Great Read! Just a few things...

by General Vagueness , The Vault of Sass, Monday, March 11, 2013, 23:30 (4273 days ago) @ Hoovaloov
edited by General Vagueness, Monday, March 11, 2013, 23:37

This probably should have been a bigger giveaway than it was, in retrospect. If you
count human as one distinct culture and the Covenant as the other... what was the
third? You can't exclude humanity and turn the Covenant into the source of all the
cultures, because that's too many. Of course, it may have been that the Covenant was
originally envisioned has having a tripartite structure, but if not, then the
existence of the Flood was hinted at pretty early. Of course, the problem with that is
that they don't really seem to have a culture, let alone an arsenal or any vehicles.
Still, it was a hint that there was a third party to the game's major conflict.

I'd actually argue that evidence of the three cultures are visible within the MacWorld trailer itself: Human, Covenant, and Forerunner. The Flood would technically be a fourth culture. This would explain the player being able to use the "arsenal and vehicles" of the third culture. However, Sentinel Beams weren't in use until Halo 2 (plus one weapon does not an arsenal make), and we never have driven a Forerunner vehicle. So it's still safe to say this bit from the press release changed significantly.

eh
In Halo 2 there were two kinds of Sentinel beam, the familiar one with a yellow beam and one with a blue beam that was stronger and overheated faster, and they experimented with other weapons-- if you're quick and lucky, you can still find a Sentinel on Quarantine Zone that fires needles (and drops a needler when killed instead of a Sentinel beam). It was supposed to also have a "Forerunner Tank" level, so I think they had "let the player use three cultures' equipment" as a real goal and (pretty much like you said) weren't able to feasibly reach it in the first game or the second one... come to think of it, the Brute stuff that started showing up a lot in Halo 3 seems like it fits that, it's different from human stuff and other Covenant stuff... and Halo 2 had the Brute shot, the Brute plasma rifle, and a gravity hammer (not usable, but still), I wonder if they were aiming for four sets of stuff in Halo 2....

The epic single-player game is complemented by a role-based, cooperative
multiplayer team game. Playing the humans or the aliens, players will use entirely
different skills, strategies, vehicles and weapons to compete in a variety of game types.

Here we get a flat-out declaration of a kind of cooperative play in Halo that we
never, ever got. Competitive multiplayer is not mentioned, although it eventually
became the staple of online Halo play. You could eventually choose to play with an
Elite player model, but the difference between it and the Spartan model were
extremely slight.

Invasion is pretty darn close to that original description. Not only is it Elites vs. Humans, but there are even pre-set Loadouts to facilitate the choices of "entirely different skills (i.e. armor abilities), strategies, vehicles, and weapons." Granted it took almost 10 years for it to be in a Halo game! :p

I'd say Firefight Versus is close too.