“You’ve got a lot of questions for me. I’m afraid I don’t have all the answers. For those we have to dig deep and turn to the men and women who made Bungie what it is today.

Last night someone asked me to summarize the studio’s overall mood. Are we excited? Are we nervous? Are we scared? I can answer that. The answer is yes. We are all those things. But mostly, we are optimistic. On the heels of the announcement of our publishing partnership with Activision Blizzard and on the eve of our Halo: Reach multiplayer Beta launch, we are eager to see what our future holds. Perhaps more so, we are eager to give you a glimpse.”

“Under the terms of the agreement, Activision will have exclusive, worldwide rights to publish and distribute all future Bungie games based on the new intellectual property on multiple platforms and devices. Bungie remains an independent company and will continue to own their intellectual property.”

“Today, we’re poised to open a new chapter in Bungie’s history-one that begins with a partnership between Bungie and Activision and ends where we always knew it would, with World Domination,” stated the Bungie official blog . “Our Next Big Thing now has a concrete path, leading from our studio to the platforms of our choosing. The business formalities are behind us. Our Constitution remains unchanged. We are still Bungie, still independent, and now we are free to bring our stories to an ever bigger audience. We chose to partner with Activision on our next IP because of their global reach, multi-platform experience and marketing expertise. From working together over the past nine months on this agreement, it is clear that Activision supports our commitment to giving our fans the best possible gaming experiences.”

Thomas Tippl, Chief Operating Officer of Activision Blizzard said, “Bungie has developed some of the most compelling and successful games, multiplayer experiences and thriving fan communities, and this alliance underscores our long-standing commitment to foster the industry’s best creative talent. Our unprecedented partnership with Bungie will enable us to broaden our pipeline of exciting new games as we continue to strengthen our industry position and pursue long-term growth opportunities.”

This confirms that, for the first time, Bungie will release multi-platform games. No word on what the first franchise will be, but we do know it’ll release across all platforms. There’s even talk of the Wii.

It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out. Huge deals like this are not uncommon, and Bungie developers have let slip in the past that they would like to work on platforms other then the 360, just to see what they can achieve elsewhere. The most interesting part is creating an alliance with a publisher who so blatantly mistreated its own employees at Infinity Ward (a developer who is fully owned by Activision, rather then a third party with a deal).

Source: [Joystick.IGN]

Watch the latest Vid Doc from Halo creators Bungie below.

Want more? Then check out the super expensive Legendary edition pics below, Mcfarlene diorama, epic amounts of crap that you never read and (the usually reserved for Bungie staff) flaming helmet for use in multiplayer. Its going  to come in at around €150 but I wont lie to you, I’m going to be paying it.

Legendary

Boom!

He said:

Bungie finally admits that they had to up the ante on the Halo franchise instead of using just the Halo brand name to sell game copies.

Former 1up staffer and now Bungie community manager Lukems left a follow-up comment on HipHopGamers’ second post:

I’m just posting to inform you that nowhere ever has Bungie said anything that is alleged in this video. Obviously as a developer you keep your eye on what’s going on around you; after all, we’re all gamers ourselves.

The ‘news’ tagline of this story however is: ‘Bungie finally admits that they had to up the ante on the Halo franchise instead of using just the Halo brand name to sell game copies.’

You then go on to say ‘this is incredible news’. Your title also claims ‘Sony inspired bungie’s Halo Reach Development.’

To reiterate, we always look at other games almost on a subconscious level. We’re always playing the latest releases, just like any other gamers are. So in that way we’re naturally inspired simply by the everyday progress of the industry itself. Nowhere did we say we have been specifically ‘inspired’ by anything however.

Frankly, HipHopGamer, if it were up to me i’d have you sued for making up nonsense like this and presenting it as news, but unfortunatley i doubt the brass at Bungie care enough to even bother.

- Luke

In a new video, though, the venerable “internet journalist” has gone out with a video playing the cool cat that he is. He’s so dreamy and non-chalant about the whole thing…

There is more insight on this podcast from thebitbag (skip to 1:20).

Grab Bag, Free For All, Headhunter, Stockpile and Generator Defense

The first three are all new versions of old game types, the last two are where it gets interesting.

I’ll let Bungie explain:

Stockpile is a little more complex. Two teams scrap over four neutral flags. Flags are scored by bringing them into your team’s designated territory and protecting them until the timer reaches zero. Flags are collected every sixty seconds.

If the flag is outside the zone, even if you have it in your hands, it won’t count. If you allow a player on the other team to infiltrate your territory and toss all your flags outside the clearly marked boundaries, those won’t count either.

There’s two ways to win.

Score a total of 10 Flags.
Score the most flags in the ten minutes allotted.

Sounds pretty simple, right? It’s actually really nuanced. There’s a lot of push/pull going on and a coordinated team can employ multiple strategies to keep things mixed up.

Generator Defense. Three Spartans defend three generators from an all out assault launched by three Elites.

Why only three per team? We’re testing out some pretty specific stuff on the networking side of things. In fact, the entire concept of Generator Defense was created simply to support what’s actually called Network Test 1. It’s just that Network Test 1 doesn’t sound like something anybody would really get pumped up to play, dig?

