on a Frat boy holding a cricket bat, or a Manhattan plumber handing you a bill. Either way, I knew something was up.
Plot. In a way, my Halo 2 experience is being ruined. By the time the game ships, I'll know a lot more about the story than I want to. People working on The Sixth Sense or The Lord of the Rings movies must have felt the same way. But it's a fascinating process, seeing how carefully managed, how cleverly written the story is.
Seeing real character development is an eye-opener in an industry where Pac-Man is still the most charismatic leading man. When you're reared on dialog like, "Take the key for coming in" or, "I am the master of unlocking," it's very easy to be skeptical. But Halo 2 is to game scripts what a rocket launcher is to a Faberge Egg collection.
And then there are graphics. I'm not just a graphics whore, I'm a graphics burglar, murderer and molester all rolled into one. I would happily run around in a video game as long as something bright, shiny or vertexy was there to distract me. Ask anyone. During game demos I'll stop earnest developers in their tracks and ask if they wouldn't mind "walking over there so I can see the water." Seriously.
So two minutes in Bungie's art department(s) would turn a Graphics Nun into the skankiest Graphics Whore on the strip. If I'm bludgeoning you with brutal metaphors, tough, I'm simply trying to tell you how it is. I was shocked to see everything was bump-mapped. Sounds dumb given that Bungie promised to bump-map everything, but when you see it � you'll realize immediately why. As the art department is fond of explaining, everything looks the way it does for a reason, and the overriding reason in Halo is to tell a story. Nothing is done for show, or simply because "it's there." Every single applied graphics technique advances Halo's story and its characters.
Got a question about Halo 2? Yeah, yeah... who doesn't? Well, this is your chance to Ask Frankie through TeamXbox in advance of the Halo 2 Weekly Updates starting up.
And yes, we know this item is late, we're including it here for extra credit. It's either that, or head out back to clap more erasers.
SketchFactor mentioned in the HBO forum the other day that recent Bungie hire Frankie should soon be picking up where Matt Soell left off, providing Weekly Updates on the status of Halo 2. Thanks Louis Wu at HBO.