More multiplayer mayhem and campaign musings

Since you last heard from us we took some time off the campaign to play some more multiplayer. In the lobby screen before the team ranked games it shows how many people are playing online: about 22,000 when we were there. And that isn't counting people who are still playing through the story or playing various other online modes. I can't say it's too surprising considering that more people played multiplayer Halo 2 than any other multiplayer game on the Xbox Live service for nearly every month between when Halo 2 was released in November 2004 and when Gears of War was released in November 2006. The natural migration is to Halo 3.

After fighting against real people we jumped back into the campaign for another level. This was one of the longer levels and was a lot of fun. There were some epic battles that hopefully we'll be able to share here later in screenshot form. In this game every level has been entirely satisfying. You can tell that Bungie really put together all their experience from the previous two games and made the best single-player campaign they could.

In Halo and Halo 2 there were several single-player levels which were either forgettable or boring. The library level from the original Halo is infamous for this. So far in Halo 3 each level is as good as the best of the first two games -- in my opinion anyway.

In my conversation with Bungie's Brian Jarrard he said that Halo 3 is the pinnacle of their game-making achievements.

"For Halo 2, it wasn't exactly what we wanted to make," Jarrard said. They knew there were places for improvement, he said. They made those improvements in Halo 3, he said

The polish and the features really show here and I can't help but imagine how exciting it is for them to have people finally playing their game.

I'll reserve final judgment on the campaign until the end, but so far this has been fantastic.