But Generator Defense? That sounds awesome! And actually, it really is. As the Elites begin to damage each generator, you’ll be notified with audio and visual cues in your HUD. If you want to prevent them from exploding, you need to get up close and activate the temporary blast shield. Each time you engage the lock down, you’ll earn thirty seconds of breathing room.

At the start of each round, you not only get to pick from a broad selection of Load Outs, you also get to choose your general spawning location. Choose wisely. As an Elite, you’ll need to destroy all three generators to win the round.

Bungie’s forum is always populated with cool information and tid-bits, but now we can get a nice comparison of Halo: Reach.

Most instances of these things we see games being pitched against their previous versions, or even the competition. Only today we posted news about CliffyB saying how much nicer Gears 3 is to Gears 2.

Bungie are confident people. Very confident in their new product indeed. So much so that they’ve posted a comparison between Halo Reach: Alpha to Halo: Reach Beta, as well as Reach versus Halo 3. And damn, it looks good!

So as cool as that multiplayer video was a few weeks back, some question were raised. The assassinations raised a few questions about (for example) how vulnerable the attacking player would be to other players attacks during the animation etc etc etc.

So Bungie (who have continued to update their ‘weekly update’ every week since Halo3 came out) have tried to appease concerns with the below info. Turns out they were all worrying in vain as its pretty much the old Halo 3 system with some new frills.

In the ways to die category, let’s clear up the 120 degrees comment Sage and Josh made concerning when and where you can engage your death dealing assassination flourish. It’s actually more interesting than you might think. (And it’s actually the same system employed in Halo 3.)

The 120 degree cone is actually based on where you happen to be looking at the moment the nefarious assassin strikes. Your “Aim Vector.” Picture a triangular with its origin point emanating out behind you. If it helps, you can think of Aim Vector as the camera’s current position. If your assailant is within that 120 degree zone outside your vantage, and close enough to you to engage the coup de grâce, then you’re going down. Keep in mind, they don’t necessarily need to be directly behind you if your head’s turned.

The assassinations that appear to be happening right in front of the player’s eyes in the Multiplayer trailer, are really occurring in the second stage of the assassination. It’s already over and the assassin has spun his victim around to deliver the finishing blow with a cool, full frontal flourish.

Oh, and if you watched the April Fools’ Day ViDoc and wondered why the Elite wasn’t going down with one standard backsmack, there’s no need to worry, when you position yourself on your opponent’s six, regardless of whether or not they rock the mandibles, you’ll only need to deliver one, clean crack to the back to snag the kill.

Here is that April Fools day video mentioned above, for LOADS more info including weapon walkthroughs head over to bungie.net:

Fail. I hate April Fools

Along with this economic system there will commendations (challenges to people who play MW2) to achieve which will give additional credits to the player.

I tell you what, lets have Bungie explain it. Read on!

A. Credits, Rank, and Commendations are all part of something new to Halo: Reach – Player Investment. The role and goal of Player Investment is to reward all types of Halo players, regardless of their preferred playstyle.

Let’s roll through those terms one at a time:

Rank – Rank as you knew it in Halo 3, is dead. The concept of Rank has been revamped and divorced entirely from Trueskill (more on that in a few paragraphs) and the concept of EXP (at both the Global and Playlist levels) has also been discarded.

In Halo: Reach, Rank is a global, cross-gameplay-mode-encompassing representation of the time you’ve spent in the game. So whether you’re a Campaign-only guy, or a Matchmaking-only girl, or you swing both ways, you’re going to be seeing that Rank advance as you keep playing.

Rank will increase over time as players earn more Credits. Credits are the lifeblood of the Player Investment system and they can be earned in all of Reach’s gameplay modes, through a number of systems.

Finishing games and Winning Games in Matchmaking – For the purposes of the upcoming Public Beta, this is going to be a significant source of earning Credits. There are very clear constants in the ways that Credits are earned in Reach across game modes and at the heart of those constants is Time. In the long run, the majority of Credits will be earned from this bucket.
Commendations – Commendations are persistent, aggregating awards that will advance through gameplay. When players are progressing Commendations, they’re going to be earning Credits – and when Commendations reach milestones, players will earn a bunch of additional Credits. Most importantly, Commendations serve as virtual scouting reports with information on what type of a player someone is, what weapons they use and what tricks they bring to the table. Commendations in matchmaking won’t aggregate specific actions – like say, a Sniper Headshot – but instead, a Headshot. The Beta will have a small subset of Commendations at very limited levels of completion.
Challenges also contribute to Credit earn (among other things), but there’s a question coming up about those later, so I’ll save it.
Achievements – Spoilers! There will be Achievements in Reach and completing an Achievement will give you some small amount of Credits.
And more…

This new Rank has jack and squat to do with your Arena rating. The two are wholly unrelated and having an amazing Arena rating won’t directly correlate to how many Credits you earn per hour, per day or per minute.

Indirectly, however, we fully anticipate an acceptable delta in Credit earn moment to moment between good players who win regularly against a guy whose never played Halo before.