You‘ve been waiting. You’ve been pining. Some of you have even been whining.
3 maps, missle pods and a man cannon. How does it play? Check it.
But it’s finally here. Well, for a select group of press gathered in San Francisco and New York this past Friday anyway, the long-awaited Halo 3 multiplayer beta got under way.
For everyone else, the public beta goes live on Wednesday, May 16, which means you’ll be fragging it up in 2 days. Until then, here’s the scoop.
So how is it?
In case you wondered, Halo 3 rules. It pwns. It totally kills. Slays. Insert outrageous superlative here . In short it’s fantastic, it’s everything we hoped it would be and even has some welcome surprises.
Microsoft had a number of Bungie peeps on hand for the Halo 3 unveil in SF, including Bungie’s Community Lead Brian Jarrard and Multiplayer Designer Lars Bakken.
Jarrard and Bakken explained that the multiplayer maps for Halo 3 were designed for “visibility, quickness and balance.” Toward that end, the Bungie team set out from the beginning to take all the best and most loved parts of Halo and Halo 2, and then combine them with new elements that would improve the overall gameplay.
After playing some 100 games (they sent all the attendees home with a beta key… hehehe) it’s safe to say as far as these three maps go - Snowbound, High Ground and Valhalla - they’ve accomplished their goal, and then some.
The new radness – Support Weapons and Equipment
If you’ve spent any time playing Halo 2, you know the gameplay hinges on 3 keys elements - weapons, melee and grenades - above and beyond the requisite map knowledge, teamwork and overall experience of your typical FPS experience; it’s here that Bungie appears to have spent the bulk of its time refining and building a better Spartan mousetrap.
Sure, the maps look better garaphically - there’s amazing textures, fantastic shaders, great looking grass, the snow shows footprints in real time, all of the above. But it’s the weapons themselves, how deep or shallow a clip on a gun is, to dual-wield or to not dual-wield, carrying only 2 grenades of each type (which there are three of now), but more specifically, support weapons that really make the Halo 3 tweaks stand out form Halo 2. “It’s basically a class [of weapon],” said Bakken of the new heavy-duty weapons. “For instance, when you enter a turret, you’ll get a prompt to remove it and you’ll rip it off and actually go into third person but you’re walking around.” Trust us, it's friggin' awesome.
Does this give you a woody?
This is very cool. There are two types of ginormous guns in this class – your garden variety gatling gun, or chain gun in the Halo-verse, and the missile pod. The missile pod is a brutalizer and features the same vehicle auto-lock on ability the rockets did in Halo 2 (sadly, the rockets have been tuned down here and are more the rockets we knew from the original Halo, i.e. without the lock-on). These new large and in charge weapons definitely slow you down, rendering the Master Chief a bit hoppy, but like a tasty beer, the turret-laden Cheif absolutely delivers the goods.
Other new weapons include the spiker rifle, assault rifle, a retuned non dual-wieldable needler and the incendiary Spartan laser. Not too shabby. The Spartan laser is the biggest stand out of this list - you cook your enemies Colonel Sanders style with this Hammer of Dawn-esque laser beam. It takes a few moments to charge up, but once you paint someone with the targetting laser sight, you'll send entire teams running for cover.
Death by laser!
In teh grenade department, there are 3 types to keep you fragging with - your standard human frag grenade, the ever-popular Covenant plasma, or "sticky" grenade, and the new Spike grenade. The latter is a bit like the Hedgehog grenades in Resistance: Fall of Man that spew out spikes rather than shrapnel or plasmatic explosive ju-ju. But better than the Hedgehog, the Spike grenade can by stuck to walls, ceilings and used as a trap of sorts. That, and like the sticky, it kills with a direct hit pretty easily. Nice!
The new equipment isn’t any mild add-on either. The most notable are the bubble shield and portable grav lift. First seen in the Starry Night CG teaser trailer, the bubble shield is super useful when your shields are down and you’re about to get headshotted (yes, we know that’s not really a word). However, it’s not a complete safeguard against attacks – anyone can go in and out of the shield, it only protects against firearms and explosives. So, if you’re on the run and someone jumps into the shield to give you a good bonecracker, you’re SOL.
