Were very excited to show off the second part of our Halo 3 image branding. This one is known colloquially as Emotion and its just a lovely, stirring piece that speaks to both the fiction and the atmosphere of the new game. The more you look at it, the more you get from it. The Chief model was built and posed from the game, and rendered out in this mixed media piece, which is part CG, part painting and a healthy dose of Photoshop thrown in for good measure. The background holds some interesting atmosphere, from the skeletal wreckage of the fallen Mombasa space tether, to those hauntingly familiar eyes in the background. Anyway, thats enough talk heres a pic. This one will be appearing soon enough, in various locations in both landscape and portrait orientations.
http://www.bungie.net/News/content.aspx?type=topnews&cid=12392
And just like that, I've got new wallpaper.
Youll also be pleased to hear that split-screen will be an option, although limited to two people in the Public Beta. Weve also done something cool with the splitscreen display for HD monitors instead of stretching the horizontal or vertical axes into big, scary too wide or too tall horrors, weve sensibly windowed the action, maintaining lots of screen real estate, but preserving a proper, playable aspect ratio.
No, this feature were testing is for the moment, just a fun addition, thats planned to grow into something pretty amazing by launch, and that feature is Saved Films. The version youll try in the Beta, is very, very, very limited. We just want you to play around with the general concept. Youll be reading more about this in the gaming press in the next month or two, and of course you can try it out for yourselves in less than a month.
Perhaps more enticing is the mention of a VERY large map that went from being just about the most empty, soulless placeholder geometry in the entire game, to one of the moodiest, most atmospheric and beautiful maps weve ever made. Its also the single largest multiplayer map. You pretty much need a vehicle to get around in it, so luckily, destroyed vehicles respawn super-fast.
May 11th was mentioned in a San Jose Mercury News blog as an unveiling date for Halo 3. Of course Halo 3 was in fact unveiled at E3 a year ago. The May 11th date simply refers to a Public Beta preview for the press so they can get their stories done for the real Public Beta launch a few days later.
Wired Magazines editor in chief, Chris Anderson, revealed in his blog a couple of pages of script dialog that hed recorded. Interweb sleuths thought theyd discovered some plot points. Sad to say that other than the dialog itself and the names of the characters on those script pages, just about everything else is a red herring. So dont read too much into it.
The X-button is second nature. Youll know when youre carrying equipment itll appear in your HUD, and all you do to use it is press X. On that note, I saw another meme pop up, and not an unreasonable one at that: You might be able to drop a shield on a vehicle and then drive around shielded. Well, nope. Cool as that might look, it would probably make a vehicle way too powerful. You should try playing around with what you can and cant do with shields (and whatever else you find) in the Beta. Its a blast.