That is all.

A few days ago we released Halo: Reach to Xbox Certification.  Assuming things go well in certification, that means the only things standing between you all and Reach are the manufacturing process and shipping the discs to stores.  It’s been a long haul getting the game to this point but the team is incredibly proud of the game and can’t wait to play with everyone on September 14th.

A few folks from Bungie will be travelling all over the world in the next few weeks to demo the game:  Brian Jarrard and Niles Sankey are currently touring Europe, I’ll be headed to Oceania soon, and Chris Opdahl and David Allen will be taking Asia by storm in August.  If you’re in those neighborhoods, look us up :)  If not, you can at least watch the campain trailer and the forgeworld vidoc on more time. 

Last but not least, sorry for the long periods between posts - turns out shipping a game and regularly maintaining a blog are not entirely compatible.  

Joe

Another long stretch without any updates. Since E3, we have been crushing bugs and working 24/7. It’s been brutal, but we did get to ZBR last night at midnight. Now we’re closing in on fixing only the crazy weird bugs that we feel just break the game or make us vomit. :)

This is also a time in the project when most of the team is locked out of the database and “have” to play the game all day. What poor souls.

Me, well I get to sit in a cold dark room triaging bugs for most of the day, then fixing some of them into the night.

We’re almost done and it’s playing so damn good!! I can’t wait for you all to join Noble Team on Reach in just a few months.

-Marcus

20 minutes to our first floor demo!

Hope you got to see the keynote address and our glimpse of Reach’s campaign. This was just one small look at a very large picture. -Marcus

Just landed in LA. Looking forward to see how the show turns out this year. -Marcus

Yes, I know it’s been way too long since I last posted.

The last few weeks have been a whirlwind of madness because we’re bringing this giant game in for a landing. I won’t lie, there’s been some turbulence and some areas of the game are coming in hot, but we’ve got the landing gear down, the runway is visible, and the engines are throttling back.

In the midst of this 24/7 period of crunch for the game, we are heading for ZBR (zero bug release). We have a huge team of testers who are hammering on the game in every way possible and logging tons of bugs about things that are broken, look bad or finding exploits that make the game just plain silly. Then, the development team is tasked with triaging all of these bugs every day and determining which ones are things we must fix and how we should prioritize them over other bugs. The goal is that our fix rate for bugs is higher than the incoming rate, so we can crush all these nasty critters by ZBR. It’s tough work, but ultimately this kind of diligence on our part means that you all get to have a better gameplay experience when you have it in your hands this Fall.

That said, we are still having fun with last minute “fixes” (which some could argue are really new features – shhh, don’t tell Harold, our CEO). For instance, I just came in today and met with our campaign design lead, Chris Opdahl, and he showed me something he and the engineers cooked up yesterday with vehicles vs. biped physics that I’ve been begging to see happen since I started Halo1 back in late 90s. I won’t spoil the fun by telling you what it is, but needless to say, it will make you a very happy player to finally see this.

-Marcus