09.27.07 5:00 AM CDT
• Modern Wizardry
• Scott Alexander
Halo 3 is here at long last, and amid the marketing tsunami, lapidary packaging options, piles of ancillary merchandise and alternating waves of hype and backlash, it turns out there is actually a game in there as well. And, unsurprisingly, it’s quite good. The single-player campaign is meaty and satisfying, if a little short (and I’m not usually someone who complains about short videogames), and the virtues of Halo’s multiplayer action are well documented at this point. However, neither of these, shiny and next-gen though they might be, represent much of a leap away from previous versions of the game (not that I had any expectation or desire that they would). Rather, what’s kept me up later than is reasonable for the past few nights is two new features that take Halo 3 into an entirely new realm—its Forge and Theater modes.
Forge is a tool that lets you modify the game’s multiplayer maps. You can’t terraform or create buildings, but you have absolute control over everything on the map that isn’t nailed down, as well as access to a full laundry list of all the weapons, vehicles and equipment in the game that you can place anywhere you like. Last night I created a map called Beach Party. At either end of the gorgeous white-sand beach on the map Last Resort, I placed a stash of brute lasers (which take three seconds to fire after you pull the trigger, but destroy everything in their path) and Gravity Hammers (imagine a golf club with nitroglycerin on the end of it). In the middle, between the weapon stashes, I placed a massive pile of fusion coils (exploding boxes), grenades and propane tanks, on top of which I placed a Mongoose (dune buggy) and a Banshee (one-man hovercraft). The slightest shock to the Death Pile (as it has come to be known) causes a highly unpredictable explosion, complete with flying, vehicle-shaped shrapnel. For good measure, on the high walls around the beach, I placed several rocket launchers for comments from the peanut gallery. Last step was to grab all the spawn points (places you restart from when you die) around the map and scatter them around the beach and walls. Suffice to say that when you put 8 trigger-happy people in there, things get heat up real quick. That’s my kind of party.
But there’s more. As my friends and I tear each other to shreds in the most spectacular ways we can imagine, the entire proceeding is being recorded by the game in the background. After the match, I can pop into Theater mode and play the whole thing back. Better yet, I can detach from my player’s perspective and fly around to different vantage points as the pre-recorded action unfolds. Finally, once I find a particularly juicy moment, like when Jeremy causes a chain reaction by knocking Greg and his Mongoose into the Death Pile, shooting him and his ride up over the seawall and out of sight, I can set up my shot, then work the camera as I roll tape. Once I have my 10-second mayhem masterpiece, I can upload it to Xbox live where the world can view it. It’s an immense amount of fun, but more importantly, for how powerful its creation tools are, it’s shockingly easy to figure out. Within minutes you’re making things. Within half an hour, your brain is churning like the QE2’s engines, as you come up with ever more fiendish machinations.
So while Halo 3 the game is very good, Halo 3 the creation tool borders on revolutionary, taking you from active participant to true co-creator of your interactive experience. This is the first stab at a new kind of experience for console-game players (PC users with programming chops have been able to do this for some time). It will most certainly not be the last.
For a demo of Forge in action, here’s one of Bungie’s development team showing how it all works.
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