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.

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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.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.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.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.