And that’ll do it for yours truly for now. Next up, our beloved Bravo!

Until next time… Live well, play Halo, and take heart, my brothers – only our enemies should fear this raging storm!

<3

________________________

Thanks Grim! It is indeed a busy time here at the studio, and as the storm sets in, projects across the franchise are marching along – you’ll see an in-progress look at some of these developments quite soon (such as the Halo Wars 2 goodness being previewed today), and work on the next Halo 5 release continues, including updates and a few new things based on your reports and feedback. Speaking of...

Purple Props

We recently caught up with Ryan Kuehn and Tom French for some background on Covenant pieces that dropped in the Anvil’s Legacy release, and also begged for a tease of what’s to come. Take it away, guys.

RYAN KUEHN – Forge Environment Artist

Being able to start with assets that have already been approved through our Arena and/or Campaign's rigorous pipelines is a huge leg up, but there is still a giant amount of work that goes into making an asset Forge Ready™. Typically pieces that are built for our other play types are meant to only be experienced from a very specific direction and as I’m sure you already know, Forge is a whole different kind of party. You can spin every object willy-nilly, rotate those little fellas, get right up next to them, and basically go wild. That means we need to go through and make sure that everything that goes into Forge can be looked at from every angle. That means closing gaps, finding creative ways to uprez parts of the model that might have been hidden before, and generally giving them that extra bit of Forge love. After making sure the model is going to hold up to the extra scrutiny that our cartographers demand, we move on to figuring out what we’re going to do with the materials on that bad boy.

For the Covie stuff we decided that it was important that it matched with the Covenant material that we set up for Forgers on our primitive/structure pieces, but we wanted to make sure they kept the flavor of the original pieces. That meant we ended up setting up new custom textures and materials for every piece we added! The end result was totally worth it as we now have accents that match with our existing pieces and help to flesh out an iconic faction in the Halo Universe for the cartographers. We’re already seeing some amazing maps utilizing these pieces and literally can’t wait till you guys get your hands on the rest of them…

TOM FRENCH – Director of UGC/Wizard/Immortal/Beastmaster

Ever since we launched Forge last December, people have been sending us requests on social media for Covenant pieces. And it certainly makes good sense, as the Covies have always been an important part of our universe! Not only has Chief has been fighting them for seemingly forever, but some of the most iconic multiplayer levels have been Covenant themed. With all the color options and even the material swap system we added people could get something closer, but really, they needed new pieces to accomplish their goals. We really wanted to give the community what they needed but as opposed to UNSC (and even Forerunner for the most part), building Covenant structures requires a lot of more organically shaped pieces which are not only more intracate in their designs individually, but also often very specific to the surrounding level layout itself.

We scoured our maps to find pieces and even shapes we could rip out of them that would make great accents with a wide variety of applications. We looked for pieces that would make great accents to levels, helping add the curves where needed and augmented that list with a lot of Covenant staples; Phantoms, drop pods, weapon pods, etc. Additionally, we opened up the flood gates on social media asking for suggestions. The hundreds of screenshots and suggestions helped us prioritize what we were going to ultimately deliver. For sake of time and bandwidth we opted to spit the list between the two types of Covenant themes; more classic Covenant style was prioritized for the first update and then followed by assets from the Elite home world Sangheili in the next (coming soon!).

It’s been super exciting to see what has been doing with all of these pieces; making the long hours of work to get them out to the community worth it. Covenant themed maps almost immediately started looking more legit, and with the upcoming addition of more bespoke Sangheili pieces we’re expecting to see another new run of cool looking Covenant themed maps for us to play. Keep building cool stuff and stay tuned because this update is HUGE and we have a lot to discuss about it as we lead up to its release! Don't believe me? Well, I suppose giving you a small taste wouldn't hurt...

Iconic Covenant elements

Alien accents. No, not those kinds of accents.

