Halo 2 Beta Love
- September 10, 2004 12:26 PM PST
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We trek up to Microsoft and spend a day playing the elusive Halo 2 beta. Master Chief rocks.
Halo 2. It is the big bad game that everyone is anticipating and that few have played. Both Microsoft and Bungie have tightly protected the game, ensuring that what little information is available is controlled to the best of their ability.While the events surrounding the single player game are still a mystery, the details of the multiplayer mode were revealed to us last month when Microsoft hosted a gameplay session at the Bungie offices as the official beta was wrapping up. For two months approximately 7,000 Microsoft employees worldwide were lucky enough to play an Xbox Live enabled version of the game. Man, talk about job perks!
With 7,000 people plus their friends, relatives and children playing the game you might think that more than just a few snippits of information would leak out. Where were all of the screenshots? The direct feed movies? All of the inside details on gameplay? How did Microsoft keep everything quiet?
In order to participate in the beta you had to be a Microsoft employee, but you also had to sign a very tightly worded non-disclosure agreement or NDA. This agreement basically said that if any of the players talked about the game or leaked information they could lose their job. An NDA is also the reason why we were not able to bring you the details of our time with the beta before today.
Making the Trip
When the call came in from Microsoft that we were being invited up to the Bungie offices to play the game notice was short ?- a Microsoft PR representative phoned on a Monday to tell us that we would be playing that same Friday. We had known that a session was in the works for some time, but the exact day was up in the air until the last moment.
After arriving at the Seattle airport, it was time to pile into a taxi along with all of the other online journalists who made the trip. The taxi ride itself was full of anticipation as none of us had seen the game since the one-level demo at E3. Even though we had to catch a 7:30 AM flight from San Francisco, nobody was complaining. Once at Bungie everyone made a beeline for the demo room where the game was setup and ready to play.
Setting Up a Game
Before we started playing, the Bungie representatives gave us a quick overview of the beta. Because the code we were playing was designed to test network play and matchmaking not all of the visual elements were final. In game artwork was old and the UI was basic. What was there was functional, but not incredibly pretty.
One of the first things to do is setup your character. In the beta there were only two skins to choose from -- Master Chief and a Covenant Elite -- but you could customize the color of the character as well as the highlights. Further customization was done by adding a symbol to the player character. Sadly, Bungie has no plans to allow for custom symbols to be created -- you can only choose from the provided list. That said there are some nifty choices here, including a nod to Bungie?s first breakout title, Marathon.
