Halo 3 Has Gone Gold

The official Bungie site has the word that Halo 3 is done. In games industry terms, they've 'gone gold'. "That means we delivered a final version to our internal certification group that passed all the tests and is now being whisked away to top secret manufacturing locations to be turned into retail versions of the game - and eventually packaged and sent to stores in various cases, tins and cat-helmets. We can't wait to share it with you guys on September 25th and 26th, but we have to say thanks."

Re:WTF?

[brkello]

Not that I have anything against Metroid...but Halo 3 is breaking records before it is even out. Lots of people are interested in it and people submitted the story. If you really cared you could have submitted Metroid stories but you can't even post with a user name. But there really isn't anything all that significant about Metroid other than it finally gives hardcore gamers who own a Wii a reason to dust off their console while they wait for Smash Bros and Galaxies.

Yeah, we all know the Xbox is Microsoft. Gamers (for the most part) don't care. If they make a good console with good games, we will support it. It is not like they have a monopoly on gaming...it takes a lot of guts to try to compete against established competitors like Nintendo and Sony.

Re:WTF?

[pthor1231]

I don't know if I would personally call the whole series "polished" I hated MP's control scheme so much that I stopped playing it after about 15 minutes and never tried again. Not being able to strafe unless you are locked on an enemy? wtf mate. That being said, MP3 controls feel very nice comparatively, and I'm not a huge fan of the Wii controls either.

Critical Theory: Halo's innovations

[graymocker]

Another long-time PC gamer here, of FPS's and otherwise. I think we may look back upon Halo as being one of the most innovative shooters of this post-millennial decade. The reason is all about tempo, and specifically, the way Halo's "recharging shield" system dramatically alters the pace and experience of FPS games.

In a conventional FPS, the player character restores health lost through attrition by picking up some variant of "Medkit" liberally sprinkled throughout the level. Thus, the cycle of the typical FPS goes something like this: fight, fight, fight, pick up health, fight some more. This cycle is a relatively long one, in that there are generally substantial gaps between health restorations. This is necessary to maintain game challenge, and to prevent the whole "Medkit" conceit from becoming too self-evidently contrived. However, as a consequence, the "tempo" and "pace" of the game is dictated by this cycle of fight, lose health, find (or backtrack to) medkit. Because of this structure, the PC is also gifted with a substantial amount of health in order to sustain him from one cache of medkits to the next. Games are generally most exciting when the player is clinging to life, trying desperately to make it to the next medkit, but the very structure of the conventional FPS dictates that this can only occur so often per level, if at all. Indeed, many players simply choose to reload if they find themselves in perilous straights health-wise, knowing the next medkit is far off and rightly intuiting that the conventional FPS is not really designed to be played on a sliver of health.

In Halo and the health-recharging games that followed it, the cycle instead goes something like this: fight, recharge, fight, recharge, fight, recharge. The cycle is shorter, the recharges more frequent, and the amount of time the game allows the player to come close to death is thus much higher. Indeed, games with Halo-type systems its not uncommon to frequently take cover in the middle of a firefight to find some minor respite and desperately hoping to avoid any incoming fire in order to restore health. You may have noticed that it takes far less time to kill an exposed, inactive player in Halo than it does in, say, Quake 4. This is because the constant health restorations compensate for the increased risk. Thus in Halo-type games the risk of death can be more constantly exploited, and the tempo of a Halo game is much accelerated as the player constantly comes perilously close to death, and repeatedly takes a sigh of relief at restoring their health just in time.

You can already see an awareness of the superiority of an accelerated game tempo reflected in the design of subsequent FPS games. Gears of War is possibly the most recognizable incarnation of a "recharging shield" health system, but on the PC side Rainbow Six: Vegas also employs a similar system. Both games have perfected this idea to generate an incredible sense of tension as exposure to sustained enemy fire for any length of time results in a swift demise. The player feels naked and very vulnerable even when simply walking through a exposed courtyard. The unforgivingly swift tempo of these games is far more successful in evoking dread and terror in the player than the repetitive haunted-house antics of, say, Doom 3. Sure, imps may jump out of nowhere at me in Doom 3, but I'm loaded up on armor and health so I know I'm in no real danger. I'd say that Gears and R6Vegas demonstrate a far more sophisticated grasp of the design potential of recharging-shield systems than Halo does, but it was Halo that first introduced this concept and its utility to gamers.

I'll leave it at that. Halo also took the somewhat daring step of strictly constraining the player's weapon loadout, but I'm more hesitant to give it credit for that as there were plenty of similarly constrained, tactically minded shooters that preceded it. I'm also going to add that I own no copies of Halo or the Xbox, in any incarnation, and I'm almost exclusively a PC gamer myself, so to the ex