Yeah, that stood out the most to me. I was nice to see some DMR footage in the beginning of that video.

Gameranx

If you head over to ESPN.com and you’ve got your ad blockers off, you’ll notice a Halo 4 banner at the top of the screen. By playing the video, you start the live action trailer showcased at Microsoft’s E3 press conference, but about ten seconds into the video, some strange stuff starts happening.

The interference pushes strange images across the whole of the page, and text begins to pop up in spurts. Halo fans are already knee deep in decrypting the message, and although the Latin text has been run through a translator, it’s still mostly gibberish, but definitely not Lorem Ipsum.

If anyone remembers the I Love Bees campaign for Halo 2, you’ll get pangs of nostalgia watching this. So band together, internet. Figure this out for me because I’m far too lazy to do it on my own. I suggest high-tailing it over to ESPN’s site before the ad is gone for good.

http://www.gameranx.com/updates/id/7422/article/potential-halo-4-arg-surfaces/

It'll be solved fairly soon knowing the Halo web community.

Little English Halo blog

UK Newspaper Metro have secured a brilliantly insightful interview with Frank O'Connor whilst they were at E3. You can read the full article here, it's a pretty big read so I've pulled out the key quotes below.

Metro: In terms of storyline the campaign trailer seems to imply that Cortana is going rampant and I think you've already stated Halo 4 is the first part in a new trilogy, but will Cortana and the other characters have a genuine closure to their story arc by the end of that?

Frankie: We've sort of shifted our rhetoric a little bit and part of that is because of the way that Spartan Ops works, and so we're calling it a saga. Because all of the story pieces that we do from now on are going to be connected and actually matter. So a trilogy kind of limits it in a really weird way, because some of the bigger ticket story beat items that are gonna happen are actually gonna happen in Spartan Ops, before the next mainline sequel comes out.

Metro: But are you going to be brave enough to have an ending to that character, and other characters in the game? In terms of storytelling the most satisfying outcome is for something to happen to her that means she cannot appear in another game - or at least not in the same manner as she has been doing.

Frankie: Well, that’s one path…

Metro: But video game characters they never do that. I mean, is Master Chief now doomed to appear in every mainline Halo game from now till the end of time?

Frankie: All I'll say is that I completely agree with you, that when you make the fates and the meaning of characters irrelevant through safety you're doing a disservice to both the story and to the evolution of the universe. We have the Halo story planned out for… not literally down to granular details but in very broad terms and in some big beats for the next 10 years.

And every big beat that we have is absolutely meaningful and the characters, they are not disposable - but I mean disposable in the sense that it doesn't matter what happens to them. They're not disposable, anything that happens to them, and even things that don't happen to them, has to actually have meaning and resonance, and sometimes gravitas. But that's about all I'm gonna say about the story because otherwise our fans will kill us!

Metro: One of our general observations at E3 this year is that companies really need to stop listening to fans in some instances. There really should be a lot more of giving them what they need, not what they think they want. But I imagine doing that is even more difficult for you given how vocal Halo fans can be and how this is your first gig after the departure of Bungie. What was it they were complaining about in the first teaser? That the codpiece didn't look quite right on Master Chief?

Frankie: [laughs] Yeah, and things were the wrong colour…

Metro: But how do you deal with that sort of response?

Frankie: You just go back to the drawing board and redo the codpiece.

Your fans are your best friends, they're absolutely a part of our extended family. But you're absolutely right, you can't design a game by committee because… it's hilarious to watch reactions on the Internet. They're completely contradictory and yet people think that they're mathematically correct. So there is good information in there and we take information from test data, we take information from boring drawing numbers cycles that happen on servers. And we do look at anecdotal information, because often people can capture the essence of what they mean in a way that raw numbers can't on their own - and vice versa you can't do everything anecdotally.

