Halo Reach

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Through Bungie.net, the makers of Halo have been continuously pushing the boundaries of what to expect out of a videogame community site. Stats and replays, tools for tracking success, and much more are just a click away. With the release of Halo: Reach, Bungie will be expanding its web presence once more, and we've got the first details on those upgrades.

 

Here you'll find info on the redesigned look, incoming Facebook-style media tools (saved screenshots will be tagged with each Spartan's gamertag!), and the possibilities of a mobile version of the Bungie.net experience. Bungie's lead web engineer, Chris Gossett, chatted with us to explain the upgrades.

 

IGN: When you guys released Halo 3, obviously Bungie.net was pretty far ahead of what everyone else was doing as far as community sites. But what was the first thing that you guys sort of slapped your forehead on and thought, "Man, we really should have had that in the game?"

 

Chris Gossett: I think the big one we slapped our head on, not only on the game but also the website, was just a good, robust file search. We had all this user-generated content that people were creating, like the screenshots and films, and it was really a challenge for people to find all that content. I think about a year later we actually tried to rectify that a little bit on Bungie.net and we launched, basically, a whole file searching, tagging sort of infrastructure.

You'll obviously see a lot of that in Reach. People who started playing Halo 3 and came to Bungie.net, they probably didn't see a lot of this, they just saw their file share which was very kind of personal, but they couldn't really find anything in the community. But if they continued playing Halo 3 and got to maybe a year, year and a half in and started using Bungie.net, they started realizing, hey, we've got a lot of really cool features and a lot of great content that people use today. I think incorporating some of that into the game for Halo: Reach was also a big priority -- you'll see some of that in there.

 

IGN: So could you give the general outline of the new things that users of Bungie.net can expect to find when Halo: Reach launches next month?

 

Chris Gossett: Sure. You'll still have your Halo: Reach service record, with all of your stats from each of the different game modes. In Halo 3 we had some campaign stats, and some of your matchmaking stats. In ODST we had some campaign stats, some firefight stats, but no real matchmaking stats. For Reach we have all three plus some more stuff. The service record itself is going to be your giant hub overview of what you can [do]. You'll build this thing out as you play through the various different types of game modes, using files, playing matchmaking, earning credits, earning commendations and that sort of stuff. That's that first page that we sent over, it was the overview of you, here's what you can identify with because this will be your player model, this will be your emblem, this will be your rank, all that stuff.

 

IGN: So that reflects the changes you make to your custom Noble Six in the campaign?

 

Chris Gossett: Yes, absolutely. As you go into the game and you buy more pieces of armor and then you go into the armor customization screen and tweak that out, it'll actually upload a screenshot of what you look like up to Bungie.net and we will use that on your service record. It's not really shown in this first image, but if you click on that image, you'll actually get a higher-res version of the whole player model. That's your player model with your colors and everything.

 

IGN: What am I seeing in this next image?

 

Chris Gossett: The [next] one's the oldie-but-goldie, the game history list. We've actually been able to tweak some things and we can now do some sorting by map and by playlist, so it's a little bit easier to find things. And then we've also added some charting, which is interactive, so you can mouse over some of the charting, find a particular game that stands out to you, either by points or by rating or maybe it was a win or a loss, and be able to go straight to that game. So it definitely makes it much more navigable than it was before, as opposed to just a giant list of games.

IGN: It looks like you guys are bringing back heat maps, obviously, where the kills during a match were generated.

 

Chris Gossett: Yep, we'll definitely have heat maps, and we've also expanded that to incorporate Firefight games. So we'll continue to track your aggregate Firefight heat map over time as well.

 

IGN: Take me through this next screen.

 

Chris Gossett: This one is basically Game Viewer 2.0. For people who played Halo 3 and used Bungie.net, there was the Game Viewer that would generate a screenshot of where all the kills and deaths happened and draw lines. And maybe a timeline that was superimposed into that same image, of emblems and where those occurred. This is a little more interactive, so you can now mouse over each individual kill and death and you'll get a little pop-up of who that was. The timeline is now interactive so you can see things like the point in the game you got those kills and deaths.

Obviously you can filter by who was in the game, if you want to just look at your deaths or somebody else's deaths or your own kills. The screenshots below are different views into the map. These ones in particular are static views that we've chosen, there are about 15 per each multiplayer map that you can use and look around at various angles. It'll remember your state as well, so if you're viewing yourself and you're looking at just one little time-slice and you change around the view, you'll actually rotate around and see where each one of those kills was at. It makes it a lot easier to determine...where was that red X? Where was that kill? If you remember from the Halo 3 one, it was difficult to find that a lot of times.

 

IGN: What else in these shots is particularly new?

 

Chris Gossett: Obviously, we still have the file share. You can still do basically everything you could do with Halo 3 about a year and a half after launch. Then career stats have just gotten a complete blowout. We now have so many career stats in so many different game modes that everything is segmented by game type. We have a little summary that tells you how you're doing, top-level stats for each of the different game modes.

