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GameplayWhat sort of game is Halo? Halo is a squad-oriented action game. In single player mode, one or two players take on the Covenant horde with the help of AI marines, attempting to discover the secrets of Halo and turn the tide of the war. In multiplayer mode, 2-16 players engage in one of five main multiplayer modes: Capture The Flag, King of the Hill, Slayer (deathmatch), Oddball (known to Bungie fans as Kill the Man with the Ball), and Racing, with a huge selection of variants. Bungie has created 26 of their favorite configurations and included them as presets, but you can modify any or all of them further.
Will I be able to use bots in the multiplayer maps, either to increase the competition when there are only a few of us, or to PLAY the multiplayer maps alone? The Solo Campaign:
How do Halo's controls work? Halo was designed for the Xbox's controller, and to a certain extent the controller was designed for Halo. Motion is controlled with the analog sticks: The left stick moves your character, and the right stick lets you look around. Halo has all the controls one would expect from a first-person action game, including weapon switching, jump, crouch, manual reload, and an action key that is also used to operate vehicles. However, Halo also adds some new abilities, such as a universal melee attack that lets the player use any weapon as a club, and simultaneous use handheld weapons and grenades. The controls are configurable with the profile system, and custom setups can be saved to the Xbox's internal hard disk. What do you do in the game? The backstory and situation of Halo is covered in the Story section. As the most powerful human warrior on the Halo, you will travel the world helping your fellow soldiers in the struggle to resist the Covenant. Sometimes you will fight alone, sometimes with allies, all the while searching for the secrets of the Halo and its mysterious, long-lost builders. Why is the gravity so low? In many of the movies, characters can be seen leaping or falling great distances with no ill effects. Gravity on the Halo seems to be much lower than on Earth. The official word on why it is like that, and I paraphrase: "It just is". The Multiplayer Arena:Multiplayer Basics: Halo supports two types of multiplayer games: Split-screen and over a LAN using the Xbox's Ethernet port. However, it does not support networking over the Internet as Microsoft's broadband solution for the Xbox is not yet ready (that is, not officially, see below). Halo can support 4 players per Xbox and 4 Xboxes linked together, or any subset of those limits, for a maximum of 16 players per game. Cooperative play is a special case - only two players are supported, and co-op cannot be played over a network, only in split-screen mode. What game types will there be?Halo supports five classes of competitive multiplayer games: Slayer (deathmatch), Oddball (odd-man-out games), Capture the Flag (objective games), Race (multiple objective games), and King of the Hill (location-based games). Each of these types can be customized with different options to allow for a huge variety of experiences. Custom gametypes can be saved to the Xbox's hard disk for future use, and 26 configurations recommended by Bungie are included with the game.
How do I use additional vehicles in a network game? You have to create a new gametype, and select the vehicle mode "all". Halo's multiplayer configuration screens are mostly self-explanatory. You can enable any combination of 2 Warthogs, 2 Scorpions, and 4 Ghosts.
Is it possible to play Halo over the Internet? After Halo was released, the community began to exercise their natural curiosity and explore the Xbox's hardware and software. Shortly afterwards, a number of utilities popped up that would perform the networking magic required to allow Xboxes to communicate over existing Internet connections (for the technically inclined, these are essentially bare-bones VPN clients built around the Xbox's protocols). Two of the most well-known are Xbox Gateway and Gamespy Tunnel. The former is open source and currently available for Linux, while the latter is for Windows and allows the use of Gamespy's matching service.
What's with the random words that appear while gathering network games? Each Xbox has a name, which is randomly chosen from a large selection. This name is used to identify the Xbox on the network. Some games allow you to change this name, Halo does not.
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