Rampancy

Civil War Makes Odd Bedfellows

I think it possible that, assuming such an alliance will exist at all in Halo 3, it may only be evident during a portion of it.

From the closing sequences of Halo 2, it seems that there is still some fighting going on at Earth; meaning that some of the fifteen ships that Regret brought with him remained there while he fled to Delta Halo.

Truth is now arriving aboard the Forerunner ship. His ship may or may not still have Elites and Brutes aboard, fighting amongst themselves. In either case, the Master Chief is not actually aware of the potential for this alliance. During the only contact he had with the Arbiter, the Arbiter did not seem willing to admit that Halo was a weapon. While he is aware of the fighting between the Covenant because he observed it during High Charity and Cortana informed him of fighting amongst the Covenant Fleet, this by itself does not necessarily mean that hostilities against humans would lessen.

Likewise, any Elites on board the Covenant ships at Earth may not be aware of the infighting. So it is possible that, early in Halo 3, playing as the Chief, that the primary enemies will still be the usual mix of units, regardless of the civil strife among the Covenant as a whole.

The small force that Regret brought with him was insufficient to subdue the Earth because he was not expecting to find humanity there. As it was, he was lucky to be able to find what he needed and get to Delta Halo, assuming that he obtained the location of Delta Halo from some artifact or information on Earth. It is difficult to imagine why he would go to Earth first and then to Delta Halo if he already knew where it was. Additionally, Truth and Mercy only show the Delta Halo to the Arbiter after Regret has left Earth-- further circumstantial evidence that they were not aware of its location until then.

Doing A 360

If Bungie's new title is for the Xbox 360, then it is reasonable to assume that the development cycle will be as long or longer as for the previous two games, for a number of reasons. One is the new console's minimum 720p resolution requirement. Both previous Halo games render at 480p maximum when running in real-time on an Xbox at thirty frames per second. It is still unclear whether Halo 2 actually renders in a larger framebuffer when running in emulation on the Xbox 360 or if it is simply performing upscaling of the 480p image.

If what Bungie is working on now is indeed Halo 3, then it is a sequel, developed for on a single platform, presumably using a similar engine; although I would certainly expect that Bungie would make significant changes to the Halo 2 engine to take advantage of the Xbox 360's improved graphics capabilities.

Any release of a Bungie game prior to November 9, 2007, would represent a decrease in the time required to develop Halo 2 and, depending on when you start counting from, perhaps compared to the time required to develop Halo 1 as well.

Rockslider has put up another piece on Halo 1; this one covers how to lure Banshees into areas they don't normally belong, and the strange behavior they exhibit once they get there. This piece covers level 2, "Halo".

Quite what the explanation for the weird behaviour is, I don't know. I find the grenade chasing business especially baffling. What on earth is there in the game programming that makes them so interested in grenades in these areas, yet not in the valley? Is it actually some sort of 'Easter egg' somebody sneaked in? Seems doubtful; I'm guessing it's some unintended consequence of the Banshee being in an environment that wasn't planned for. If anyone reading this can shed some light on these behaviours or has a theory, I'd be happy to hear about it!

Having just played the first few levels of the original game this weekend, I also noticed some of the same Banshee behavior, as well as some other, related non-Banshee behavior.

I have a feeling that the scripting for Banshee pilots (or perhaps any AI unit using a vehicle like a Banshee, Wraith, or Shade turret) is "overlaid" on top of that unit's basic AI routines. So the normal Banshee behaviors we're used to seeing, such as the dive-bombing and so on, only exists in environmental areas where Bungie expected Banshees to be, and often times wrote specific scripts for specific areas.

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