In the weeks leading up to today’s release of the New Xbox Experience, reports circulated on the impact of installing games to the hard drive. While most games a modest decrease in load times, Halo 3, strangely, was performing worse than it did when running off the DVD. Installing to the hard drive requires that you insert the disc of the game you want to play into the DVD drive for the purpose of verifying you actually own the game. The game disc, however, isn’t spinning like usual, so even if loading times weren’t impacted, you wouldn’t have to hear that noisy disc drive while you played.

As it turns out, those reports weren’t erroneous. Bungie is advising people to not install Halo 3 to their hard drive, as internal tests have shown that doing so can increase load times. Because of that, there’s the concern that increasing load times will negatively impact multiplayer games. Longer load times slow down the process of actually getting into games, which means people will begin quitting, which results in more waiting or in lame, unbalanced games.

The technical explanation of what’s causing this is fairly complicated. The full explanation can be found here, but essentially the reason is that Halo 3 already makes use of the hard drive in order to speed up load times by temporarily caching data. Even though the game is now located on the hard drive, it doesn’t know that, so it does the same process but is unable to simultaneously read the data from the hard drive and write to the drive.

The most important detail of this story is whether or not we’ll see a fix — and, unfortunately, it doesn’t sound like one is coming. Bungie engineer Mat Noguchi explains, “While anything is possible, it would be a significant undertaking to try and retroactively patch/update Halo 3 to be optimized to take advantage of the HDD install features of NXE. The risks of doing that and the resources required has to be carefully considered against what could really be a rather insignificant change to the player experience.” While he says that Bungie will be monitoring the situation, with Halo 3: Recon and other projects underway, you can’t really blame Bungie for not diverting their time to rectify this problem.

Steam in its current form — a PC game store and Xbox Live-esque community service — does a lot of what Microsoft talked about doing years ago. But like the Live Anywhere concept, Games for Windows Live has largely drifted by the wayside. Yesterday, Microsoft released an update to GFW Live to improve upon the lackluster interface that has, so far, not come to be the unified PC gaming platform Microsoft hoped it to be. According to Shacknews, Microsoft will be releasing another update in the next few weeks that will add support for downloads of demos, videos, and DLC through a true GFW Live Marketplace application.

Microsoft has more in store than just that, though, as we learned in an interview that Shacknews had with GFW Live GM Chris Early. He said:

When we get to the place where we do distribute games digitally, will we have a digital rights management system? Maybe. Or maybe we’ll just continue to support the industry leaders in that. Because it is a hard thing to do. You talk to any of those companies, and that is their whole company, is doing digital rights management.

Asked about that first bit — regarding when Microsoft begins distributing games digitally — Early admitted, “Clearly it’s on our road map.” That initiative will come once they’ve fully rolled out their plans for allowing DLC through the Marketplace.Early believes this was the right order to release things in, claiming “this is something that you can’t do today on a PC, right? You can buy digitally through a bunch of places.” While that’s not entirely true — just look at Bethesda, who has offered DLC for games through its website — a unified place for DLC on PC isn’t a half-bad idea. Whether this means we’ll begin seeing more premium DLC on PC is unclear, but we can hope that the mod community will manage to keep that in check or, at the very least, make sure we don’t see any companies trying to sell us a set of horse armor.

The release date for Halo Wars got a bit more specific today as Microsoft announced the Xbox 360 exclusive RTS will be released worldwide in February. Naturally, given that it’s a Halo game, you’ll get to dish out some extra cash for the Limited Collector’s Edition which is full of Halo goodies. Just don’t expect anything quite as substantial as a helmet for a small, cat-sized animal of your choice.

