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JaggedSac on 12 August 2008
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If you are willing to dig deep into the Halo 3 experience, you will see some quite neat features that Bungie has implemented.


Theatre mode: Quite nice if you and your buds just finish a match and want to rewatch something cool or something you thought was BS. Take your party into the theatre lobby, load the film you want to watch, and everybody will view the film together. The party leader has control of the timeline of the film. You cannot take pictures or save film clips while a party is viewing, but each player had control of their own camera. If you are watching a save film by yourself, you can take a picture or save a clip. Once you take a picture, it is uploaded to Bungie.net where you can do various things to the picture. You can send it to the community forums and let people more easily view your photos and get voted on. Each photo you upload can be rated by anybody(must be registered Halo 3 player) with 1-5 stars. You also have the option on Bungie.net to select anything from clips, photos, game variants, maps, etc, to download to your XBox the next time you log onto Live and play Halo 3.


Forge: Bungie created an extensive map editor(not map creator) that can be used to place objects, weapons, vehicles, spawn points, etc. Each object has various options to tweak such as respawn time, direction, etc. The best thing about the way Bungie designed their game types and map variants is their ability to alter the matchmaking playlists on a regular basis. They usually have new playlists for the weekend and there are no visible downloads involved. Very, very nice software engineering here. Another cool thing about Forge is the ability to have matches inside of Forge with players having the ability to drop items for their team and what not.


Stats: Bungie provides an extensive amount of stats for every player in every match. They even allow these stats to be gathered by non-Bungie websites. Bungie provides some very good statistics on Bungie.net on both your Ranked and Social playlist games. They provide heat maps on each map showing hot spots where you have died or killed someone throughout your Halo 3 career, etc.


File Share: File sharing is another neat thing that Bungie implemented with Halo 3. Each gamertag has a certain amount of files they can upload into their fileshare slots. You can place photos, maps, game types, film clips, etc, into your fileshare and other players can click on your gamertag in their friends list(or in a game lobby) and view whatever is in your fileshare. The player doesn't even need to be online.


Party System: Bungie tweaked their party system to perfection with Halo 3. I can't speak for anyone else but I cannot stand games without a party system now. I have 2 other guys who I usually play online with and it is awesome to be able to be matched up with different people of the same skill every other match. There is no need to try and organize with each other on what servers we are going to be on or anything. I can be playing Uno and they send me an invite, I accept, and Halo 3 launches and plops me in their party. Incredibly seamless(some of this is due to Live's seamless nature as well). We can go from playing Campaign, to viewing films, to playing in matchmaking without the least bit of hassle. This is one of the reasons why Bungie did not want dedicated servers. It would have made their matchmaking system more difficult to implement. After a match is over, players are placed in a lobby where they have the ability to party up with each other.  They also implemented a very easy way to mute players, which can come in really handy.


Balance: Bungie understands the nature of online play and made great strides to create a better experience both from a latency perspective and gameplay perspective. The altered melees, battle rifle spread, sweep sniping, spawn algorithms(you should look at an article they wrote about it), shotguns spread, etc. Everything you can think about with an online competitive game was considered by the Bungie dev teams. Each weapon serves a purpose with both negatives and positives for various situations. There isn't a single uber weapon. The balance is increbile.

 

Overall, the complete package that was shipped on day one provided an incredibly immense number of features for a player to use, and all provided and supported by the developer. It was incredibly refined and incredibly well layed out. Very, very good software engineering from the guys at Bungie.  The community has really grabbed onto these features and upload a ton of content daily to Bungie.net.  It really is a fantastic melding of website and game.