EGM Halo 3 Summary.

My last Halo 3 post consisted mostly of speculation, based on scans from a Swedish magazine called Level. This Halo 3 post however, consists of a summary of the info in the new EGM scheduled to hit news stands very soon. The summary comes courtesy of Velez of the halo.bungie.org forums, who managed to score a very early copy of EGM at his local Quickmart.

Below are individual paragraphs (in italics) from the summary Velez so kindly posted, followed by my thoughts and, interpretations if you will. I can safely say, everything i read of the summary only fueled my anticipation for the final game in this epic trilogy...Enjoy.

The New Needler:
IT IS NO LONGER DUAL-WIELDABLE!!! Not much is explained but they do say that it is going to be made more powerful, balanced, and "usable".

I've spoken with some other long time Halo players about this and a couple of thoughts were thrown about, one of them being the possibility that it will inflict more damage per individual needle, as opposed to making a weapon with a faster rate of fire, or not, what do you think? Or perhaps, it may get an increased capacity clip, who knows?

The Brute Ghost:
The only details on the Brute Ghost were seen in the 20-second Single-Player Video (more on that later). It is summarized in the magazine as a "bulkier version of the classic hover bike" shown in the vid with a Brute climbing into it.

The Brute Ghost eh...Surely this won't differ from the normal Ghost purely on a cosmetic basis, no, that's not Bungie's style. Will it have a more substantial front gun, will it be slower accelerating, I'd hazard a guess so, but, no one can be sure until the final game ships, so what are your thoughts?

Single Player:
The guys at EGM got a 20-second video of the MC "tearing" around a huge industrial compound with gunfire coming from all types of Covenant crafts including a hulking wraith and "what looks to be a new Brute Ghost". There were "ships flying overhead, lasers everywhere, multiple enemies all around etc". Again, EGM rejects us much info on the stuff that no one else has...(More details to be revealed on Nov. 20 on the Mini-Site)

There's nothing to say on this as it's light on specifics, but, as always, sounds awesome.

SAVED FILMS:
One of the things I am most excited about is being able to record gameplay onto your hardrive or memory card. The best way to describe this is as an example: Late one night you go into matchmaking and have the best game of your life. You rack up 95% of your teams kills and attain little deaths. You were playing like a GOD. The problem is, none of yours friends were with you. Don't fear, as long as you chose to save the temporarily stored video of the match, you can share your glory! Start up a party and get all of your friends in it, then bring up your saved video and launch it! The video will automatically come up on everyone's screen and the host will be able to control play, pause, slow, rewind, etc. while everyone else can choose how they want to see it, be it First Person, Third Person, or from a "fly-it-yourself bird's eye view". All I can say about this is, WOW.

Okay, now read that again. This is perhaps the best 'new' feature to come out of the 17 page blow out. Just imagine the possibilities, Velez does a pretty great job of describing a real life application of this feature, but I'd like to add my own spin on it, which I'll do later as there are some more 'new features' I'd like to incorporate into it.

Game Settings:
No longer are certain things such as speed reserved for either one person. That's right you can give all special traits to everyone!!! And for even more fun, you can even give them to the leading/losing teams in a match! But along with the old traits come a line of new ones. My favorite is being able to make characters more visible, BY SETTING THEM ON FIRE!!! You can even turn down gravity to allow people to jump twice as high, and prevent certain people from picking up weapons. That was all that was specofied in the mag but they say there is more...

LAN Parties, that's the first thought that came into my mind when i pictured this feature playing out in my head. Often at LAN parties there is always a slightly weaker team, unless you're fantastically lucky with the teams. Usually, having unfair teams leads moving everyone around to different controllers and causing chaos every time a team change is in order. This will be a thing of the past when Halo 3 rocks your 360 thanks to these 'traits' which you can assign to an entire team. And if i have perceived the summary correctly, you can set it so when a team starts losing/winning, they receive a positive/negative trait respectively, creating a much fairer match, hopefully. Being able to change the gravity it just downright awesome.

