Just a few short notes from the second to last podcast before the Halo 3 release…
The Bungie podcast revealed that you will NOT play as anyone but the Master Chief in Halo 3. That is, unless you play co-op and your friend steals Master Chief first.
Also, the campaign designers stated that the Easy and Normal difficulty are intentionally EASY to prevent frustration and really pull the player into the Halo storyline. I think they really built those two game modes for the mainstream audience that they are trying to draw into the Halo Nation for the first time with this edition.
To that I say, only WEAK Halo people should play on easy or normal. I think I will have to play through Legendary for the my first go unless I decide to marathon through the story in a couple of days at Heroic.
Check out the Bungie podcast. It may not seem worth subscribing to now with Halo 3 already released, but I am sure there will be some interesting upcoming discussions of the launch results and the downloadable content available. Note that this most recent edition is the one following up the one that I am summing up in this post.
An interesting side note to their conversation in this podcast was a discussion of how many players actually complete the campaign. According to a recent study they cited, only 10 percent of the purchasers of any given game actually complete it. I would say that sounds very low, but talking to a couple of friends of mine, I have come to realize that several haven’t ever completed the campaign out of a lack of interest or necessity. To me, the gameplay in the campaign mode is part of the reason I want to own the game. I care more about finding out the end of the story than playing the multiplayer.
We’ll see soon how this edition of Halo 3 stacks up with it releasing just a couple of hours from now. I will be waiting until my lunch break to pick up my copy since there are no midnight launches at Best Buy in Austin. I took their pre-order deal for the bonus Microsoft points, but it stinks that they don’t offer the game at midnight like GameStop.
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As you can see on Metacritic, the more traditional, larger Web sites and magazine publications online seem to be on the higher end of the Halo 3 scoring while the niche online blogs and gamer portals are being a little more skeptical. No one is rating it lower than 85, but the below 90 scoring is definitely coming for the more niche online outlets. Only time will tell how the public truly perceives the game, but regardless, Halo 3 is going to be a blockbuster.