Articles referring to the Halo 3 Multiplayer Public Beta, held in May and June of 2007.
The Saved Film feature of Halo 3, as implemented in the beta, looks more like a framework than a finished piece of work, but even as such there are some quirks worth noting.
Currently you can "share" up to six of your saved films; essentially, Xbox Live hosts them for you, and friends and other players can access them. To help those film browsers out, you can retitle the films and give them descriptions. By default, Halo 3 names them by game type and number (SLAYER003) and the description includes the map, game type, date and time.
You can override these, and for entering the new title or description you can use the onscreen keyboard or a USB keyboard if one is attached.
However, doing so is a bit awkward. After you've selected the film you want to edit, you have to choose whether to override the title or the description; you can't do both at once. After you've changed one or the other, you have to go back to the master saved films list, choose the film again, and then select the other item to change and change it.
Also, while nearly all of the Dashboard interface accepts controller or keyboard interface (the arrow keys double for the navigation functions of the controller) in Halo 3, the keyboard stops functioning when you're not in a text edit field, so you can't move up or down the list of saved films with the arrow or page up/down keys.
That would be a real convenience.
Okay, so not everybody is in love with Halo 3. Over at the Hushed Casket, Midnight calls it "fun" and details the changes. Rapture calls it a bigger, prettier Halo 2, and it's most decidedly not a compliment. Of course you can't please everybody, and some things (like Halo) become so popular that the only way for anybody to make themselves cooler is to not like it. The guys at the Hushed Casket aren't like that, though, so if they've got a beef with the game, there's probably something to it. That doesn't mean I agree, but it means there are probably things worth thinking about.
Some people say that Halo 3 isn't pretty enough.
After playing Gears I can see where some people are not impressed. However, I think it's worth noting that there is nowhere in Gears any location that is as large as even a medium-sized Halo map. There are lots of terribly detailed textures you get to look at at fairly close range in Gears; mostly on your own characters, your enemies, and the nearby environment. The path you can travel is predetermined and there is no way to break off from it. Forget trick jumping, in Gears you can't even jump. I don't mind that, actually. In fact, I really wish Halo 3 had implemented some kind of limitation on consecutive jumps to eliminate bunny-hopping, which is an incredibly annoying tactic. The day a game studio decides to make their campaign enemy bunny hop because it's an effective and legitimate strategy, I'll drop my complaint.
To expect the same level of texture detail and lighting effects in an outdoor area like Valhalla where you can go virtually anywhere in the level at any time is simply unrealistic. Epic, in a sense, by restricting you to small rooms and preventing you from looking at thing up close that are far away, has spoiled 360 gamers for any other approach. Halo 3 is incredibly detailed. If you haven't already, download the Red vs Blue Beta PSA. It's got some Halo 2 footage of Blood Gulch right next to Halo 3 beta footage of Valhalla. If that doesn't prove that there's been a quantum leap in the look of Halo 3 from Halo 2, I honestly don't know what would.
Another thing to keep in mind is that while Gears' single player campaign is suitably lovely in its appearance and scope (even if most of it is just unplayable scenery) the multiplayer areas are also toned down. They're smaller than even the small areas of the campaign. There's nothing approaching the size of a map like Valhalla in it; that's the tradeoff that Bungie is making.
I've read in several previews that the range of the radar around a Spartan in multiplayer has been reduced. I don't have any good way of quantifying that, but it certainly seems to be true to me.
In particular, on Valhalla there are two rock outcroppings on either side of the stream where players often like to perch with ranged weapons like a turret, sniper, or laser. Often there's a lot of activity far away that they are paying attention to, and more than a few times I've run right up to such a player from behind and assassinated them if there's no one covering their back. It's also happened to me quite a few times as well.
I have a feeling that the radar may have lost most of its usefulness in many situations if this is the case. It can tell you if an enemy is nearby but on a different level, but doesn't indicate whether it is higher or lower, so this is of little use. Out in the open, you'll see a player long before he or she ever shows up on radar, so it's only good for detecting someone outside of your line of sight. If the range is so short, however, that it's routinely possible to run (not sneak) up to players and melee them before they have a chance to register an enemy on the radar, it makes me wonder if it shouldn't be either removed entirely, given a greater range, or provide additional information, such as the elevation of a target.
I'm also of two minds about the new selection of grenades. Frag grenades appear quite dark and are easy to miss in many areas. Thankfully, they have bright red dots that help you locate them. Spike Grenades are rather large and obvious compared to the others, and are nearly always easy to find. Not so the fan favorite plasma grenade. Something about their appearance now seems to make them nearly unnoticeable. Perhaps they also need some part to glow a bit more brightly?
