Halo 3: keeping or losing its halo?

By Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Friday, 18 May 2007 00:36

Opinion and Analysis

It’s official: Halo 3 will launch on September 25, with the highly anticipated Halo 3 beta having just gone online, but not everyone is happy.

The Halo 3 beta is here at last, but the beta’s launch didn’t go quite as planned, with owners of special editions of Crackdown with a Halo 3 beta code unable to download the nearly 1 gigabyte demo for 14 hours after the beta officially opened.

Once users started playing, the comments started coming in thick and fast. Halo’s greatly updated high-def HD visuals are stunning, and drew great praise from beta players around the world, while the new vehicles and weapons were greatly appreciated.

But the biggest criticism from some, despite the new weapons, vehicles and other changes, was that the actual gameplay is not that greatly removed from Halo 2.

Now, given that Halo 3 is not only the successor to Halo 2, but the game that promises to close this particular story arc by having ‘you’ help to ‘finish the fight’, it’s not really that surprising that Bungie would take the gameplay that has sold so many copies of Halo 1 and 2 and plug it into a Halo 3 game that takes the visuals to the next-gen HD quality that we know and love about the Xbox 360.

After all, Halo 2 sold well over US $125 million in its first 24 hours on sale, and is still the No.1 game on Xbox Live, with almost 1 billion hours of Halo played online!

That said, some commenters were expecting changes in gameplay, and the comment was clearly made by several that there are still several months and plenty of tweaking opportunities left for Bungie to have some more major Halo 3 surprises up their sleeves for us all when Halo 3 finally launches in finished form in approximately four months time.

One of the surprises with the announcement of the September 25 launch date is that Halo 3 will come a bit earlier than expected, with talk of November being the time frame to expect it in.

Another surprise has emerged since the beta started with Crackdown owners unable to start playing for 14 hours – that of the beta being extended by 4 days to now finish on June 10, which covers the weekend!

There’s still no word on the ‘single player’ storyline of Halo 3, but Halo isn’t revered for it’s single player modes, it’s revered for its truly outstanding online gameplay, with this the true benchmark for Halo 3.

Bungie have said this is the final Halo game in the current story arc, but have left open the possibility that a new Halo game could appear in the future, and if this happens, this is where we will see true gameplay changes as Bungie take advantage of the extra freedom a ‘new’ game can offer, as well as learn from what worked properly and what could have been better in Halo 3.

And, to conclude, that’s what the multiplayer beta is all about. Testing how well the game, as it stands now, plays in multiplayer mode, the mode that is responsible for almost a billion hours of online gameplay.

For now, Master Chief’s halo looks to be burning brighter than ever, with the only thing able to top the current multiplayer beta being the actual release of the full game itself come late September in what some are calling an 'early Christmas present'!