So we do take that all seriously, but there's some things where even where it looks like you have a kind of core element in the fanbase that is convinced something is wrong or that something is awesome we know that their reaction to that is not based on gameplay, is not based on experience. It is not based on, say, three months of building a Spartan career. So there's a lot of things that we do that fans will object to or embrace.

It's not a monolithic community so you get all ranges of opinion across the spectrum and you have to look at that but you can't use it necessarily as a guidepost - but you can absolutely use it as useful context for the decisions you've already made and the ones that you're tuning and working on.

Metro: Can you give a specific example of where you think the fans have misinterpreted something you're trying to do in Halo 4?

Frankie: The controversial ones are the ones where they think we're taking ideas from other games. So right now we've added this loadout system so you can customise your Spartan. Which is as much based on our fiction for the Spartan forces as anything else, but the irony is people say, 'that's lifted from Call Of Duty'. But it's really… like even the UI [user interface] looks like the loadout system from Gradius III from the 1989 coin-op.

And so it's strange that people already have a kind of imprint in their mind about where ideas come from or where they're going, and that's a good example of one where we know it's fun and we tested it and we know that it's balanced but we just have to stick to our guns and make sure that when we execute on it, it's as perfect as it can be. And they might be resistant to the idea but so far we've discovered even on the E3 show floor they're embracing the feel and they're embracing the experience and that our call was correct.

- Cowboy Out.

We're not always going to be right, but often we know better than they do how these things settle out.

http://www.littleenglishhaloblog.com/2012/06/uk-newspaper-metro-have-secured.html

The Little Halo English Blog

The latest update to the iOS Xbox App includes a preview screen showing off new features. One of the tiles shows a screenshot from Halo 4 along with the text "Halo 4 Play the demo"

It might just be placeholder, but Frankie is being quizzed over on NeoGAF and he's not denying it, sounds pretty promising. :D

- Cowboy Out.

CVG

You'll piece together a picture of the show from overheard fragments and half-conversations with colleagues - Watch_Dogs is amazing, Star Wars 1313 is running on Unreal, John Carmack has built a pair of Space Goggles, and Sony's spectacular show-ender was matched only by Microsoft's opener, Halo 4.

Cutting from live action straight into the game, 343 showed off their version of Bungie's Reach engine, rendering thick fog and dense jungle in a tightly-scripted sequence apparently designed to scare the living piss out of existing Halo fans. Instead of a wide-open Halo map this was a skinny corridor; instead of free-form combat this was scripted enemies attacking on demand, lunging at the camera and knocking the Chief to his back. It's a complaint 343 answered behind closed doors the following evening in downtown LA.

REQUIEM

If you caught Microsoft's E3 demo you've seen as much of Halo 4's story as 343 are prepared to reveal. Master Chief gets eaten by a planet, the UNSC Infinity follows him inside, and somehow we're at war with the Covenant again so we'd better go shoot at some things.

Requiem is a Forerunner Shield World - an ancient construct built to protect the Forerunners from the firing of the Halo array some 100,000 years ago, and it seems to have worked as expected because an army of 100,000 year-old Promethean super soldiers are standing between the Chief and the wreck of the UNSC Infinity. Microsoft's stage demo offered a taste of what the Forerunners can do but it's only when you face them in the game you get a sense for how they rewrite Halo's rules.

Microsoft put controllers in hands at a wildly expensive late-night event where they showcased Halo 4's PVP multiplayer and one level from the game's episodic co-op campaign. Over the weeks following Halo 4's release 343 will release new Spartan Ops maps and missions which pick up where Halo's solo campaign leaves off. Every episode has its own cut scenes and dialogue, and every episode can be played alone or with three friends.

The demo level - The Cauldron - sends you onto the battlefield with your own custom loadout, transferable between PVP and co-op, with all-new armour abilities and weapons available from the very start. There's a new boost pack, X-ray vision, a riot shield of sorts, and a new Covenant needler-like rifle, only without the purple rain and explosive money shot. Sprinting is a standard feature, Reach's 'blooming' reticle returns, and the whole thing still feels like Halo despite the new developers behind the wheel and the enemies you'll face along the way.