Having two each of three kinds of grenades is also a mixed blessing. Because of their different characteristics, each kind needs to be deployed differently. Because you only have two each of any type, it means you get a chance to miss once and try again, but then you're done. Also, the addition of a third type makes the result of hitting the grenade cycle button difficult to predict.
Before, you had only two types, so the grenade selector was in one of only two states: frag or plasma. If you'd started with just frags but just walked over some plasma grenades (hearing the distinctive sound and seeing the on-screen message) then you knew you had a choice. Pressing the button once changed to plasma grenades. Since you knew the initial state and knew the choices available, you could know the new state without actually looking at the indicator. If you had plasma grenades, the button switched to them. If you had none, it did nothing.
This isn't true anymore. If you have frags and pick up spike grenades but no plasma grenades, hitting the grenade cycle button once switches to spikes. If you have all three kinds, it switches to plasma. From that position, if you had plasmas, it takes two button presses to get back to frags, but only one if you had spike grenades. If you had plasmas but no spikes, then again it would take only one press. In short, it's no longer possible to be completely assured of what you're going to throw without actually looking at the screen.
The same is also true of what happens when you've thrown the last grenade of a type. In Halo 1 and 2, since there were only two types, you basically had a "preferred" grenade type and a "reserve" grenade type. Once you'd thrown all of one, you switched to the other without having to press a button. If you picked up any of the preferred kind before completely running out, you never had to give the game any input to maintain that grenade preference.
If you're throwing spike grenades and run out (more likely now because you only have two of a kind instead of four) what your next throw will be depends on what you're carrying. And if you don't like what the game gives you next, you have to override that with a button press.
Some of it is just the inevitable increase in complexity by adding a third option; just as with equipment and heavy weapons, there are additional factors to pay attention to.
Halo 1 came out nearly six years ago. Halo 2 came out nearly three years ago, and until the release of bright, shiny, next-gen Gears of War, ruled the roost at Xbox Live. Halo 2 just logged it's five millionth unique player, and will no doubt continue to be a fairly popular game as long as there are more first generation Xboxen in the field than their younger, 360 brethren.
With all those players, games, weeks, months and years under the bridge for Halo 1 and 2, what can one say about Halo 3 after three days?
Probably the easiest thing to do is just point out what's changed.
The Difference Engine
In some ways it's easy to see how people can glance at screenshots or beta footage and say "it's just Halo 2 with better graphics", sometimes cheekily adding a "slightly" in there someplace. Certainly the Halo 3 beta has the look and feel of the Halo universe in its three multiplayer levels, Valhalla, Snowbound, and High Ground. To expect otherwise would be silly.
Take a moment or two longer to really look at things, though, and it's obvious that there's nothing that hasn't been touched here.
Frankie has spouted off at length about the water effects, and I honestly don't know if the ones in the beta are final or not-- but they are gorgeous. The waterfall in Valhalla is nothing short of stupendous, not only because of its look, but because of its sound. The areas of flowing and standing water look so much like real water that they cease to be an impressive CG effect and become simply water. Unlike some of the earlier footage, bodies, weapons, objects and projectiles do produce pretty splash effects. If these effects were final, I'd have no objection.
Great graphics might be the beginning of a great game, but it's not the end. And since for players, this beta is the very, very beginning, I'm not going to dwell overmuch on the graphics.
The sounds, though... the sounds are astounding. Gunfire and other sounds in the distance sound convincingly far away: not just fainter, but different. Just standing and looking over the battlefield with the rat-a-tat-tat of assault riflery in the distance evokes the impression more of watching a war movie or even news footage than it does playing a video game. Grenades and other explosions get similar treatment; they've got plenty of punch up close, but from far away they aren't just quieter, they really do sound far away.
The Warthog sounds and drives pretty much like it did in Halo 2. The Mongoose sounds like a cross between a Warthog and a riding mower, but it's so much fun to drive, it's hard to object.
Beneath The Skin
Those are all cosmetic things, though. The look and sound of the game can bring you into the game's universe and envelop you in it, or it can jar you back to reality, where you're just another guy or girl on a couch with a controller. Whether it transports you to another universe or not, though, the game has to manage your input and give you feedback. You have to do stuff, and see stuff happen as a result. So what's different about Halo 3 in this respect?
