Thoughts on the Halo 3 "Et Tu Brute" documentary

[cypher543]

Awesome.

If you haven't seen it yet, you can download it from Xbox Live or from the announcement on Bungie.net (http://www.bungie.net/News/TopStory.aspx?cid=9340). I am so happy that Bungie released a documentary with some actual game elements in it! Now I know what to expect from Halo 3.

As you can tell from the title, the documentary focuses on those ugly beasts, The Brutes. I do agree with Bungie's assessment of the original Brutes in Halo 2. They were slightly boring and added nothing to the gameplay other than pure frustration. They always did the same thing, always died the same way, and you could really only do one thing to kill them... waste your ammo until they finally fall over. From the scenes in the the new videos, the brutes have more variety to them. I was particularly amazed at the new animations. They're so fluid and detailed! I'm also extremely excited about the "dismemberment" thing. I was a little annoyed that using a sword on an enemy did nothing but kill them in the same way every time. Being able to slice and arm or leg off will certainly make the enemy encounters more enjoyable.

I still haven't quite figured out the Covenant alliances, yet. In the video, Grunts are seen fighting along with Brutes, while an Elite is show killing one. I sure hope Halo 3 provides an easy way to tell friend from foe, because with the whole Covenant civil war going on, it could be quite hard to tell which Elite is trying to help and which is trying to rip your face off (or maybe not).

I keep seeing people complain about the graphics in this video. They're not done yet! In fact, the graphics shown in the final sequences are actually quite old. They look pretty darn good to me, so I can't even begin to imagine what they will look like when finished.

I was happy to see the shotgun in the documentary. I loved the shotgun in both Halo 1 and 2.

So, those are my thoughts. After watching the video, what do you think about it and Halo 3 in general?

NOTE: Please don't turn this into a PS3 vs Wii vs Xbox 360 flame war.

[Thetargos]

Not even with a year's head start the 360 was able to appeal to me... Now with the new games in the horizon that might just change. I'm not a huge fan of the Halo series, not the way it got implemented, anyway (I was expecting to see it when it was going to be released for the PC using Glide and way back, almost to compete against Unreal Tournament and Quake 3). What was delivered by Microsoft when they bought up Bungie, felt kind of awkward, especially with the first controller for the XBox (thank God they changed it!). I don't mean that it is a bad game, not by any means. Just that at the time, having played the other famous FPS games, it felt slow, sloppy and clumsy when compared to the amazingly fast and agile Unreal Tournament (UT99) game play. Also the over simplification of only being able to carry two weapons felt odd at first, and later on made sense, and even added to the game experience, though the rest of the gameplay, especially the controls, while good (as good as you can get with a gamepad) was not close by a LONG mile to the degree of precision you can achieve with a keyboard and a mouse.

Graphics-wise (including the engine) the game always felt a bit "fat". Astonishingly achieved, but generally slow. I'm not sure if that was a design decision (to cap the FPSs for the conventional TV sets) or if it was due to "dirt" in the code (hence poorly optimized and cleaned). On the XBox it worked rather well, but the PC version leaves much to be desired (is almost idiotic you required a top of the line machine at the time it was released to bearly play it with slightly better settings than the XBox, like higher res and maybe AA/AF), the reasoning being that basically they had to rebuild the Xbox code for a regular Windows PC, fill in the blanks (add more options for sound/graphics/control/) and it was set... That would be my major complaint, because it could have been a much better game on the PC. It was the biggest title for the Orignal XBox, no doubt, and H3 may very well be the same for the 360.

[Moustacha]

Assuming you've played Halo 2 and can remember the story line, the elites left the covenent because the arbiter went nuts or something, and I think the elites might fight beside the humans, or at least MC.

Halo 3 looks good, but I just want to know the story-line, so many unanswered questions. But i'm not gonna buy a 360 just for it, not worth it IMO, just go to a friend's house :P

[cypher543]

Assuming you've played Halo 2 and can remember the story line, the elites left the covenent because the arbiter went nuts or something, and I think the elites might fight beside the humans, or at least MC.
I think I got the sides mixed up. I thought the Arbiter was the leader of the rebellion, but I guess it was actually the Heretics who left the Covenant first. Thanks for clearing that up.

[Thetargos]

I need to find an English copy of Halo2, as the version I played was in spanish and to worse it up, I could hardly understand what they were saying (bad dubbing, bad volume) I hardly remember anything about the story of the game. One thing is for sure, for some reason it did not felt as epic as the first was (maybe the dialogs do add quite a bit of immersion in this regard), and it sure felt much shorter than the first (played from start to finish in about 10 hours spanning two days). I want to replay it as much as I did the first to get a good sense of it, otherwise I won't have enough elements to judge the story as a whole and how would it affect the developing of the third game.


Of the cinematics I've seen of the third, though, it would look like that the covenant is breaking appart, and there's some struggle. Again, I did not get much of the Elite section of the second game to judge.

[cypher543]

The storyline for Halo 2 was OK to me. I think they could have taken it a bit farther with the flood and Cortana's meeting with the flood king. But, I guess Bungie didn't want to reveal too much before Halo 3.