Bungie Weekly Update/05-11-01

This is the Bungie Weekly Update of May 11, 2001, written by Matt Soell.

Bungie Update
This is going to be one of those painfully brief Updates. The team has put in an enormous amount of effort this week, but most of it was bug fixes and playability tweaks. There won't be a Halo Update next week as we'll be in Los Angeles for E3. Of course, we'll also be at the Bungie FanFest next Wednesday, and who knows what will happen then? If you're in the area, be sure to check it out - see www.bungie.net or http://bs.bungie.org for details. And keep an eye out for the HaloMobile.


 * We got the Marines, Warthogs and dropships to play nicely together this week. In particular, the dropship no longer drops Warthogs on hapless marines.
 * The AI is now aware of vehicles; that is to say, if you roll up in the Warthog the Marines are smart enough to hop in.
 * The Covenant Elite are significantly more bad-assed than they have been in the past. You want to make sure you take them out quickly and completely. Wounding them just pisses them off.
 * We got a lot more sound in the game, including some context-sensitive music and roughly 1400 separate dialog tags.
 * You can hurt people by slamming vehicles into them. Now you no longer need a friendly Marine manning the chain gun to make the Warthog a dangerous weapon.
 * Rob beautified many things, and Shiek piled in a slew of new effects, including a lovely plasma grenade effect.
 * There was a LOT of multiplayer testing this week. And it was a LOT of fun.