The 7th Zone

In Bungie’s latest weekly update, a host of information and media pertaining to Halo: Reach has been unleashed, with but three weeks to its release on September 14th. Bungie’s Halo swan song looks better by the day, as developers at Bungie reveal more juicy bits on the game closer to release.

Did you know Halo is 10 years old? You probably already know that, but it sure has come a long way!

What fans might find most interesting would be the “Behind The Scenes” look at Halo: Reach’s latest live action short film, “Deliver Hope”. The picture below is right out of Bungie’s latest update.

We will spare you the agony of sifting through walls of witty text for this week’s Bungie lowdown on Halo: Reach. Here’s Bungie’s FAQ section, quelling the curioisity of many inquisitive fans.

Q. Will Halo: Reach be region-free?

A. According to Domenic, Halo: Reach is “world signed,” meaning you can play any regional copy in any region on any retail Xbox 360.

Q. Not including Firefight maps, are there more or less multiplayer maps compared to pre-DLC Halo 3? (Forge World only counts as one map.)

A. There are eight multiplayer maps on the disc and five Forge World map variants: Asylum, Hemorrhage, Paradiso, Pinnacle, and The Cage. (The latter most certainly do count, our designers put a lot of time and effort into them and they play like a dream. One of those dreams where you stumble onto a pile of money, only in this dream you get to wake up and keep the cash.)

Q. How does unlocking armor from Waypoint work?

A. You download and launch Waypoint, it runs a background check on your gamertag for the necessary career requirements, and then it unlocks the armor you qualify for automatically. It’s like magic, and as Luke mentioned in an earlier update (bless his heart), the additional (but still awesome) armor pieces will only be displayed in your Armory if you’ve already earned and unlocked them.

Q. Can we specify hill shapes besides cylinders and boxes, like maybe ellipses or triangles?

A. The options are Cylinder, Box, and None. You can control the radius and both the upper and lower limits of the hill, but triangles, parallelograms, and various other complex geometrical shapes are unfortunately completely impossible to create. Which means, sadly, that none of us will ever be able to experience King of the Dodecahedron.

Q. Can we customize campaign options, similar to Firefight?

A. You can modify the experience through scoring, difficulty settings, and the thirteen immediately available skulls (don’t worry, you’ll have plenty of other *things* to hunt for in each game mode). And of course, your opponents will now scale in difficulty depending on the number of players in your game.

But nope, no infinite ammo or unlimited armor abilities in Campaign.

Q. What might the exclusive Digital Content for Legendary owners be?

A. It might be developer commentary. It might also be Gwildor’s Cosmic Key. Only time will tell!

Q. Theater 2.0!

A. The theater experience remains largely unaltered from its already robust predecessor, but we did implement a few choice tweaks and bug fixes. Most notably, you can now rewind Campaign and Firefight Films, just like you can in multiplayer, and all modes will now support Film Clips.

Q. Armor effects and achievement point values.

A. There are a number of Armor Effects in the game that you can unlock if you’re willing to part ways with a whole mess of credits. The most expensive effect is 2,000,000 credits.

There are 49 achievements for a total of 1,000 gamerscore. They break down like this:

• 5 Doctor, Doctor
• 10 That’s a Knife
• 10 I See You Favor a .45
• 10 An Elegant Weapon…
• 10 Swap Meet
• 10 A Spoonful of Blamite
• 50 Folks Need Heroes…
• 125 Gods Must Be Strong
• 25 The Soldier We Needed You To Be
• 150 A Monument to All Your Sins
• 10 We’re Just Getting Started
• 10 Protocol Dictates Action
• 10 I Need a Weapon
• 10 To War
• 10 You Flew Pretty Good
• 10 Into the Howling Dark
• 10 Dust and Echoes
• 10 This is Not Your Grave…
• 10 Send Me Out…with a Bang
• 25 They’ve Always Been Faster
• 25 Two Corpses in One Grave
• 25 Banshees, Fast and Low
• 25 Your Heresy Will Stay Your Feet
• 25 If They Came to Hear Me Beg
• 25 Wake Up, Buttercup
• 25 Tank Beats Everything
• 25 Lucky Me
• 5 KEEP IT CLEAN
• 10 I Didn’t Train to Be a Pilot
• 5 Be My Wingman, Anytime
• 10 Yes, Sensei
• 10 Skunked!
• 5 What’s a Killing Spree?
• 10 Crowd Control
• 5 Knife to a Gunfight
• 10 Score Attack
• 10 Firestarter
• 25 Blaze of Glory
• 75 Heat in the Pipe
• 25 Game, Set, Match
• 10 Make It Rain
• 15 The Start of Something
• 25 An Honor Serving
• 5 A Storage Solution
• 10 A New Challenger
• 10 Make it Drizzle
• 5 Cool File, Bro
• 10 Lemme Upgrade Ya
• 10 One Down, 51 to Go

Q. Will the Fuel Rod Gun ever make an appearance in matchmaking?

A. You can add the Fuel Rod Gun to Custom Maps, but no, it’s unlikely that you’ll ever see the FRG in Matchmaking. According to hater of fun and hot dog eating champion, Dave Gasca, slow moving projectiles can play havoc with multiplayer networking in a disturbingly wide variety of ways, making the experience less than fun for everybody involved. Even though it would likely be fine 95% of the time, the 5% of the time that it acted a fool would result in you peppering us with insults on the Internet. We’re just acting proactively to avoid your stinging verbal barbs.

Since Campaign and Firefight run on a different networking model altogether, the Fuel Rod Gun is all systems go for both of those modes.

Q. Have they fixed saving films in the post game lobby, ala one single button click in the Halo 3 Beta?

A. The Halo 3 Beta single click was an elegant solution and its ultimate omission is still a sore subject for some of the team. Thanks for opening up the wound, Professor. The reality is that once you start adding in the layers of complexity from multiple modes, lobbies, and player configurations (i.e. splitscreen), the UI and engineering work involved in making single button press a permanent fixture across the board became too unwieldy.

The good news is that while you still don’t have a single button press post game, you can pull up your File Browser by pressing Start in any lobby, allowing you to save and upload your most recent games from the menu without having to drop out of the party.

For the full skinny, click here for Bungie’s weekly update (27th August 2010).

Tags: Bungie, Halo, Halo: Reach