Some people have reported on various forums that there was initially a glitch in the billing system that allowed people to download the Blastacular maps for free. This bug was quickly fixed but anyone who still attempts to circumvent the billing system will actually end up locking themselves out of the maps entirely with no way to download them. The Xbox Live team is pursuing a fix to enable downloads again for these vagabonds, ne’er-do-wells and hooligans.

In a few other cases, the problem is caused by a kind of disconnect between this generation of Xbox Live and last, as far as age ratings are concerned. Basically the system thinks you’re too young, even if you’re not. Those problems are being fixed as we speak. Again, the reason this has been a less than perfect transition has an awful lot to do with insisting that the maps are made available to both 360 and olde Xbox owners. It has never really been done before, so we apologize for our teething troubles.

Most of our multiplayer activity recently has revolved around testing the Public Beta. As some of you may already know, an internal Microsoft Beta has been running for a while. We’re using that for a very different set of tests than the public version. Number one among those tests is scale.

We have to make sure that Halo 3 scales well to a large population, and that will help us improve and test our netcode, as well as try out one more feature that we’re including in the Beta. A feature that definitely requires a lot of stress testing in a big population. Conspiracy theorists can drop their 128-player game theories at the door. Halo 3 is still a 16-player game, and the reality is that most people prefer smaller games than that.

No, this feature we’re testing is for the moment, just a fun addition, that’s planned to grow into something pretty amazing by launch, and that feature is Saved Films. The version you’ll try in the Beta, is very, very, very limited. We just want you to play around with the general concept. You’ll be reading more about this in the gaming press in the next month or two, and of course you can try it out for yourselves in less than a month.

As for the Public Beta itself, it’s pretty close to finished and a lot of folks have worked really hard to make it happen, with late nights, early mornings and a constant diet of Cheetos and evil. So to those brave men and women who sacrificed themselves on the Anvil of Bungie, under the Hammer of Crunch, we salute thee. Your smeared remains will be remembered.

Although the Public Beta may seem like a simple sampling of the MP levels from the finished game, extracting those and packaging them into a playable bundle, with off-schedule bug testing, gameplay tweaks, code fixing and netcode support, is a herculean task. Hopefully it will pay dividends and players will get tremendous enjoyment from these maps and game types.

Since we’re testing matchmaking, you won’t have the kind of control you’re used to with custom games, but we’ll be there to guide you into a very nice selection of Matchmade game types – and don’t worry, the playlists will almost certainly have your gametype in there, in some shape or form.


You’ll also be pleased to hear that split-screen will be an option, although limited to two people in the Public Beta. We’ve also done something cool with the splitscreen display for HD monitors – instead of stretching the horizontal or vertical axes into big, scary too wide or too tall horrors, we’ve sensibly windowed the action, maintaining lots of screen real estate, but preserving a proper, playable aspect ratio.

Jub-Jub, (codename for one of the secret Multiplayer maps) is coming along beautifully. Steve Cotton has been decorating it with…well, that would probably give away the theme. But I will mention that right now it has birds in it, flying around in a convincingly flock-like fashion, but don’t get too used to that idea. If there was ever something superfluous to gameplay, it would be a flock of birds wheeling around in the far distance. If it so much as twitches, it gets cut.

Perhaps more enticing is the mention of a VERY large map that went from being just about the most empty, soulless placeholder geometry in the entire game, to one of the moodiest, most atmospheric and beautiful maps we’ve ever made. It’s also the single largest multiplayer map. You pretty much need a vehicle to get around in it, so luckily, destroyed vehicles respawn super-fast.

We’re very excited to show off the second part of our Halo 3 image branding. This one is known colloquially as “Emotion” and it’s just a lovely, stirring piece that speaks to both the fiction and the atmosphere of the new game. The more you look at it, the more you get from it. The Chief model was built and posed from the game, and rendered out in this mixed media piece, which is part CG, part painting and a healthy dose of Photoshop thrown in for good measure. The background holds some interesting atmosphere, from the skeletal wreckage of the fallen Mombasa space tether, to those hauntingly familiar eyes in the background. Anyway, that’s enough talk – here’s a pic. This one will be appearing soon enough, in various locations in both landscape and portrait orientations.

Source: http://www.bungie.net

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