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<toggledisplay> Bungie Weekly Update Posted by Frankie at 1/19/2007 4:04 PM PST

Layers. Layers and layers of detail. That's what's going into Campaign now, and the speed at which it's happening is astonishing. I now have a little bit of OCD about downloading the latest build. Sometimes I'll check it out once a week, sometimes once a fortnight (Americans think that word is hilarious) but these days, I am checking it out maybe twice a day. Artists are checking in such amazing stuff, at such an amazing rate, that something you get at 6pm might be markedly different than something you picked up at 8am.

Joe and I were tooling around in a huge indoor environment and admiring the light shining softly through the dirty skylights above. I was getting up close to a chain link fence and enjoying the rusty steel texture visible on the quarter-centimeter wide chain link. We were playing on separate machines, I should add, and not in the same "session" so don't read anything into that. Joe clambered up on top of a ventilation duct and was bobbing up and down as he raced over its regular sections. He was also demanding that Marty insert a hollow-metal banging sound for that action.

I noticed that there's a lot of extruded detail - that is to say, 3D objects on what would normally be flat surfaces. Think at the simplest level, a real drainpipe against a wall, but more impressive were these brilliantly done, and wonderfully conceived things like taut steel cables, the aforementioned chain link fencing, realistic electrical and communications wiring and just the random garbage that covers the world - all lovingly recreated with a futuristic bent.

Hao and co. are still messing with water, and it's getting better every day. They're going to be dropping it into the areas where our (perfectly attractive) placeholder water is right now. You've actually seen one of those areas in the pre-alpha shots of Valhalla. I can't wait, because I am Earth's most famous video game water geek. On the day it's dropped in, I am locking myself in the playtest lab with a pair of Wellington boots and an umbrella.

But they've been sneaking the atmospherics into builds daily and boy howdy does it make a difference. I can't decide if the new blowing sand on one of the later levels is an atmospheric effect or not. Would be cool if our snow did something similar, huh...?

And lighting is still being introduced in new and exciting ways. There's now dappled rays of sunshine beaming through the canopy, with tiny particles floating in 'em. I would write a poem about it but you'd call me a pansy and push me down the stairs because you don't understand how emo I am.

I also noticed that pretty much every level is not only in the build, and for want of a better word, populated, but that the levels actually flow together pretty well. It's playable enough now, from end to end, that we've started testing properly for difficulty and length. Performance is all over the place of course, from build to build. There's seldom any visible reason why the build is suddenly really framey, or conversely, buttery smooth. It's best to ask a grown-up before picking which version to play - although we do make alternate builds for alternating reasons - one might be to test frame rate, one some specific lighting function, another shader effects. An engineer is often the best person to explain which build is going to be "fun."

And fun it is. I am starting to limit how often I play because if you're enjoying yourself, you're probably not working. And we're swamped.

Noguchi came over while I was playing Campaign and I said, "Hey, Gooch, when are you guys going to fix the bright green loading screen that happens every time the game loads the next part of the level? It's hardly seamless you know." He just stared at me. Then he snatched my debug keyboard and typed in three words. Something along the lines of "turn_off_crazy_green_indicator."

Now my game loads in the next part of a level invisibly. Red faced, I asked how long that had been there. "Always, moran," he says. That's how he pronounces moron.

Lots to do this year. I'm spending the next two weeks with my head buried in combat dialog. We have a lot more characters this time around, with more Marines, Grunts, Brutes, Elites and more to write dialog for. The acting roster is being filled out now, and the people involved are going to be amazing folks to work with. True talents, old and new, famous and obscure. It's going to be a riot.

We have more behaviors to accommodate for combat dialog now, and one thing I noticed is that the sheer number of characters on screen, talking simultaneously, affects the flavor of combat. Hearing three grunts panic while two charge you, yelling, makes combat feel way more intense. Grunts are still funny, but it's not so funny when they're winging plasma 'nades at you like The Big Unit after a bad haircut. The number of times I have been taken by surprise by a gang of angry Grunts - I can't even tell you. And don't even get me started on Brutes and Jackals.

Marty also keeps teasing me with names of some of the actors who might or might not make it into the game. Some of them will be kept as a surprise even after they sign on the dotted line. And speaking of spoken surprises, I got to see the script for the Multiplayer voice announcements. It is awesome. It's awesome because all your favorite announcements are returning - you know, Killtacular and so on, but we're adding more, so you'll be aurally rewarded or punished for various multiplayer antics. And there are easter eggs in the script right now. Should be interesting to see how folks discover them.

With any luck, we should be bringing back the incredible voice talent of Jeff Steitzer to threepeat his epic MP vocals. That recording session is coming up pretty soon, and the actor is going to have to say some pretty bizarre lines. And you guys are going to have to do some pretty bizarre shizzle to find them.

You might be surprised to learn that the difficulty levels are actually implemented. Nothing like ready, or finished, but they are there, and are more or less indicative of easy, normal, Heroic and Legendary. Tuning is going on simultaneously for all four difficulties, partly because that's the smart way to do it and partly, I suspect, to avoid the nightmarish logjams that happened in a couple of places in Halo 2's Legendary setting. It won't be easier, per se in Halo 3, but you will have more options and fewer encounters where you just get jammed.

We also have more resources and time to devote to testing Legendary, and we're also going to be implementing new ways of testing Legendary. I'm actually really excited to try it. By the time the game ships, I'll have played through it dozens of times, but I will save the Legendary session for the finished retail product. And there's going to be more to that than meets the eye.

Oh and just to prove a point, I loaded up the latest build. Full of new stuff. Including animated tree canopies I had never seen before. And a working, controllable version of a brand new vehicle.

Oh god, Robt just found Ling Ling. He brought her out. She's looking at me. With her eyes and her neck hole. And check out the Brute Icon T-Shirt. It's a limited edition that's nearly sold out. But it's part of a series. The next one is going to be just as, if not cooler.

Check out the Brute Tee!

And here's Mister Chief fearing Ling Ling in 3D, why not?

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