 

One thing that we didn't have before, for Halo 3 or ODST, was stats by playlist. That's something that people have always been asking for, so we definitely added it. A lot of times it's like, hey, I'm playing in the Grifball playlist, but all of those Foundry stats are lumping in with my other Foundry stats from all the other matchmaking games I've been playing. It obviously doesn't make a lot of sense, because my number one kill is now the gravity hammer. Having it by playlist enables you to segment it out and you see, oh, yeah, all those kills came from the Grifball playlist, not from this other playlist where you're playing with normal weapons. That's one of the new things in the career stats.

Again, I think we have a few more views showing that we are indeed tracking every weapon kill you have, enemies is there -- it's mostly for campaign and for firefight tracking -- all the kills that you've gotten on enemies and which enemies have killed you. The medal chest is back, but there's far, far more medals in Halo: Reach than in any of our previous games. The new thing with this is that, again, it does segment by game mode, certain medals that you couldn't earn in one game mode won't appear here so you don't feel like you need to earn something you can't earn. [That] was a problem in Halo 3 that we rectified with this.

 

IGN: So it's a way for people to track their progress for each game mode, as opposed to feeling a little lost or directionless.

 

Chris Gossett: Right. We've always had people who were trying to fill out their medal chest, they feel like it's a badge of completion, and there were certain medals that they couldn't earn for certain game types because they wouldn't have the right game types in matchmaking at the time. There may still be some of that, but at least now, if you're playing Firefight and there's Firefight-only medals, they're not going to show up in your Arena medal chest for example. You won't feel like there's no way you can earn that medal anymore.

IGN: So tell me about file search and video.

 

Chris Gossett: Yeah, this is basically a file search view of screenshots. This is showing a grid view of all the screenshots that are part of this search, and tagging it through this. We still have everything we had in Halo 3: file tagging, filtering and sorting by map and file type. And then you can also search by tags, obviously, so if you're looking for funny screenshots that are maybe on a particular map, you can do that, and the same thing with rendered films. These are all user-generated tags. There's really not much restriction on it, and we try to bubble up the good tags, or at least tags that get voted up in the right way. This has worked pretty well for Halo 3 and finding Halo 3 content, and we just carried it over into Reach. I think this is something you can also do from inside the game, so if you tag something in the game, you'll see that same thing tagged on Bungie.net, the systems are completely linked together.

 

IGN: Tell me about the Facebook-style gamer tagging it looks like I'm seeing.

 

Chris Gossett: This is new to Halo: Reach. When you upload a screenshot to us, it'll also upload camera information and who's actually in the screenshot. That enables us to draw this Facebook-style box around who is in there, so if you look at [this image], my poor friend Green here is getting assassinated by his other friend, and you can mouse over and see who he is.

You get a little summary of who he is and if you go to [the next shot], you get a sense, like, oh, that's the guy doing the assassination. We're actually drawing links there as well, so if you click on that, it'll take you to that guy's service record. This is one of the things that I'm most curious to see how people react to, and what they actually do with it. I know that in Halo 3, people would take their trophy shot on their service record and usually it would be a big group of their friends. Well, now that big group of their friends will actually be something that's interactive, you can mouse over it and see everybody who's in the screenshot, click on it and go to their service records, use that as a way to navigate around the site as well.

 

IGN: Screenshots that are uploaded are clearly tagged with the different gamertags that were involved in the game, or in the shot in particular, right?

 

Chris Gossett: Right.

IGN: So it's clear that the evolution of social networking over the last few years has influenced the direction you've been going with Bungie.net. Something I'm noticing is that it's not just trying to see what other game developers are doing, but seeing how people are interacting on sites like Facebook and Twitter and things like that, incorporating that. Is that accurate, do you think?

 

Chris Gossett: I think that's fairly accurate, yeah. We look at some other games that come out, when they have their own stats, and a lot of times you have to sign in before you can see your own stats, it seems like it's a very personal experience in those games. And that's probably the right thing for what they're doing. We've definitely tried to emphasize the content we have. Let's make it really easy to get to, let's make it really accessible -- if you want to Twitter about this cool screenshot you had last night, go ahead and Tweet it to somebody, if you want to put it up on Facebook that's fine too.

 

We really want to reduce the barriers between you and the content on Bungie.net, which is why a lot of the stuff you can get to anonymously. Obviously we have a lot of cool features that will require some sign-in, but that's more for privacy and things where it just makes sense to have a sign-in for them, because we'll have to know who you are. Things like viewing a friend's stats, though, viewing a screenshot and so forth, we want to put the lowest barrier we possibly can on that. I think we have taken some cues from other social networking sites that have really lowered the barrier on some of that accessibility.

IGN: Was there anything in particular that the community was calling out for that you felt had to be included on Bungie.net?

