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XBox (Games)

Halo 3 Has Gone Gold 75

Posted by Zonk from the done-when-its-done-and-its-done dept.
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."
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Halo 3 Has Gone Gold More

Halo 3 Has Gone Gold

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  • Umm, didn't that happen yesterday?
  • I'd love to be at those developers' post-Gold party. (And I'm sure they have them)

  • Internally Certified (Score:5, Funny)

    by Rob T Firefly ( 844560 ) on Thursday August 30, 2007 @01:55PM (#20414901) Homepage Journal
    This means they've made double-double sure to delete the hidden minigame where a lady soldier invites the player to come over to her base for some nice hot bubble-shields.
  • I seem to recall there being a Vista only version that was announced pretty long ago...

  • well... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Pojut ( 1027544 )
    ...while I'm not going ape shit over Halo like a large portion of the "console-only" generation (I have yet to meet a long-time FPS PC gamer who thinks Halo was anything beyond "entertaining") I did rather enjoy Halo 1 and 2...Halo 3 will hopefully bring a nice close to this story arc.

    Strictly speaking of the Halo franchise, I'm more excited about Halo Wars than Halo 3...but what do I know, I grew up on Zork.

    • Re:well... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Khuffie ( 818093 ) on Thursday August 30, 2007 @02:50PM (#20415601) Homepage
      Hi. I'm a long-time FPS PC gamer who thinks Halo was beyond merely 'entertaining'. Nice to meet you. Would you like some pie?

    • Critical Theory: Halo's innovations (Score:5, Insightful)

      by graymocker ( 753063 ) on Thursday August 30, 2007 @07:42PM (#20419075)

      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

      • Very interesting read, thanks. I guess this is what zonk is hoping for when he posts all those gaming stories that most /.ers hate.
      • You sir, have made a friend. Several minutes ago I had a post composed about my hatred for health paks. After I lost interest in writing that much, I closed the tab and found your comment. Well said.

        IMHO, halos best innovation was seamlessly integrating ranking into online play with a level playing field and actually making attempts to keep it that way. I love how once I hit level 15 or so I no longer have to worry about team killers or n00bs or quitters, because the the level range is composed of people wh
  • I'll give $75 to anyone who can get me a PC / winXP version. I'd LIKE to give that money to the game developers, but MS doesn't want that to happen. And I'm not going to buy an xbox just to play Halo3. So I have $75 ready for whoever gets me Halo3 for the PC first.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Mr2001 ( 90979 )
      Let's see, you're asking someone to port an unreleased game from PPC to x86, without access to the source code, and you're offering about enough money for him to buy a copy of the original (which he'll need to perform the port), a case of beer, and a sandwich?

      So you're the one who posts all those job listings on Rentacoder!
  • I have been less than impressed with the public beta's. I think despite Microsoft will pay someone to give it GOTY, titles like Assassins Creed and BioShock will slaughter the Master Cheif IMO
    • The beta wasn't designed to impress. It was meant to give a little whif of a carrot to fans, in addition to helping identify weaknesses in system - including but not limited to: high traffic spots on the maps, new risky high powered weapons, potentials of (map) exploitations, maybe low level tcp/ip code, or ati graphics code or anything even remotely related to running a system with millions of high demand, high traffic connection streams all with tons of data to parse and save.

      Every beta blurb I read menti

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