Another welcome addition is the portable grav lift – deploy this little baby and you can zip up to previously out of reach places, like up to the Spartan Laser spawn on High Ground, putting you past the closed gate for a flag-grab. Other pieces of equipment we saw include the power drainer and trip mines, both of which seem cool but were a tad harder to use with any deftness. The power drainer is like this huge blob of kill-plasma, but you have to walk into it or drive through it, which most seasoned players wouldn’t do. It can be used effectively when rolled down a hill, as it is ball-shaped, making it a killtacular little number to toss down a hill or some stairs. It also has a strategic element to it though – you can block tunnels during territories games and keep your plot safe – the same can be said for the trip mine. Other than dropping it in front of an oncoming warthog, you can put it in the way of an objective, like the flag, although it emits a beeping sound when you get close to it, which again is a giveaway to most players.
All these goodies have been mapped to the X button, which confused the hell out of us the first times through. You Halo-philes know, the X button in the Halo days of yore was the goto for reloading and picking up weapons, so everytime we came across a BR we simply had to get our mits on, we'd press X instinctively and watched as either nothing happened (not so bad), or worse, we would unintentionally deploy a covetted bubble shield or grav lift for no good reason. Bad. Eventually we got our bearings and adjusted to the changed X button and its replacement, which in case you're curious, is the right shoulder bumper, which you'll be using from now on to reload and gather your ballistic goodies.
Maptacular!
Ohhhh, it's cold when you die on Snowbound.
The maps themselves were a ton of fun. Snowbound is the smallest – it consists of a 2 base system with an elevated exterior perfect for melee or dual-wielding spiker showdowns, but the real action takes place in the tunnels below. Blue-tinted and filled with covenant technology, the tunnels are twisty, sometimes dark areas perfect for 4-on-4 firefights, with the occasional ghost thrown in for good measure.
Like Zanzibar, High Grounds has a single base which makes for some fantastic bottlenecked battles.
High Ground, an asymmetrical map with a fortress ala Zanzibar, spawns one team defending the higher base, and another on the beach below that must charge the ramparts.
Valhalla is big... just not as big as Jub-Jub.
Valhalla, the largest of the three maps, features lots of wide open space perfect for vehicular warfare, but more importantly, two bases with man-cannons. That’s right, a cannon that shoots out men. Similar to the grav lifts seen in Halo 2 maps Ascension and Lockout, the man-cannon blasts players right into the mid-field of combat. Spartans can drive Mongoose’s, a new ATV vehicle type first seen here, through the man-cannon as well. In fact, the built-in physics allow players to fling almost anything off the man-cannon – dead bodies, grenades, weapons – we need to try to throw the flag off!
There are a variety of modes to play, including a few new ones added to the classic Slayer and CTF gametypes. VIP, which charges teams with the task of earning points only by killing a randomly selected player with a boosted overshield, and territories, which is like 3 Plots with a twist – there are 5 territories to claim, and once you lose one, you can’t get it back.
Overall, the beta is lots of fun and is sure to dominate the next three weeks of your time if you’re a Halo-ite. Unless you received an invite from Bungie or are locked into the Rule of Three program, the only way to access the beta for the everyday gamer is (1) a copy of Crackdown, (2) a Xbox 360 and (3) a Xbox LIVE Gold account. Without any one of those 3 things, you’re outta luck.
If you can’t get at the Halo 3 beta, you can always tool around with the 2 new maps on Halo 2, Tombstone and Desolation. If you play Halo 2, you prolly already know the matchmaking ranks have been reset, putting everyone back to 1 on all ranked match sets. Speaking of ranking, it looks like Halo 3 will follow a ranking system more akin to Resistance: Fall of Man, with actual military ranks (private, sergeant, etc.) denoted by stripes and stars and all that.
There are also a few cool additions to the medal system too - like in Halo 2, after each match, the game doles out medals (which players can access in the Post-Game Carnage) for completing certain actions during a match, like sticking somebody with a grenade, double-kill, triple-kill, killing spree, etc.
New medals we’ve seen so far are Death From the Grave (kill an opponent after you’ve died, i.e. a grenade you’ve thrown just before eating it yourself takes a sombitch out after you’ve already kicked the bucket), Laser Kill! (get an opponent with the Spartan laser), Killjoy! (end an opponents killing Spree) and Sniper Spree (kill 5 opponents with a sniper rifle without dying), among others.
Check back for more updates on Halo 3 as we play our way through more of the beta!
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