Open Phantom variant and the pieces to close it up and FX to make it look like it’s flying.

OMGWTFBBQ

So, yeah. Stay tuned.

Pumpkin Stencils

We’re getting ready for the upcoming holiday, and as has become tradition here in the world of Halo, our team of graphics artists has prepared a collection of Halo-ween pumpkin stencils for you to use in your carving efforts. They wait all year for this. The time has come.

This year, we’re happy to present 11 new stencils (the most ever!), ordered from Easy to Legendary.

Be sure to send us your creations on Twitter using the hashtag #HaloLantern, and we’ll feature a few of our favorites in a later edition! Happy carving.

MOAR FOURVFOUR

When we last spoke, the first episode of FOURvFOUR: The Competitive Halo Documentary had aired. Since, two episodes have dropped. Episode 2 chronicles the release of Halo 2, 'Spartan 069' and the 2v2 era of New Zealand Halo, and Episode 3 details the tactics, 4v4 format, and how New Zealand Halo developed in regards to both.

We love the series, and this week, we caught up with creator William Slingsby to get some extra detail and background on the project. Take it away, Will.

WILLIAM SLINGSBY – FOURvFOUR

As a videographer/film maker, I've had the idea for the project since early 2011 in one way or another. I initially thought up the idea for a university project, but later shelved it for something smaller. It wasn't until towards the end of my study I mapped out the entire history of Halo in New Zealand in detail and got to work.

In late 2014, I travelled around New Zealand gathering interviews from players that I had deemed worthy of a story to tell within New Zealand Halo history. The main players interviewed are iconic figures within each era of Halo, and some span multiple titles while holding some of the most prestigious achievements a Halo player can achieve in a country so small.

Throughout 2015, I did some pickup interviews and more planning in my spare time and then I finally moved into post production in late 2015. From then to now, I've been editing and collaborating with another partner to get it finished and up to a standard we’re both happy with.

Being a Halo player embedded within the New Zealand scene since 2005, I can safely say that it's been a decade that I would never trade for anything... I've met some great friends and have watched many friends succeed. Being able to take my skillset and give back to the community in the form of this documentary is something that I hope can stand the test and educate players that come into the scene in the future.

Episodes released weekly on Thursdays @ 7:00pm NZST.

Fun Facts about the project:

With a total number of 22 interviews, 19 were shot over 4 different cities around New Zealand (Auckland, Wellington, Palmerston North & Tauranga) and the remaining 3 were shot in Australia, Germany & Japan with the help of local recorders.

The total amount of hours invested into the project before I stopped counting = 281.... stopped counting on 20.01.16.

Edited in 3 different countries (Australia, New Zealand & United States of America)

837GBs of Interviews

372GBs of Tournament Footage (Spanning ten years)

2.5 TBs of Material (Footage, Pictures, Documents, Visual Assets etc)

Be sure to subscribe for more FOURvFOUR here.

Community Spotlight

This week’s Community Spotlight has two favorites – first up, we’re highlighting Bullet Rebel’s latest masterpiece, as he impresses us once again with another beautifully edited montage.

Next, we’re taking a look at Embolism by I SoldierSide I. This battleground is an instant classic, mainly because it comes from a recreation of an instant classic that also stood on its own as an instant classic in the sequel. What we’re trying to say is that we really like this Coagulation remake, and we think you will too. Click the image below to download the map!

Play of the Week

It’s been a while since we’ve featured a clutch Warzone play, and this week, xcasbonx sent us just that. At the start of the clip, there are 19 seconds left in a Warzone Assault match, and they’ve just called in the “Core-Stomper” combo any Warzone player loves / hates – the Camo and Fuel Rod. They’ll need to dodge, duck, dip, dive, and dodge to get the job done. Watch it here.

That’ll be it for this week, friends. I’ll be on the road next week and off the grid intermittently, but Grim will have an update for you in about seven days’ time.

Until then,

Bravo & Grim