The list of changes reads like a subset of popular fan complaints. Although the sword hasn't yet been seen, to the best of my knowledge, the "melee lunge" that gives you that extra burst of speed towards an opponent when trying to get a melee strike seems to be drastically reduced. It takes some getting used to, and I've certainly been stymied by it a few times so far, but in my heart it feels right. Other beta footage seems to show the lunge more or less intact when using the sword, but until we see a game type with the weapon present, it's anybody's guess. The same goes for the pistol, which is supposed to be somewhere between Halo 1's handcannon and Halo 2's peashooter.
Some changes are so ephemeral it's hard to know if there's any there there. One of my earliest impressions of Halo 2 gameplay came in the opening encounter of the Delta Halo level. Rushing up the middle, I encountered an Elite hiding behind a crate. I emptied a clip into him; he meleed, I dodged, and meleed him in the back for the kill.
Yet the entire sequence felt unrewarding. It felt floaty; it felt like my opponent and I were skating on some ether a few millimeters above the ground, sliding around each other, reaching out but not quite making contact, as if everything felt far away and was being controlled remotely.
There's nothing like that in the Halo 3 beta. Everything feels solid, the way I remember from Halo 1. Objects and enemies seem solid. They are where they appear to be. When you hit them, you get a satisfying smack.
Unless you're driving a vehicle. Vehicle-player collisions now for some reason seem to cause piteously small amounts of damage; targets just seem to slide around the edges of your ride and bounce harmlessly to one side. Sliding a hog around behind one of the Blood Gulch bases used to be an easy way of getting cheap kills on helpless players. That's not going to work here.
The sniping weapons, the beam rifle and the sniper rifle, are pretty much as you remember them from H2. The sniper rifle no longer shows a live video feed when you're not zoomed in, but instead shows a vector rendering of terrain, vehicles and enemies.
The Situation Is Under Control
You'll need a few moments to adjust to Halo 3's controls. It's one thing to note the new scheme-- Bungie publicized it awhile ago, but reading the chart and knowing what they are are two different things. The blue 'X' button used to reload, but now it deploys equipment. Make that mistake and you could find yourself inside an unintended shield bubble, or draining your own shields, or bouncing on a mini-trampoline. The right bumper reloads your right hand weapon. If you've only got one weapon, the left bumper cycles your grenade types; maximum two each of frag, spike, and plasma.
That same change applies to performing other actions, like picking up objects and getting in and out of vehicles: you have to use the right bumper, not the X button. If you're trying to grab a flag and rely on your Halo 2 instincts, you'll find yourself running around like a chicken with its head cut off, as happened to me in my first H3 CTF game; until you get used to the new controls, anyway. For me it may take a bit longer.
Like it was with powerups in Halo 1, like heatlh packs, active camo, and overshields, you pick up equipment in Halo 3 just by walking over it. The beta's reaction to this is so subtle you might miss it; you get a new icon in the upper left of your screen, and a one-line text notice. If there's a lot of killin' going on, you might miss it; there are also some places in the game where the screen is so bright that it completely obscures that text. Until you get used to checking for those icons and instantly recognize what they mean, you might hit X and get a nasty surprise.
Halo Reloaded
The idea of using the bumpers for independent reload of dual-wielding weapons certainly seems logical, and fits the way the 360 controllers were designed. Whether it works well in practice is something I can't truthfully answer just yet. The only weapon I've even dual wielded so far in the beta is the new Brute Spiker. I've seen SMGs on the maps, but to be honest, I've yet to even pick one up. I'm not even sure I've seen another player wielding one yet. Perhaps this bullet-hose, that got a rousing cheer in the Earth City demo when Sgt. Banks gave his weapon to the Master Chief because he'd need it, is now so completely associated with the "spray and pray" criticisms of Halo 2's dual-wield-heavy gameplay that no one is longer interested in it. I couldn't honestly tell you if the Spiker is any better at all, in terms of accuracy or power. I do know that it's new, shiny, looks cooler, and certainly sounds like it's a lot more deadly. Also, they seem to spawn in convenient pairs, so you don't have to go looking for a second one.
Other weapons offer unique tradeoffs. The heavy weapons, the turret and the missile pod, even change your point of view, like driving or riding in a vehicle. They slow you down, and stop you from doing almost anything else: no grenades, no melee attacks, no crouching, no zooming, and no riding or driving vehicles. Do they dish out enough punishment to make it worth giving up all that? Up to you to decide. The turret seems suitably deadly, though. I've yet to get any good results out of the missile pod but I'm sure the blame for that is squarely on my shoulders.
