It starts in a dark bunker with the rallying cries of an officer. The space flickers with the beams from our fellow soldiers' rifle-mounted flashlights, bringing out a dull gleam on the parked Warthogs in the shadows. Marines bellow bullish whoops before we mount up and proceed up a wide rough-hewn tunnel, intermittently lit by a chain of reddish floodlights.
This may not be the first level of Halo 3's campaign but it is early on. It seems an appropriate place to continue the adventure, given the ambiguous ending of Halo 2. The Covenant is splintered by civil war and Earth is under full attack from the remainder of its forces. Cortana has been captured by the mysterious Gravemind and Master Chief has announced his intention of "finishing this fight." But right now, in this grittily inauspicious bunker, all those plot complexities are moot. We're on reassuring terra firma, and allies are all around.
The game is taking place in the similarly dark, over-air-conditioned boardroom of Bungie's Seattle studio, which is a similarly inauspicious bunker-like building. A clutch of journalists from around the world are sitting ready, their faces illuminated by bright, new, LCD TVs. Behind them stand Bungie staff, arms folded and pensive. This is the first time anyone outside of Bungie and Microsoft has seen the single player focus of the game, the last part of a console-defining trilogy that began six years ago.
One by one, the screens brighten still further. Players are reaching the top of the tunnel. Before us spreads wide savannah under blue skies. Grunts flee before our thundering tires, up a gentle incline scattered with low trees and rocky outcrops. This is Silent Highway, the third level in Halo 3's campaign. It's a triumphant re-envisioning of Silent Cartographer's drop-ship beach landing -- a thrilling chase across open ground alongside your victory-hungry fellow soldiers.
And before we know it, we're back in the familiar instinctive, free-flowing combat that makes the Halo series so distinct among first person shooters. But though it feels familiar, it's not the same. The environments are more expansive than ever before, and they're spanned by fighting enemies and allied forces. Tens of Brutes and Grunts bearing varieties of armor and weaponry are visible and active at any one time, attacking both you and your fellow marines. The scale is immediately evident, and remarkable.
Naturalizing something only smoke and mirrors managed to achieve in its forebears has subtly changed Halo 3's battlefield. "In Halo 1 and 2 you'd have to spawn a load of guys at the front, and once the player has killed those guys, you'd spawn some guys behind a rock and so the entire battle would sort of play out the same way," says Jaime Greisemer, Halo 3's sandbox design lead, the man behind the new weapons and equipment, damage systems and AI behaviors. "But now we spawn a whole battlefield full of guys and have fun. If you want to engage these guys right up front, you can. If you want to stand up on a ridge, they'll start shooting back."
The result is a lot more variety. Encounters have even greater fluidity than before, organically ebbing and flowing with your actions. It's common to push forward too quickly and find yourself attacked from all sides, so apart from managing your weaponry, it's now important to tactically manage your troops. It's often wise to hang back and give support, allowing them to clean up less powerful enemies, and protect them by carefully taking out threats. In the same spirit, AI is the same, but more. A new group dynamic means leaders will audibly give their troops orders, such as to throw grenades, and they will, in an alarming barrage. Meanwhile, your troops interact with the environment with new sophistication. They'll hop over debris on the ground or kick it out of the way, and they'll open doors if you're in a vehicle.