High Charity (cut Halo 3 level)
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 Concept art of John-117 looking at the Mausoleum of the Arbiter.
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High Charity ruins, Installation 00 |
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- "I took the Cortana mission, completely gutted it and rebuilt it in about three weeks—that mission where Gravemind is talking to you and Cortana is in distress. We didn’t have a lot of resources for that. It was a lot cooler on paper. And it had the transforming Flood, but I don’t think we did great there. It’s a kind of half-baked mission that needed to be there for the story, so we sort of threw it together, but I would’ve preferred not to do that."
- — Paul Bertone discussing his work on Cortana and highcharity.[2]
High Charity or HC was a planned level in Halo 3's campaign, eventually replaced by the retail level Cortana.
Description[edit]
When originally conceptualised, the level that would become Cortana in the final game was simply meant to be a level set inside High Charity, fighting against the Flood.[4] In this build, the High Charity level was to consist of two large found segments connected by the Hanging Gardens.[5] An early mission layout showcases the mission as progressing with the player eventually progressing into and through the Mausoleum of the Arbiter - with a planned reveal of an army of Flood-infected Arbiters which the player would have to battle. Later on, the level was intended to feature a sequence in which the player would find a Scarab with damaged legs, which Cortana would take control of and use to battle the Gravemind while the player held off invading Flood forms and shot off the Gravemind's tendrils that attempted to latch onto the Scarab.[6] The planned Flood-infected Arbiter enemies were prototyped in some form, with surviving tags recovered by 343 Industries named flarbiter. When creating the Floodfight updates for Halo 3: ODST, 343 looked at resurrecting the flarbiter enemies for use in the gamemode but ultimately determined the tags to have been cut from the game too early on in the process to be useable.[7]
It would end up being present as a selectable level in the Halo 3 Alpha.
Ultimately, the High Charity level was one of several levels cut for time.[8][9] At a similar time, the level Floodgate was cut-down around 75% due to issues with pacing, and thus much of the geometry developed for that mission was repurposed for Cortana. This process of gutting and rebuilding this mission was undertaken by Paul Bertone, who did the task in around three weeks.[2] Cortana was expanded around 75%, as the team felt the mission needed to be longer and harder to better-reflect the narrative stakes in the story.[10][11] These issues, combined with the lack of a dedicated designer for the level, meant that the developers at Bungie knew they were shipping what they considered to be a bad level, but were unable to do much about it. One idea pitched by Dan Miller to aid with navigation in the level was to place holographic footsteps on the ground to help show the player where to go, similar to the effect shown at the end of the level The Covenant.
The reuse of the Floodgate geometry originally developed for the crashed cruiser meant that the interior structure of High Charity contains some illogical design choices, such as the bridge of a Kerel-pattern assault carrier. The level posed numerous technical challenges for the developers, with the level's size requiring it be split into eight BSPs. Having to allow the geometry to have AI walk on it - even upside down or on walls - was also challenging, and collisions had to be faked for much of the level geometry. To help produce the feel of the city having been wrecked and crashed, the engineering team wrote a script that tilted the level geometry by fifteen degrees on export. Nonetheless, the AI pathfinding continued to be an issue, alongside questions of how to balance art vs. design needs for the level.[10][11]
Following the release of the Halo 3 Mod Tools, further details on the level were released including scripting for various encounters including but not limited to the Scarab and Mausoleum, dialogue, and a few music queues.[1]
Early revisions of highcharity were prototyped in the early Halo 3 engine on the original Xbox console. Screenshots of these early environment tests showcase a design intent to have High Charity's architecture resemble the environments the player finds themselves in in the Gravemind and High Charity levels of Halo 2.