Halo 3: Blackout
The long-awaited confirmation of a Halo 3 remake of Lockout has arrived. Below, I have included excerpts from Bungie.net’s article on this, along with all the screenshots they released of the map. This map, along with Ghost Town & Avalanche releases on April 15th via the Legendary Map Pack and will cost $10/800pts. Bungie is currently not aware of any plans by Microsoft to make the maps free in the future.
As its name suggests, Blackout is a remake of the Halo 2 classic Lockout, a cold series of interconnected platforms and walkways. Where Avalanche was retuned, reworked and massaged into something both familiar and unfamiliar, Blackout is a remake in a pretty strict sense of the word.
The setting is a UNSC Antarctic weather station with the completely arbitrary and stupid number z/41, it means nothing. Until the fans write some fictional significance into it and we eventually have to reverse engineer it into our canon. Thanks a lot, fans.
Its predecessor, Lockout, was set on a Forerunner installation. This time around we thought it would be cool to see what a human version of this same map would look like. So we created the fiction of it being a human weather station in the middle of frozen nowhere.
It’s a UNSC research station set in the Arctic, and I am pretty sure that this is also where all of the R&D on military grade Otter Pop rations took place. Early on I thought it was going to be an oil derrick, but that changed over time. We have some cool racks of glacier core samples, Doppler radar and other pieces of research gear strewn about, which makes for a nice touch – and when you look up to see them make sure you notice the beautiful Aurora Borealis in the sky. There were other, more outlandish settings done in the concept phase, but we’ll keep those secret as you never know when we’ll dig into that bag and pull it out for a future project.
What’s changed between Halo 2 and Halo 3 that affected the remake process?
PR: Equipment, field of view tweaks, higher resolution, widescreen, and Forge.
DM: I would guess the main change would be that jumping has changed and it made certain jumps easier to make. I wonder if the Assault Rifle’s influence also changed how the level plays vs the SMG. I think the level plays a little more mid-range because of the Assault rifle.
AM: The general pacing in MP changed between Halo 2 and 3, and the sandbox changed drastically, so that affects all remakes, but for Blackout specifically we wanted to keep things as close as possible to what was built in Halo 2. That means that the biggest changes come from actually gameplay as the way weapons and equipment interact on the map make a game on Blackout so much more different than a Halo 2 game on Lockout.
This is the first time I believe we’ve tried a full-blown nighttime multiplayer map. Originally I wanted it to take place on the back of a giant llama. I’m still bitter about this.
We almost didn’t do it because we already have Guardian, which was similar and ‘inspired by’ Lockout. But when I started up the DLC project we gathered a ton of data from the community, looked at the most played maps on Live and did some very unscientific polls on Bungie.Net and other community websites and Lockout was leaps and bounds ahead of every other map in terms of games played and the public demand. It also fits a need in our overall map portfolio to help round out the small maps that are available in Halo 3 and was a great artistic exercise.
The toughest part of making it was trying to be as faithful to the original as possible while also accommodating the inherent gameplay changes between Halo 2 and 3. The second toughest was getting Paul and the gang to fix their bugs on time and making sure lightmaps weren’t screwed all of the time.
Three more weeks!