The laser isn't a heavy weapon, but it is different from just about everything else in Halo's arsenal. It perhaps most closely resembles the Torque Bow from Gears of War. It takes a long time to be ready to fire, and in that time, produces a visible sighting laser that you use to line up your target, and that your target can see (so they know to get the heck out of Dodge, fast). The long charge time means it's less effective at short range when you don't have time to react, but also makes targeting distant enemies a bit challenging. It's hard to use, but it's virtually an instant kill on just about anything, just like the torque bow is.
You Ought To Be In Pictures
The Saved Films feature is in the beta, although its functionality is a bit limited; you can't change camera angles during playback, or pause, fast forward, or rewind.
What you can do, however, is upload up to six films to your "file share" associated with your gamertag. Other gamers can browse your share. You can browse the shares of other players, and download those films to watch them if you wish. However, at the moment all you get is the first person perspective of the player who recorded the film--exactly what they saw when they played. The only exception is that when you die in-game you get to control the "death cam" and that control also extends to the viewer during playback.
That's it for reactions after thirty games or so-- more will be coming soon.
So now it's over. For just about everybody. I thought I'd do one last collection of observations about the Beta before we begin the four months or so waiting for the Real Thing to arrive. However, before that happens, it's interesting to note that the beta didn't end at the same time for everybody...
Parting Shots Are Such Sweet Sorrow
Okay, so the beta didn't end at the same time for everybody. It was perhaps foreseeable that people would find stuff in the Beta that Bungie didn't really intend for public consumption. So it's perhaps not surprising that in addition to items located in the code, people found a way to access custom games, functionality that wasn't supposed to be available.
Without going into detail, the trick involved having a large party join a single user, with one of the large party being booted from the group and dumped into the Custom Games menu. After that, anyone could join that game, back out to the lobby, and they'd be left in a custom games menu as well, allowing the phenomenon to spread virally. One could almost have imagined Bungie did expect people to find it.
Of course, with LAN play and split-screen locked off, and custom games also supposedly unavailable, Bungie had an easy way of cutting everybody off from the beta: simply stopping the matchmaking service from their end. That left custom games as a loophole. Users who began custom games before the beta ended are still in them, and as long as they don't quit the beta or restart their 360s, there may not be any existing mechanism for stopping them.
Of course, once they do quit the beta or restart their boxes, that's it-- attempting to restart the beta results in the expiration message, and to the best of my knowledge, nobody's found a way past that yet.
If you're running a custom game, email me your gamertag, I'm interested to see who manages to keep it open the longest (and if anyone sacrifices a console to the cause).
UPDATE: This may be redundant now, as it seems there are still users in the Custom Games lobby, but who are unable to start games or join other parties. If anybody gets around this, let me know.
Swimming Upriver
There has been a lot of discussion since H2's release about weapon spawns. H1's weapons were on simple timers; H2 employed a more complicated scheme that allowed for "weapon control" as an effective strategy. The Beta seems more akin to H1's method than H2's; at least it was not necessary for a power weapon to be dropped or depleted before it respawned.
However, the Beta did seem to have another spawning problem: player spawns.
It may be simply inherent to the genre and not anything the designers can do anything about, but the act of spawning a player on the battlefield seems to upset the course of a game far more often than seems desireable.
The Beta would gleefully spawn you next to enemies, or even in the middle of a running firefight, condemning you to die in the crossfire. It would spawn you just behind an enemy that had spawned ahead of you, giving you an easy kill. It would spawn you directly in front of a moving vehicle, awarding the lucky driver with a splatter.
Team slayer games that began with clear territorial biases (one team spawns on the beach, the other in the base on High Ground) would shift as players moved. Suddenly you'd find the player you just killed who was trying to advance on your defensive position on the top of the wall has spawned behind you. The only thing less enjoyable than that would be advancing all the way down to the beach to camp the opposing team's spawns.
I'm not sure there's really a solution to this. Dead players have to be brought into the game somewhere. They have to be brought in at multiple locations, and as long as players are allowed to roam over those spots this problem is going to occur. I can only wonder aloud if a temporary period of invulnerability (and perhaps lack of weapons functionality) upon spawning is warranted, to give opponents time to notice you and spawning players a chance to run for a weapon, take cover, or both. Perhaps explain it as a side effect of a Spartan's energy shields powering up.
It seems to me that reducing number of kills that occur within three seconds of spawning-- regardless of who does the killing-- would be a good thing. It would minimize the perception that players appear from nowhere and are either dying or getting a kill because someone was otherwise unaware of their presence.