Halo 3 Multiplayer Demo Coming In Spring

Today is the fifth anniversary of the original Halo: Combat Evolved. To celebrate Bungie has announced new maps for Halo 2, a commercial for the upcoming game to be shown on December Fourth, and (most entertainingly) intentions to offer a multiplayer demo of Halo 3 this coming spring. From the lengthy post: "What exactly does this mean? Well, again we can't really get into the details quite yet (notice a theme here?) but we can confirm that our fans will have an opportunity to play Halo 3 multiplayer over Xbox Live BEFORE the final game is available. You'll be playing a little multiplayer and simultaneously providing us with some valuable data to help our development team. We're still working out the details on timing and scope and there will be a lot more info coming in the weeks ahead."

What a coincidence...

[Shadow Wrought]

Right around the time PS3's might actually be available in quantity. Huh. Funny that...

Re:Beta on a console

[Turn-X Alphonse]

or they are very desperate to steal the press's all seeing eye now when the PS3 is just out the blocks.

If something seems fishy, it probably is.

Re:Still not as good as Halo 1 alpha?

[AcidLacedPenguiN]

I think the idea is that, for a game that hasn't been released we can imagine all these nifty features the game could have but when the game actually comes out it can never live up to the imagined greatness that a few minutes of alpha footage can bring. I was excited about the Mac version when I heard about it, they were calling for some form of human vs covenant epic online battle for the ringworlds. Being a game from back in the day, what like 1998 it sounded legendary. When I heard that Microsoft bought them I thought "well that's a bummer." When it came out I still thought it was a good game, even though it wasn't the hundreds of people playing online in the same match, military power versus military power, MMO action shooter that many of us imagined it was going to be.

bottom line: Curse Microsoft for not magically making Bungie exceed the impossibly high expectations of the common internet fuckwad.

Re:Still not as good as Halo 1 alpha?

[Ford Prefect]

So the only way to tell if a game is good or fun is by the quality of the graphics? Halo was dummed down to work on the xbox and has never recovered.

Have you seen non-cinematic videos of the early versions?

There. Was. No. AI.

Aliens just ... stand there, oblivious to the player's presence. Going further back to the third-person versions - aiming was a mess of reticules and lucky guesses. 'Gameplay' might have involved driving over someone with a warthog, or shooting him/her/it with one of the vast and peculiar array of weapons available. While wandering round an unfinished map with almost no cover whatsoever.

The beginnings weren't much of an improvement - the game was an RTS where you could place units, order some around, and that was about it. Wahey.

There's a video out there somewhere which has Bungie employees pointing and laughing at the incredible smoke-and-mirrors act they pulled from a game which, to be honest, wasn't really going anywhere. They had ideas, they had talent, but if someone hadn't bought them out or paid them, and then given them a giant deadline to meet, then Halo would probably have been forgotten...

The amazing, nebulous vision of a perfect, detailed Mac-only Halo steeped in aeons of complex gameplay - then being crushed under the boot of a monolithic Microsoft - is just a creation of people's imaginations. Sorry.

(Aha! Found it: The Evolution of Halo [bungie.org]. Worth seeing.)