Joystiq impressions: Halo 3 Game Films

by Kevin Kelly { Jul 12th 2007 at 8:00AM }

Bungie's Frankie took time behind closed doors to show us a new feature in Halo 3 ... Game Films. What's that, you ask? Since the hearing has started to return to our ears, post the Rock Band party in Hollywood, we'll let you know. We've started forming coherent thoughts again.

As you can probably figure out from the title, these are saved films of your played games in Halo 3. The cool thing is, they can be from either multiplayer or campaign games, can be saved, and you can also select your favorite clips from your films and upload them to be shared with others via Xbox Live. Pwn a warthog with a Spartan Laser and make it flip 47 times? Clip it out and save it. Snipe some from across the map? A few button clicks and it's immortalized forever ... or until your console dies.

Frankie showed us a game film they'd made in a map for Halo 3 called "Sandtrap". It's the biggest level they've ever created, and as you can imagine, it's heavy on vehicle use. It was a four on four match, and sure enough everyone jumped into one of the vehicles at the spawnpoint, and they all raced off towards each other and there were several deaths pretty soon into the gameplay.

Using the free cam mode to fly around, he found a particularly spectacular kill, and checked it out from several angles, reversed, paused and fast-forwarded it via a timeline on the screen, and even zoomed in and out showing us how you can use the free cam, or you can lock on to any player you chose. He did that throughout the rest of the match, and it even revealed details like where Player X was hiding when he fragged Player Y. It's a pretty robust way to check out a match after the smoke clears, and the films don't take up much space on your HDD. The film he showed us from Sandtrap was fairly long, had eight players in it, and was only "4 or 6 megabytes."

There are some limitations, mainly the fact that you can only view saved films from within the actual game engine (like with Burnout), and you can't actually edit the films, other than saving short clips. It'd be cool if this linked up to say, a Halo 3 channel in YouTube, allowing users on the web to watch spectacular kills and such. However, it's bound to be a tool that machinima directors will love to use, and it's a nice addition that adds a lot of replay value to the match you just played, and the game as well.

Tags: bungie, E307, Halo 3, Halo3, impressions

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Jake @ Jul 12th 2007 8:21AM

Nice flamebait right at the end there. That outta change this thread from honest discussion about this cool feature to more RRoD dribble. Stay classy Joystiq.

baby sea tuna @ Jul 12th 2007 10:30AM

Fuck it, even if your console does die, you can always just swap out the HDD to a fresh one.

It's almost like they knew...

dum dum @ Jul 12th 2007 8:24AM

"adds a lot of replay value to the match you just played"

Hehe, nice pun.

mo @ Jul 12th 2007 8:38AM

sweet

adds a lot of replay value to the match you just played haha :)

off topic:
does no one realize that smash brothers brawl release date was unveiled??
i mean thats kinda a big deal and there arent any articles about it

mo @ Jul 12th 2007 8:42AM

scratch that im just stupid

Stevo @ Jul 12th 2007 8:45AM

I loved the feature in the Beta and I can't wait until I can fast-forward and clip out what I wanted to see.

One of the best things about Halo are the "OMG DID YOU JUST SEE THAT?!?! Moments"--they happen so frequently but are rarely seen by anyone but yourself. This will certainly change that. Kudos to Bungie.

Stupidiot @ Jul 12th 2007 8:51AM

Yeah I had one of those moments, in which I was trying to jack someone's banshee out of the sky and he flew straight into the waterfall! I thought I had died but I then noticed that I was still sitting in the wrecked banshee, with the top blown off and everything. It wouldn't let me fly it so i was stuck in the river :(

EdgeofBlade @ Jul 12th 2007 10:42AM

It's a minor note, but this feature, if it uploaded to a video site, would probably use MS' Soapbox rather than YouTube. I wouldn't count it out yet. And of course, people will capture those videos and post them one way or the other.

BigCountryFarmr @ Jul 12th 2007 10:25AM

Even though you can only run the saved film through the in-game engine. You can easily just have a TV Tuner on the side to capture the saved film, to bring it on computer and do whatever you wish to the video...

horngreen @ Jul 12th 2007 11:48AM

This seems cool but we all have "that" kid on our friends list, you know the one you feel pity for? The kid who spends the WHOLE game telling you what just happened to him at EVERY given moment in the game. I can just seem him choking up everyones "inbox" with clips from games he just played. This will be a great tool for determining who to delete from the friends list.

rowd149 @ Jul 12th 2007 1:10PM

Noice :D Not particularly revolutionary, since sports games have had this feature for a LONG time, but eh, innovation isn't creation, it's putting the right things in the right places. Hey, maybe Halo will got in the opposite direction and deathmatch style games like this can be real irl(and paintball and lazertag don't count).

Megaqwerty @ Jul 12th 2007 3:03PM

Pardon me, but haven't we been doing this since Quake came out? While it's certainly great that console games are joining in on the fun, demo capacity isn't particularly notable.

Really ironic that Red Vs. Blue is ending just as this is coming out though.