Halopedia:Bungie Weekly Update 09-06-03

This is the Bungie Weekly Update for September 6, 2003, written by Brian Jarrard.

Bungie Update
Another week has come and gone and we're creeping closer and closer to the finish line. Halo for PC is in the final stretch and both Bungie and Gearbox are still hard at work tying up loose ends. Our own Michel Bastien has made it out of Plano, TX alive and is back at home in Redmond this week to give us a quick update on the latest developments:

All right!... You guys came very, very close to getting a "special" Halo update directly from Hamilton’s fingertips. But no such thing – he wussed out. That’s too bad, at least for you, because Hamilton has a couple of good stories to share... From my perspective, I'm not too bummed since these stories involved me doing (or saying!) things I shouldn’t.

To be fair, he’s extremely "busy" play testing our latest Halo RC disc (RC stands for Release Candidate). Indeed, we have reached the point where we are burning CDs we could potentially ship. Then, it’s testing and testing and testing... And Hamilton and I are pitching in, as are many others around Bungie (we’re really only sidekicks to our army of testers). The RC cycle feels very bizarre – on one hand, you’re testing like crazy, looking for the one show stopper that would force you to pull the product off the shelves were it discovered post-ship (you know, your typical "Uninstalling formats your hard drive" issues... who would ship with such a bug!?!). On the other hand, uncovering such an issue means fixing it, burning another Release Candidate and, well, starting testing all over again. Pain.

How much time will be spent in the RC cycle is hard to predict but so far, so good. I’ll keep you posted!

We have gradually been coming back from Texas this week. Phil, one of our Microsoft bad-ass graphics engineers who teamed up with Shawn from Gearbox to polish the visuals in the game, came back on Tuesday. Andy, our beloved British development manager, came back late Wednesday night and Hamilton and I flew back early yesterday morning. At this moment, Roger, our test lead, is still hanging around at Gearbox, finalizing a thing or two for which it’s easier to be on site. I must admit it’s good to be walking around Bungie again and I’m now looking forward to catching up with Halo 2...

Now, back to my desktop PC and my game paused on "Truth and Reconciliation". I’m going for the full play-through of the game... one last time!

-mbastien

Thanks for the update Michel! Hmmm... do you think he's playing Legendary or taking the easy way out? Maybe if we're lucky I can persuade Hamilton to share some of those incriminating stories with us at a later date.

Around here it's just test, test, test. One thing that I personally found interesting (though others feel it's totally boring) while talking with some of the testers is all the work invovled to localize a game like Halo PC. Think about it... Halo for PC will be released in 8 different languages. All requiring translation, testing, etc.. I think that's pretty intense but maybe it's just me. =)

The featured map of the week over at the Microsoft Halo PC site is Ice Fields. Very little has been shown of this map so far so be sure to head over there and check it out. Also, the Gearbox site has also posted some new screens including a shot of "Sapien," one of Halo's editing tools.

We're almost there. Stay tuned.