Halo 3 Preview & Bungie Interview

Gamers following Halo 3's progress may be familiar with a new feature called Saved Films. Players can choose Theatre Lobby from the user interface, and select a film they have saved - essentially a replay, but with next-gen written all over it. We recently checked out a Multiplayer film, but Bungie promised us that everything you can see in Multiplayer films is available in Campaign mode too. This film we saw was a five-on-five game of Slayer, on the new Sand Trap map, "the biggest we've ever had in a Halo game, and designed primarily for vehicle combat" Bungie says. It's a huge desert map where the vehicles respawn really quickly, so you're never without a vehicle or a power weapon; when you die and respawn there's always something to get you on the map safely - or powerfully.

The game records footage from every single player, but far from being a simple replay of what that player saw during his game, players can switch off the on-screen display (or 'heads-up display' - HUD) and the user interface, detach the camera, and control it in pretty much the same way as the game only flying rather than walking, something anyone who's ever turned on cheats in a FPS will likely have fiddled with in the past. It's a big map, so we accelerate the camera and fly out over to the blue team's position before they all start to meet for a fight in the middle. You can pause and fast forward through the replay, and we see combat kicking off in earnest in this recorded game from an all-new kind of perspective, as the players get (or got!) their bearings and started grabbing weapons.

It's the special edition Halo 3 spartan-coloured console.

One great moment of this Saved Film was seeing one player thinking he was cool taking out a Mongoose with a Missile Pod, but he didn't see a targeting laser trained right on him at the time. It was Frank, up on a distant part of the level, who was about to show what happens when you don't pay attention to a Spartan Laser - boom. Other players then ran over to try and get the Missile Pod he'd left behind - not a particularly good idea when Frank still had his Spartan Laser trained onto the area.

"The cool thing about this is that the replay is game data, not a movie file", explains O'Connor, "so they're actually very small files, meaning they can be kept for posterity on the hard drive or a memory card." Another new feature is armour customisation, allowing players to mix and match various armours of different styles - shoulder parts, chest plates and helmets - so players can define their appearance online.

What's especially cool about Saved Films is being able to watch in slow motion. Frank knew in advance that something was about to go badly wrong for one particular player in the replay of this match, so positioned the camera on him to watch the carnage. The audio continues while you're freeze framed, and all the visual effects are frozen allowing us to pan around and see everything in impressive audio and visual detail. If we see a particularly awesome moment we want to capture, we can also capture it by pressing the X button, saving the screenshot to the Xbox 360 hard drive and with the option to automatically upload it to Bungie.net, where a gallery of higher-than-game-resolution screenshots are exhibited. In Campaign mode, user photos are uploaded to Bungie.net too - "I believe this is the plan," said O'Connor. "They are well-compressed Jpeg files so not too large, but the resolution will be higher than you see on this HDTV."

In particularly lengthy matches players can also just choose a start point and an end point for their clip, and upload that to their file share, recommend it to friends, and share it around the community. The clips also save the camera angle movements you chose, so players can show it how they want it to be seen. "You can't really paste clips together and edit them on the 360 itself, other than making clips," warns O'Connor, "but as we saw on the Multiplayer Beta, literally half an hour after it went live, there were films online, so we'll leave it to the community to decide how they want to archive and keep their films, and there's no file size limit to a film, it's as much as you can keep on your hard drive."

There's also a new feature in Halo 3 called Forge, enabling players to insert game objects into existing maps. "I would say if anything, it's as interesting or more interesting than the Saved Film feature," comments Frank. Bungie has shown an example where an unfeasibly large volume of exploding fusion cores are placed on a vehicle, causing it to spin wildly out of control in the air upon detonation. Once players have altered maps using Forge, they can play a match on it - changing the experience of playing on that map considerably.

And what of those weapons that people found "hidden" in the Beta - when are we going to learn more about some of those? "Soon enough!", promises O'Connor. "We haven't shown them yet; Jungle is just a first level so it's kind of a training level getting players used to a small set of weapons... you haven't seen all of them!"

And I had to ask about including a Spartan Laser-only multiplayer game. I foolishly asked if they would "consider" it. O'Connor pipes up: "Yes, not only would we consider that, but you can set it up in thirty seconds; you can do what you want and set up game variants and share them with your friends, and we're actually going to give you a lot more control than we ever have before."

With that in mind, I'm sold on Multiplayer. With improved visuals over the Beta and all these new features, there's little doubt it'll be the finest online multiplayer FPS action to date - and the announcement of four-player co-op is a definite plus point. And singleplayer Campaign mode? We've seen nowhere near enough to say whether it will genuinely improve on Halo 2, but if Frank's claims are true, and the story really is as satisfying a finish as Bungie promises us, then we hope to be including Halo 3 in our favourite FPS games of the year - something we believe it should earn, not automatically claim. In a few short weeks, we'll have all the answers.

Click here for our previous Halo 3 Multiplayer coverage.

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