Among the contents of the collector’s edition is Halo Wars: Genesis, a graphic novel detailing a mission involving the Convenant’s interest in Harvest; a unique Honor Guard Wraith for use in-game; early access to the three new Halo 3 maps that comprise the Mythic Map Pack; and two other slightly more ambiguous items. One of them is the Spirit of Fire patch, which the press release explains lets you “start the journey as an official Spirit of Fire crew member.” The other is a collection of six Leader cards — that’s not a particularly clear description. We know Leaders are essentially the game’s Hero units, but it’s unclear if these are simply trading cards with the Leader units plastered on them or something more significant. We asked Microsoft and they let us know they’re simply trading cards and that they won’t have any impact on the game.

This package will run you $80 — not a terrible deal if this actually gives you the actual Mythic Map Pack, since that’s likely to cost $10 on its own. As an extra incentive to preorder, certain retailers will offer a download for a unique in-game Warthog sporting flame decals. That seems a bit out of place in a Halo game, but people do love them some flame decals.

The Halo 3 sound production team was among those who received top honors at the 24th Annual Technical Excellence & Creativity Awards. The team walked away with the award for Interactive Entertainment Sound Production.

Other teams honored at TEC include sound production for Robert Plant’s Raising Sand, The Police reunion tour and The Foo Fighters for the “The Pretender” as well as Universal Pictures’ The Bourne Ultimatum. it’s good to see videogames are finally being recognized for their excellence. It’s not the first time the industry has received kudos with other forms of entertainment, but it does give me hope that eventually videogames will more commonly be thought of as an art form.

As expected, the new teaser trailer Bungie released yesterday has been picked apart frame-by-frame with various details being discovered. One such detail was a message that read, “Maddie, where are you?” While that might not mean anything to some, others took it as a reference to the highly publicized disappearance of young British girl Madeleine McCann last year. The three year-old went missing while on vacation in Portugal with her family and has yet to be found — naturally, this threw some up in arms after the suspicious message was found in yesterday’s trailer.

Bungie quickly responded to a thread made on their official forums. Luke Smith wrote, “As always, all of the characters in our games are fictional. Any similarities between real life and the characters in our games are purely coincidental.” He added, “That said, this is both an unfortunate and untended coincidence.”

With that squared away, there are other details that have been found in the trailer — perhaps most notably a date of 01/06/09, which we could take as a release date this upcoming January. There is also the Xbox Live Marketplace description for the trailer to take into account, which refers to the game as a “new Halo 3 campaign experience.” What do you make of all this?

After an ominous countdown on their website, Bungie has revealed a new teaser trailer for a Halo 3…something. The weird thing is, the video doesn’t really explain what it’s supposed to be about. Really, if it weren’t for the Halo 3 logo at the end, I’d have no idea what this was for at all. The only other glaring clue to what this teaser is meant to show is it’s description on Xbox Live, which reads:

“High action and deep mystery await players in the new Halo 3 campaign experience. Prepare to Drop!”

I’d say that’s a pretty clear indication that some new story missions are on the way for the game. It’s hard ot say how that would fit into the existing story though, so maybe it will be a prequel of sorts? We’ll have to see.

We seem to be on the verge of a major announcement from Bungie, what with the Superintendent surfacing once again on Bungie.net, rambling on about “emergency data corruption” and yielding to uphill traffic. But for today, there’s no puzzle solving to be done — it’s just a straightforward release of new Halo 3 goodies with Title Update 2.

None of the major feature upgrades we inferred might be in the update have turned out to be true, unfortunately. And while, yes, Bungie did shoot down those rumors last month, it wouldn’t be the first time they denied the existence of a feature only to have it show up after all.

Many of Title Update 2’s enhancements are on the backend, meaning you probably won’t see any real impact on the game itself (other than hopefully running into fewer cheaters). As for what you will see, there are two items of significance: playlist ratings and new Achievements.

You might cast off new Achievements as merely something for the Gamerscore whores out there, but you’d be wrong. Three of the Achievements — each dubbed a “Vidmaster Challenge” — will net you zero points to your Gamerscore, but Bungie promises “there will (eventually) be a pay-off. We’re not going to spoil the fun just yet but suffice it to say that gamerscore isn’t everything. There is a pot of gold at the end of the Vidmaster rainbow and it is something you will want. More details later.”

