Bungie brought the latest features for their latest shooter, Halo: Reach, to Comic-Con, including all-new multiplayer modes, new maps and a new vehicle. Finally, you will be able to drive a futuristic forklift in a Halo multiplayer.
For the developers final Halo game, Bungie will be adding to the popular Firefight mode by adding a few new options. Developers showed off a new Firefight options, including a new game type, Gruntpocalypse, described as "All grunts, all the time. Aim for the face," and deep, easily accessible customization options.
More warmly received by the hardcore Halo crowd was Halo: Reach's new Versus Firefight mode, which lets you play from both the Spartan and Covenant perspective in the popular cooperative mode. In the gameplay demo shown during Bungie's panel, a two-player match between Elites and Spartans went down, with a wave of Covenant soldiers warping in against a lone Bungie developer playing as a red Spartan soldier.
We watched from the perspective of a Covenant Elite armed with an energy sword. (In this one on one match, the remainder of the Covenant swarm appeared to have been AI controlled, by the way.) He showed off new, unique assassination animations for the sword weapon, vicious looking attacks that pulled out the camera to third person for cinematic effect.
Bungie also showed off Halo: Reach's newest multiplayer vehicle, a forklift. It controls awkwardly (intentionally) and features a fully working klaxon while in reverse.
Similarly impressive was the new Forge World. Bungie revealed it by showing off Halo: Reach's remake of the map "Blood Gulch," a classic arena now known as "Hemorrhage." While exhibiting the map, an up-rezed version of Halo 2's take on "Blood Gulch," Bungie showed off a bunch of new editing tools, designed to make creating custom Halo: Reach maps easier than any other game in the series.
Those new tools included minor things, like choosing custom colors for lights, to more powerful tools, like the ability to better create and control objects, apply custom physics types to those objects and scale items like teleporters. Players can snap rotate objects, have objects phase through other objects (and the world) and easily undo changes.
While cruising through the "Blood Gulch" recreation, Bungie devs took to the skies to show us what we were really looking at: Forge World. Going "beyond the canyon" the crowd realized the "Blood Gulch" map we were seeing was just a small slice of a much, much larger environment. Forge World was actually a huge map comprised of much smaller ones, with islands off shore, cliffs and ridges cut into a huge mountain and pre-constructed areas built into rock.
Players can define the playable borders of their Forge World map and customize it, making Forge World a map editing playground, with amazing opportunities. The developer released a new Vidoc of the tool on its official site, which shows in great detail what Forge World is capable of.
Bungie also showed off the new Xbox 360 Halo: Reach edition, the new sleek, silver hardware that sneaked out earlier today. They unboxed one onstage, then gave it away to a lucky fan.
Halo: Reach is out September 14 for the Xbox 360, with plenty of support after the fact expected.