More Hype for Halo 3

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The action flows through gullies, over hills, through installations and past crash sites, following the path of a raised highway. There's plenty of opportunity to explore the environment away from that central stream, too. There are wide vistas looking out over a precipice toward the Covenant excavation site (the vast crater seen in the first game trailer), and exploration is rewarded by extra dialogue and musical cues, plus the sight of a distant aerial conflict against the swirling cloudscape.

The highway is frequently broken. Shattered sections of road have fallen at angles into the landscape, forming spectacular crescents of mangled concrete against the sky. Such scenes show off the lighting engine: golden sun catches surfaces with subtle shine and contrasts with delicate pools of shadow.

It's easy to see that, visually, Halo 3 is a much closer expression of what Bungie's vision was for its predecessors, without departing in style from them one bit. It has far more detail -- the highway is littered with crashed cars and debris, and there's a lot more textural variety in worn human-made objects, lustrous natural features, and vivid Covenant war material.

Bungie's content manager, Frank O'Connor, later claims that the in-game graphics now closely resemble the original concept paintings. "I always think our games have something of a painterly quality because they're not photorealistic," he says. "It's a little risky because people, say, expect cars to look like the cars from Forza, but I think we've fulfilled our original vision, graphically at least."

As an introduction to vehicles for newcomers, Silent Highway's path steadily progresses from the Warthog charge at its outset to vehicle-to-vehicle combat against Brute Choppers, noisy, ugly motorbike-like vehicles with twin machine guns and enormous, appropriately brutal, front wheels that turn out to be good for mowing down anything in front of them. And then, during a subtly enforced on-foot section, it introduces a series of Wraiths that must be destroyed. They have been slightly tweaked from the previous games with a more explicit weak point -- an exhaust port on the rear with a cover. Two melee hits and they will blow -- if you can get in close enough.

And so the level ends. There's a palpable sense of relief from the crowded Bungie staff. "For the designers it's the first time they've seen people outside of the lab rats playing through," says community and franchise lead Brian Jarrad. He explains that the dev team had even been working on it earlier that very morning, a fact confirmed by the build date on the software we see on the menu screens. "It's a relief it's all working," he admits.

We take a minute with O'Connor in the studio's lobby, and he explains that the morning has been terrifying. "It's hard to explain to some of the guys here, but one of the processes of making a game is revealing it, and it's stressful," he says. "We've lost perspective, I think, on how it looks and how it plays. Multiplayer's fine -- everyone's confident about that. But the campaign in many ways has the most to live up to and prove." Why's that? "I think because of Halo 2's campaign, the fact it finished on a cliffhanger, the fact we didn't have time to do all the things we wanted to do. We certainly didn't have time to do all the testing and polish. This time around we've had all the time we needed."