A parte del nuevo trailer del 5 Dic. y demas...
Just call it 17.25 seconds," laughs Halo 3 design lead Jaime Griesemer. "It was probably shorter than that, but just say it's 17.25 seconds, anyway." No, Griesemer isn't modifying his statements about 30 seconds of fun in game design; he's talking about how many seconds of Halo 3 single-player footage I'd just watched.
At the end of the E3 Halo 3 teaser, Cortana declares, "This is the way the world ends." She's referencing the T.S. Eliot poem "The Hollow Men," and the line that follows is "not with a bang, but with a whimper." If Halo 3 is the way the world ends, these 17 seconds are a part of the bang -- not the whimper.
The single-player footage opens in the middle of a gray warzone. It's colored in a palette I haven't seen in the Halo-franchise. Everything is painted in grays -- the colors look like the New Caprica encampment on SCI FI's BattleStar Galactica. We're on what appears to be Earth -- the large, blown-out buildings aren't Forerunner architecture. It's a city, not unlike the now-dismantled New Mombasa (which was destroyed by a Covenant cruiser's Slipstream jump in Halo's previous episode).
The footage is all in-game and being played (it's been captured using Halo 3's new Saved Films movie feature). Think back to the E3 2003 presentation -- it's like that, but not dark. Master Chief's Battle Rifle looks different; has it been upgraded? It almost looks partially cobbled together. There appears to be wear and tear on the weapon -- the muzzle, while open in Halo 2, seems to be even moreso right now (Bungie tells us it is the same Battle Rifle, despite any perceived aesthetic differences). The scope still reflects light, and now it appears to use the real time reflection we saw in the H3 announcement teaser.
After a few quick steps forward, the Master Chief hops into the back of a Warthog with a Gauss cannon mounted on the back. There's the familiar whirr of Warthog engines humming to life and the hog spins out from underneath the building's overhang. After lurching out from beneath the overhang, the road opens into a staging area. Overhead there are explosions streaking the sky; in front of the Warthog is a Covenant Wraith tank. The familiar purple tank is swaying side to side and the Warthog screams past it. Master Chief rotates the gun backwards to target the Wraith tank and looks to the sky to see a Covenant Drop Ship taking off -- two banshees flying in formation fly by, right behind the Drop Ship. They don't stop to attack -- they just fly by.
The familiar whine of a Covenant Ghost howls and Master Chief lowers the Gauss cannon. But this Ghost is unlike any Ghost we've seen before. Instead of the two small wings that normally frame a Ghost, this model is more tube-like in design. The sound is unmistakable, just like its bumpy hover. There's a much larger driver at the back of this new Ghost-type vehicle -- a Brute. This is the first vehicle we've seen from what Griesemer describes as "the Brute Sandbox."
The vehicle appears similar in color to the Covenant Ghost. It sounds the same as well (but this is pre-Alpha code, so it could be placeholder sound), but the wings have been folded up and the result is a much thicker, tube-ish vehicle. As Master Chief lowers the Gauss cannon on the Ghost, the demo ends.
Visually, the demo is everything that it should be, considering the quality seen in the announcement teaser from E3 2006. While the game is technically in pre-Alpha with presumably a year left in development, the single-player footage looks incredible, so much so that it might make some people say "Gears of Huh?"
Gears of Huh? xD