If you take a look at the Achievement list for the game you’ll find more than just the new ten that have been released by Title Update 2 — there are now a total of 79 Achievements for the game, some of which reference unannounced maps, new skulls, and ‘Mythic’ maps. Bungie’s not ready to talk about any of these details yet though, so we’ll have to sit tight and wait to find out what the deal with these is.

Playlist ratings will enhance your ability to track progress in matchmaking. Rather than simply having your Trueskill and global rating (which measure your skill and amount played, respectively), each playlist will get its own individual military rating. This will indicate the amount that you’ve played that particular playlist. Nothing is being lost with this addition; your global rank will be counted on top of the individual playlist ratings.

With all that’s going on in the world of Halo right now, we’ve decided to take a look back at the last year in Halo developments. Look for that and some tasty theories on what this Superintendent business is all about in the coming days on 1UP.

You’ve probably heard the unsettling news that Ensemble Studios, developer behind Age of Empires, would be closing its doors following the release of its newest game, Halo Wars. Apparently though, an RTS wasn’t the only Halo game that the company had in the works. Gamasutra recently learned that the studio was also at one time working on an MMO set in the Halo universe. But this one’s cancellation had nothing to do with Microsofts decision to dissolve the developer; it seems the game began development in 2006, before ultimately being canceled later in 2007. All that’s left now though is a collection of concept screenshots of what might have been. Of course, “what might have been” looks an awful lot like a World of Warcraft ripoff, so maybe this is for the best.

Via Gamasutra

Ever since Bungie flew away from Microsoft’s nest, fans have been wondering just what the studio is up to these days. Well, they may soon get their answer since rumor now has it that they’ll be announcing their latest game next week. This news comes from an industry insider that got in touch with Gamer.tm to drop this juicy bit of info. Unfortunately, that person couldn’t confirm just what sort of game it would be (i.e. “Halo 4″ or not); only that the unveiling would take place at an event in Europe this following week. That same source also revealed that Rare is apparently announcing their next game at around the same time.

So to recap: next week, two big studios, two big game announcements. Unless maybe the two companies have joined forces to make Perfect Dark: Secret Agent Master Chief? I would so buy that.

Via Gamer.tm

Since the announcement that Ensemble Studios would be closing after Halo Wars’ release, many gamers have been asking one specific question: is the game going to suck now? It’s a very legitimate question given the circumstances, and now lead designer, Dave Pottinger, has stepped up to address that very topic on the official Halo Wars site:

That’s a totally fair question. The Ensemble Studios’ closure announcement certainly affects the perception of Halo Wars. Despite that risk, we put our people first. Telling our employees ASAP was the right thing to do. I give Microsoft quite a bit of credit for letting us do that.

We’ve worked with Microsoft to create the best set of options for every employee’s future. For example, there is a deal in place for a new company that will employ some people from Ensemble. It’s premature to announce much about that venture, but it is definite that the new company will pickup and support Halo Wars going forward.

That said, I’m sure some folks will leave before Halo Wars ships. I’ll applaud them for doing what is right for their happiness. Ensemble has always been about our commitment to employees. We’re not going to forget that at the last minute.

We’ve done everything possible to retain everyone through the end of Halo Wars. Any reports about people already being laid off are 100% false. Full timers are still employed and have a job until well after Halo Wars. Contractors still have their contracts. Our goal is to keep everyone here until the game is done.

Halo Wars is going to ship. We want Halo Wars to be awesome. If you’ve read any of the E3 or Leipzig press coverage, you know the game is good. Plus, the new company will support Halo Wars via title updates and DLC.

Finishing the game will be harder now, but it will get done and be great.

Dave Pottinger
Halo Wars Lead Designer

I’m still a little skeptical. The thing is, while the game might be excellent when it does come out, the chances are pretty good that any future patches or online support will be stymied by a smaller development team. So if you were planning to pick up the game for it’s online components, you may want to consider just how much bang you’ll actually be getting for your buck.

Via Halo Wars Site