 

Chris Gossett: I think definitely files in general. That's something that Bungie.net started having for Halo 3 really early on, and the game itself, it needed that incorporated inside the game. And integration between those two things, so that if you make some change on Bungie.net, you can see that show up personally in the game as well. Obviously some more of the player investment sorts of things -- if I change my player model I want that to show up on Bungie.net. As I tag that screenshot I want it to show up in the game and vice versa. I think that was something where, from the get-go, we absolutely had to keep that, we had to make that right.

 

IGN: Were there any features from old Bungie.net that didn't work out the way you had originally hoped they would, that got scrapped or reworked?

 

Chris Gossett: Yeah, I already touched on one, which was our initial viewer and how we were going to handle screenshot uploads. When Halo 3 launched, if you wanted your screenshot to be recognized by the community, you would post it to a forum and it would have a link back to your screenshot, and we were going to use that as a way of managing it. It was just way too much content; any sort of forum listing just didn't make any sense. You could post your screenshot and 20 minutes later it would be on the fourth page or fifth page. No one would ever see it and there was no way to search through them or find them. Recognizing that, we definitely invested a lot of time into making ways so you could search through stuff, tag stuff and make a lot of the stuff much more discoverable than it is now.

 

Some other things that didn't work out... I'm trying to think of something else that hasn't really worked, that we didn't care for, because it seems like we kind of do all these features and everything works at least on some level. We always seem to just keep carrying it forward. If we lose it, there's still somebody who's using it in a way we didn't think of, and usually we'll just keep it going forward. Once something's built it's not that much work to keep it moving.

IGN: Is there anything in particular about saved films or screenshot functionality that's been added or changed since the beta?

 

Chris Gossett: Not really. From the beta it's going to be the same system that you worked with. You go find a file, [if you happen to] be a Bungie Pro subscriber, there's a nice link that you can click on if you have render minutes and each Bungie Pro subscriber I believe still gets five minutes per month. You can render whatever you want. You have to remember that the beta was pretty full-featured compared to what we've done in the past. That was another success story, really, of what we did on Bungie.net, having a lot of those systems up and running for the beta well before the actual launch of the game. That was a good proof of concept on our backend systems, making sure everything was working.

 

IGN: How have the daily and weekly challenges been worked into Bungie.net?

 

Chris Gossett: One of the things we noticed, we had a lot of traffic to our playlist page from Halo 3, and the reason why we had that is because people were always trying to figure out what playlists were active -- what can I go play today in matchmaking? We realized that challenges are going to work the same way, people are always going to want to know, what am I gonna play today because there's a challenge I know I can go after? Or is there a weekly challenge I'm trying to find to progress? Not only do we have the global, here's what's active today and here's what's active this week challenges page, which I believe is in one of these screens, we'll also have a more personal page inside your service record that will show your progress and how close you are to achieving that goal. There's a little progress slider that says, hey, you've got 10 out of 25 headshots, so you've almost got that challenge completed.

IGN: Something that wasn't as big a deal in 2007 when Halo 3 released that's obviously become more common now is the idea of people using social networking sites on smartphones like iPhones or Android phones. Have you guys worked on making a version of Bungie.net compatible with the most common smartphone browsers?

 

Chris Gossett: We've definitely thought about it, and it comes down to: A, we definitely want to do it, and B, do we have the manpower to do it? We want to make a kick-ass experience first for Bungie.net. Something we haven't talked about is that there will be some sort of developer API. [in the past] we've just done RSS feeds, but there will be a developer API which will enable some community members to build some of those mobile experiences for us. That addresses the manpower issue.

 

IGN: Yeah, that was going to be my next question, whether or not there would be apps for Bungie.net coming down the line, but it sounds like you guys are putting it out there so that fans can make their own apps and release those out in the marketplaces.

 

Chris Gossett: Right. It will be a limited subset of stats that people will have access to, but obviously some of the core features, people will be able to build into apps. We actually have seen quite a lot of this even in past incarnations of Halo 2 and Halo 3, people have done amazing things just by scraping our website for stats and then saving them off themselves and creating their own fansites or their own mobile apps. We actually like that in a way, not only does it extend the reach of the content of our game, but it takes some of the pressure off of us. It's great that people are doing that. That they're that invested, they're going to spend their time extending our content to other platforms. We appreciate it.

IGN: Are there features that you wanted for the launch of Reach that aren't going to make it on Bungie.net, or any things that you're planning on adding down the line that Reach supports?

 

Chris Gossett: Yeah, we have a whole laundry list of things that we had thoughts about -- hey, this would be a great idea, we can do it -- and then it didn't make the priority cut. Some of this other stuff we obviously thought was much cooler, so we spent our time on that. Are there a few things out there that we'd like to do, that we think would be big wins? Yeah, absolutely, and I would expect that there will be a few more updates to Bungie.net in the coming months and... six months, a year. Kind of similar to what we did with Halo 3, I think the gravy train didn't stop right after launch. We still had a successive launch maybe every month or two months we'd add features. Part of it is in reaction to how people are using things, and part of it's also, like, hey, we've got some of this data, here's another way to show it, maybe this makes more sense.