With them saying more players, hopefully that would give multi team a boost as well. Maybe 4v4v4v4 or maybe 5 vs. What was Halo 2's multi team like 4 teams of 3 or something?

I'm tired of playing with my friends and when we play multi team we get split up :(.

I think they will be able to pull off pretty awesome halo's but I don't think anything will be able to touch what Halo: Reach will be.

Couple tidbits from the Bungie Weekly Update:

http://www.bungie.net/News/content.aspx?type=topnews&cid=24866

To War

Since we’re already rocking the Show and Tell action in today’s update, I should probably talk a spell about Max Dyckhoff’s Most Amazing Show on Earth Reach. While we’re not talking at all about campaign story details beyond what we've already disclosed – that lidded adventure will stay undercover for a good, long spell – I can provide some cryptic details about some pretty serious technical upgrades the team has in the works to make your experience even more epic this fall.

The scene: Chris Opdahl’s workstation (he’s the svelte gentleman that showed off the big AI battles in our most recent and totally awesome ViDoc). He's already in the midst of a conversation with Max about what’s happening onscreen when I walk up behind them, stalker style. For some reason, the engine is spitting out a tinny rendition of Flight of the Bumblebee to accompany the visuals. Max and Chris are talking numbers.

“How many are there running onscreen right now?”

“Two hundred, plus.”

“Oh, I was thinking we could do double that.”

And here I am off to the side speechless, drooling like Homer Simpson dreaming about pink, glazed donuts. Then they called security and I had to slink away ashamed.

Still, all things considered I’d say it’s a damn good week to work at Bungie.

I’m Da Champ!

It should be no secret at this point that I’m what you might call an ass. As soon as I got the Magnum in my hot little hands on Wednesday night, I was grinning ear to ear and making sure anyone within hearing range knew that I was cranking out headshots with what I felt was absurd efficiency. (Didn’t seem to instill much fear in Bob as he crouched over my lifeless corpse and offered up his own analysis of my elite skills.

“Yeah, headshot that, dumbass.”

:(

While it’s not quite the double damage, TSK machine from the Evolved era Sage spoke out about in our most recent podcast, the Reach Magnum was far and away my favorite weapon in the latest takehome build. At one point, I must have said, “My God, the pistol is soooooo good!” just a little too loudly, because Luke piped up to admonish me for calling attention to it.

“Shut up, dude. They’ll hear you!”

I don’t know who “they” are, but Luke seemed to think that the Magnum in its current state wouldn’t be sticking around for too much longer. In fact, I heard him recount this very same tale to some unlucky passerby again this morning.

“If I like a weapon too much, it gets changed.”

So, yesterday morning I crept up on Sage’s right-hand man, Josh Hamrick, and praised him for all the fine work they were doing with the weapon set. “It all felt perfect,” I said. “Tuned up just right.”

Slurp, slurp.

Then I inquired *gulp* as to the status of the Magnum and the forecast for its short and long term future. Josh assured me it was pretty much locked in. Now, all the weapons will likely undergo some small tweaks through Alpha, Beta, and public release cycle of course, but Josh seemed confident that the pistol will ship as the effective sidearm it was when I wielded it this past Wednesday night. Sage echoed the very same sentiment to me earlier this morning.

And Luke definitely wasn’t taking his own advice, anyway. While I was busy not shutting up about the Magnum all throughout the evening’s festivities, Luke’s own DMR-fueled taunts quickly devolved into moans and groans of pleasure that would have made an entire tribe of scantily clad Na’vi warriors blush in brilliant aquamarine embarrassment. He and his trusty rifle were definitely working together in some kind of disturbing tsahaylu tandem. I see you, Luke Smith. I see you.

Ripped, Pilfered, and Pillaged

Last week I teased you a little bit about the unfounded claim that our brilliant and beloved multiplayer designers and artists had ransacked campaign, absconded with a few choice spaces, and lazily called it a day on the multiplayer map front. Were it so easy. The reality is that the multiplayer team staked and proved out their battlegrounds as they always have, while naked, skunked, and full of artificial cheese flavored snacks.

Jokes. Don’t eat artificial cheese, kids. It’s bad for your health.

Like we noted last week, the process was a bit different this time around. The multiplayer spaces were still constructed separately by a team of trained multiplayer experts, but as each arena came online they were subsequently passed over to the campaign team and injected into the game in progress as small portions of much larger campaign missions (which should explain the information coming out of X10 last week).

So, if you were worried that multiplayer would suffer from the reuse of campaign ideas and architecture designed for that explicit purpose, you can rest easy. If you were worried that you’d be spending the majority of your campaign play-through in multiplayer-inspired spaces, you can rest easy on that front, too. Not happening.

Don’t believe me? Fine! Here’s what Chris Carney had to say on the subject:

“Absolutely no sacrifices were made as to the quality of the multiplayer maps for Reach. In addition, the visual experience of each map is now equal to campaign, as they received crazy amounts of polish to makes them ‘super sweet.’

Super.

Oh, and if you think we’re telling you the whole story, well, you must be as green as they come. This week Shishka tipped me off that he was working on something cool that Cotton’s been cooking up and it was ready for a really early sneak peek. Jaw, I’d like to introduce you to Floor. Floor, this is Jaw.

Cotton, you must be out of your damn mind. This is impossible. Right?

A couple things:

What exactly are they rendering 200 of?  Ships, enemies, flood(dear god I hope not)?

CE pistol lovers most likely will enjoy the return of a more potent pistol in Reach.

Those worried that the because the multiplayer and campaign maps are shared, that they will not be as good for multiplayer, can rest easy.  Multiplayer came first.

Do you have to buy halo odst for the beta. Is that the only way to get in?

Yes you will have to ODST.  You will be able to access the beta through the ODST disc.  When the beta is live theres going to be a menu for it.

thanks for the info.

@ JaggedSac

"What exactly are they rendering 200 of? Ships, enemies, flood(dear god I hope not)?"

0o0o I'm really excited to hear more about that, i doubt it's AI, but if so, the scope of Halo: Reach is indeed Epic. That article had so many tidbits to be excited for, but my main focus is on the last part.

"This week Shishka tipped me off that he was working on something cool that Cotton’s been cooking up and it was ready for a really early sneak peek. Jaw, I’d like to introduce you to Floor. Floor, this is Jaw.

Cotton, you must be out of your damn mind. This is impossible. Right?"

This is just getting my hyped up to think about what it could be, i want to introduce my jaw to the floor now, lol.

We can all breath a sigh of relief:

http://www.xbox360achievements.org/n...alo--Reach.htm

YES! Great post Jagged! I'm glad they are sticking the the way things are now. That's why i love playing Halo online, it's a fair balance when it comes to your load out. No one has "more armor" unless they pick up the Overshield in game, and that's fair game for anyone.