Voting:
Have you ever been in a party and the host is putting a gametype that no-one wants to play? Well vote against it! This can allow people to override the host's power. Whatever happened to the good ol' x button?

This is common sense, and a natural progression of how Halo 2 works on Live, it's all the little things which build up remember.

Advertising Customs:
Now you can put your custom gametype or even your custom game lobby out there for everyone to see! This was Bungie's answer to custom matchmaking...

Again, another natural progression, this is brilliant news as it was often difficult getting a highly populated game of your custom gametype over Live as you has to rely on having enough friends being online, this will no longer be a problem.

Ranks:
Now you will have an actual "military" rank in Halo 3. This will be seperate from your matchmaking ranks and will include your overall stats, ranked, unranked, and even customs.

This is a nice little touch, i grew tired of the being assigned a number for how good i was, i prefer having a good ol' fashioned military rank to display how good i am. Am i alone on this or do you like the idea of Military ranks?

Ok Now More Info on the Older New Stuff:

The Brute Spiker:
I doesn't launch orange needle. It launches two foot superheated metal spike which resmble orange needles.

The Spike Grenade:
This thing latches onto ANYTHING. Covered with spikes, it will kill a Spartan if it you hit one on the head with it, but will stay embedded into it until it explodes: The explosions send out a conical volley of spikes, conical being so that if you are in a certain blind spot near the grenade, you won't be damaged.

Spartan Laser:
Can penetrate through multiple targets...

Grenades in General:
You can now only carry two of each...thats wack...

Man-Cannons:
Yes you can drive anything into these "cannons" but heavier things, such as the Warthog, won't go nearly as far...

Ok the Spiker now sounds a whole lot meatier, amiright?

I love how the Spike grenade latches onto anything and everything, as for only being able to hold 2 of each grenades, that's pretty lame, but i would imagine that's a balancing choice opposed to a design choice. Although, with all these variables you can tweak in multiplayer, i don't see why the 'infinite grenade' toggle can't make a welcome return, gotta love abusing them grenades.

No doubt they'll be an achievement for spearing more than one enemy with the Spartan Laser on Live play.

Man Cannon? Futuristic catapult? Yes please!

Earlier today i watched the latest 1UP show, and in it, they said that it's possible for someone to launch themselves in the Man Cannon, and then land and board on a speeding ghost! And this has happened in testing. Banshee's being boarded mid flight hasn't happened yet, however, sounds like a challenge to me!

The Halo 3 Gameplay Scenario:

Imagine if you will...

You're playing Halo 3, with your buddies, it's the 'OMG IVEGOT HALO THREE LETS HAVE A LANPARTAY!!' you've been dreaming of (as if anything else...). You boot up the new map, Valhalla, you create a custom game type, Team Spartan Lasers, to try out the new anti-vehicle deathbringer, you play a couple of games. It's great, it's more than great, it's fan-fucking-tastic, but one team is destroying the opposition, someone whines that the teams need changing (there's always one), 'oh no no' you say, 'no need for team changes anymore', so, you make the stronger team on fire so they're more visibible from across the map, and the weaker team invisible, it works a treat, you have several games which are as nail bitingly close as the last, before you decide to end the competitiveness and try out the Man Cannon. You start by all flinging yourselves off it, seeing who can go the furthest, then you try and land on Ghosts, Warthogs, Mongooses, by boarding them. Then, a few second before the round ends someone nails a Banshee boarding hundreds of feet in the air (you have reduced the gravity after all) to great applause by the rest of the room. “save that!” someone shouts out, so you do, with the new 'saved films' function, to watch another day. Then, it's pizza, followed by some more, you guessed it, Halo 3...

Phew, well, that does it for this exhaustive run down of just some of the new features you can expect from your no doubt most anticipated title of 2007! Hope you enjoyed it, and if you have any speculation of your own, let us know. I for one would love to hear other peoples 'Gameplay Scenarios'.

DannyOB out.