The Cauldron begins before Infinity even touches down inside Requiem, with a four-man Spartan IV team leading an assault on the entrenched Covenant forces by Pelican dropship. As the three mile-long Infinity drops out of slipspace it rams through the Covenant capital ships and opens up its MAC guns on everything it can't park on. This particular Covenant fleet is manned by the surviving religious zealots - the Grunts and Elites who remained loyal to the Prophets even in the face of extinction.

For them Requiem is holy ground; for everyone else it's a misunderstood relic and weapon of mass destruction which threatens every living thing in the galaxy. Infinity's job is to reclaim the planet for someone less likely to unleash an invincible, immortal army on the Milky Way as the final act in a bonkers holy war.

As the Infinity soaks up damage in orbit, the Spartan squad land on the surface - actually the inside of a huge metallic sphere. From the surface the sky is lit by an artificial sun which paints the world is shades of orange. If Bungie's Halo was blue and green then 343's Halo is orange and black - environments bathed in orange light with deep, black shadows; and enemies glowing bright orange beneath glossy black armour.

PROMETHEANS

The Forerunners are 343's answer to a decade of Covenant over-exposure. When you shoot an Elite he'll duck behind cover; kill him and his Grunt entourage will scatter - you've seen how they work and you know how to fight them, but the first time a Promethean dematerialises and pops up elsewhere, your entire gameplan collapses. The first few areas in The Cauldron - wide spaces in traditional Forerunner shapes - are populated by Covenant zealots but halfway in the Forerunners unleash an army of charging four-legged panther-like creatures and their heavily-armoured Promethean super-soldiers.

Standing around nine feet tall, the Prometheans deploy shield-generating drones and can teleport to safety when cornered. Toss a grenade and the drone will catch it and fire it straight back, but a carefully-aimed shot will explode the grenade, the drone, and leave the Promethean vulnerable.

343 showed as much in their on-stage demo, but here in The Cauldron the combat wasn't scripted. Our grenades missed their mark and our shots bounced harmlessly off the Prometheans' shields. Ten years of fighting the Covenant has made us soft and new enemies required new tactics. Fighting a Promethean isn't about chasing them, but about predicting where they'll go next and lining up enough firepower to catch them as they rematerialise.

Nope, 343's stageshow wasn't Halo, but it's not a reason to be scared, either. In every interview 343's Frank O'Connor and Kiki Wolfkill have given over the past twelve months they've said the same thing - 343 are in love with Halo's sandbox and they're committed to bringing it to life. The proof is there in The Cauldron - a series of bowl-shaped sandbox spaces where four players have room to attack from any angle they choose.

This, more than any other E3, was home to the safest scripted demos the show has ever seen. Every game got the same whizz-bang-pop explode-o-matic on-rails trailer designed to make Spike TV viewers douse their drawers and make everyone else rock back and forth with their head in their hands lamenting the death of videogames. It's the E3 where what you saw on stage has nothing to do with the game you'll play - Resident Evil's survival horror campaign was demonstrated by the world's toughest chopper bouncing off skyscrapers like a pinball, Splinter Cell: Blacklist is filled with shadow stealth missions but the stage demo was set in blinding sunshine, and Halo 4 came off like an intergalactic Call of Duty.

A kind of blindness and deafness sets in at E3 and the major publishers aren't helping. If everything looks the same from where you're sitting it's because developers didn't dare show their real hands until they got behind closed doors. Sit down with Halo 4 and pick up the controller and it feels new, but crucially, it feels like Halo - no rails, no scripting, no quicktime events, and no need to worry. 343 might just know what they're doing after all.

http://m.computerandvideogames.com/352437/previews/halo-4-hands-on-with-a-true-halo-sequel/

The OST is so good!

Just wanted to let you know that there's always someone nerdier than you...:

The guys behind the chief look so awesome btw!