When the rocket takes off, propelling your cyborg hero into space, it's easy to look away. In this launch sequence, which appears early in the upcoming Xbox 360 game Halo: Reach, the developers at Bungie cribbed from the bolted-on camera angles of a NASA mission. It's a smart visual allusion, but gamers have seen it before. And yet, when the spacecraft's stages have been jettisoned, and you're now in control of a Sabre attack ship in orbit, with squadrons of alien fighters swooping in, it's impossible to resist a stupid grin. For its final installment in the blockbuster Halo series, Bungie is proving that it's still the hardest working studio in the game business.
The space battle is part of a campaign mission that debuted today at E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) in Los Angeles, but we first saw it during a recent visit to Bungie's headquarters in Kirkland, Wash. This was a hands-off demo—even two weeks before the show, the sequence was missing key audio tracks and was considered too potentially buggy for me to play in the only conference room in the building that hadn't been filled with workstations. The mission is the fourth in the game, set towards the beginning of the battle for the planet Reach, a human colony that's in the process of being attacked by a warmongering confederation of alien species called the Covenant. Although it's the last Halo game Bungie plans to make (Microsoft, which owns the rights, is free to publish additional Halo titles), Reach is a prequel. It details the last days of the planet, and a fight that in the Halo mythology stands as a kind of futuristic Antietam. Reach is where humanity's super-soldiers, the Spartans, make their final stand against the aliens. Though the exact details are still under wraps, according to creative director Marcus Lehto, "the sacrifice that they make allows the events of the other games to transpire," setting the stage for the lone Spartan hero of the first three titles, Master Chief, to ultimately win the war. Other certainties: 500 million people will die. So will the planet. And Master Chief, gaming's biggest celebrity since Mario, will not appear, not even in a cameo.
It's a risky, ambitious swan song for the franchise that put the Xbox on the map, and later brought online multiplayer gaming out of the PC world and into the more mainstream console market. Reach is bleak and doomed, and missing the star of the series. From a gameplay perspective, it's even more of a risk—Bungie has thrown a slew of new weapons and gadgets, such as short-flight jetpacks, into the already chaotic firefights. Playing through the campaign mission, community manager Brian Jarrard showed off a few of these additions in a sequence that takes the story's central squad of characters, Noble Team, across the planet's rugged landscape, into a military launch site and, finally, into orbit.
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Which brings us back to that space battle—the first of its kind in the entire Halo series—and the reason that Bungie picked this particular mission to polish up and present to the world at E3. Although vehicles, even flying ones, are already common in Halo titles, designing new spacecraft (such as the humans' Sabers and the Covenant's Seraphim) and new combat mechanics drew significant resources from a project that was already at least three years in the making. It also seems to prove that—as Bungie wraps up its exclusive 10-year relationship with both Microsoft and Halo and prepares for a new decade-long partnership with Activision and a new, top-secret game project—the studio is simply churning out a respectable finale. Space battles in games are notoriously difficult to pull off—fighting in three dimensions can be both bewildering and boring, with players endlessly spinning until a target pops out against the star-dotted black.
Bungie's solution to the blandness of zero-g combat is, as usual, an injection of calculated chaos. The orbital environment roils with blues and greens, a natural phenomenon that's essentially Reach's larger, more spectacular version of the Northern Lights. When the planet swings into view, explosions flare across its surface. And while the battle-space is large, the action centers on defending a space station from incoming aliens. Without locking you into a narrow path, the sequence keeps you relatively focused, even as the battle escalates and ships start swarming your position. Maybe most important, it's a great, Haloworthy fight, with the two sides as distinctive as ever—the humans, fighting in what amounts to space shuttles armed with machine guns and missiles, and the more sci-fi-ish alien craft with their volleys of plasma bolts.
Spectating aside, without having played the mission, it's hard to confirm whether the extra effort paid off. Jarrard claims that everyone on the team knew it wasn't a necessary feature, and that it was a gamble. "But in our play tests, it's always one of the highest-rated parts of the game," he says. There are other surprises in Reach, including multiplayer modes that weren't playable in the recent public Beta, more new vehicles and a fully-featured level-editor that's so powerful, Bungie developers used it to create a few of the maps that will come with the game. Although it's already in preproduction on its next, non-Halo game, Bungie wants Reach to have the biggest dramatic punch of the entire series, and then to live online for years. If Reach is as good, and as bold, as it looks, the final days of Halo could last a very long time.
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