Tag Archives: Xbox 360

Halo Fest 2020 – Spartan Ops

The Story So Far: Adrift for over 4 years, the crippled UNSC frigate Forward Unto Dawn is pulled towards a mysterious object. Cortana wakes the Master Chief from cryosleep and the pair discover that they’re being attacked by a splinter fleet of Covenant loyalists led by the Sangeili Jul’Mdama. Without warning the object opens and violently pulls all nearby ships into it. Crashing onto the interior surface of what they learn is the Forerunner Shield World Requiem, Cortana picks up a faint signal from another UNSC ship, the supercarrier Infinity. Attempting to warn the Infinity of Requiem’s gravity well, the pair unwittingly release an ancient Forerunner warrior leader, the Didact, from stasis. The Didact resumes control of his army of defensive constructs, the Prometheans, with Jul’Mdama’s faction also falling into his ranks. Barely escaping, Master Chief and Cortana reach Infinity’s crash site where Master Chief rallies the UNSC defense, forcing the Didact into retreat. Aboard the Infinity Captain Del Rio dispatches a force to disable Requiem’s gravity generators so that the Infinity can escape. In the process the Master Chief is lured to a Forerunner facility where he’s contacted by the AI imprint of an ancient Forerunner called the Librarian. Explaining that the Didact intends to use a device called the Composer which had been used to digitally conscript living beings, including humans, into Prometheans to fight against the Flood, she insists that he must be stopped. Upon returning to the Infinity, Captain Del Rio observes Cortana’s instability and orders Master Chief to surrender her, ordering his arrest when he refuses. Instead, the Infinity’s executive officer, Commander Lasky, aids the Chief by procuring Pelican gunship for him. The Didact departs Requiem aboard his flagship, the Mantle’s Approach, though the Chief and Cortana make it just in time to stowaway on an accompanying Covenant dropship. Later hijacking the ship, the pair head to Ivanoff Station, a research facility where the Composer has been relocated. They find the station already under assault and attempt to sabotage the Composer before the Didact can reclaim it. Failing, they witness the Didact unleash the Composer on the station to devastating effect. Master Chief and Cortana then arm a Broadsword fighter with a HAVOK nuclear missile and pursue the Mantle’s Approach as it heads for Earth. Crashing into the ship’s interior, Master Chief takes the warhead and continues to fight his way to the Didact on foot. Confronting him, Cortana distracts the Didact for long enough for the Chief to manually arm the warhead. Cortana is able to teleport the Chief safely off of the ship but sacrifices herself in the process. Master Chief is later found and brought back aboard the Infinity where he quietly mourns the loss of Cortana.

“Oh goody, more Knights…”

Replacing the popular Firefight wave survival mode first introduced with Halo 3: ODST and iterated on with Halo: Reach, Halo 4 included a separate episodic co-op oriented campaign called “Spartan Ops”. 343 Industries might have opted to do this as part of an effort to canonize Halo 4’s multiplayer (AKA “Halo: Infinity”) with competitive modes being presented as war games conducted aboard the UNSC Infinity. Similarly, and the reason I wanted to cover Spartan Ops despite not talking too much about multiplayer during my Halo Fest posts is that, unlike Firefight, the Spartan Ops campaign actually includes a full story, taking place just after the events of Halo 4.

Back in the day I had started to work my way through Spartan Ops by myself on “Heroic” difficulty but quickly discovered that it was definitely tuned for 4 person cooperative play. Between this and that it still retained much of Firefight’s wave survival gameplay (and you were fighting damned Prometheans a lot of the time to boot) it was quite the slog. I think I made it as far as episode 2 before burning out, and I believe this is a huge reason for that negative impression of Halo 4 I’d been carrying around for almost a decade now. Going back to the campaign in 2021, I decided that cranking my difficulty down to “Easy” would probably be a solid first step in meeting my goal of making it all the way through this time.

“What can I say? The Warthog never gets old!”

While still not a total cakewalk, there were a few things unique to Spartan Ops that made it a bit more tolerable. For one, weapon racks and ammo crates are generously placed throughout each map. Sure, you may still need to grab a Covenant or Promethean weapon from time to time, but you’ll have the option of using UNSC weapons without worrying about running out of ammo much more often than in Halo 4 proper. There are also special ordnance drops that are given to you during many missions, usually when there’s a particular reason you might need a special weapon; rocket launchers being dropped for you just before a pair (or multiple pairs) of Hunters show up is a common example. You also get to use your multiplayer loadouts which means access to your choice of basic weapons and grenades, equipment, and special “tactical packages” and “support upgrades”. Finally, being multiplayer oriented, you simply respawn if you die rather than having to jump back to your last checkpoint. Nice!

Gameplay wise, your fireteam is dropped into an area and issued a linear string of objectives, coming one at a time to appear more dynamic. For instance, you might be sent to a waypoint, then told to activate a McGuffin, then told to defend the area against a few waves of enemies, then told to reach the extraction point and… oh no, reinforcements! Better defeat a few more waves so you can extract! You get the point. In the first 5 episodes this gets very formulaic and very repetitive very quickly. Even more so when you consider that the same 8 maps are featured multiple times in those 25 levels, and many of them are based on sections from the main Halo 4 campaign or are straight up taken from multiplayer in the first place.

Episodes 6 through 10 greatly improve things by introducing a new batch of maps which feel purposely crafted to be used this way. They also do a better job of varying the gameplay, though the tradeoff is that some chapters end up feeling more like single player campaign missions than Firefight-like scenarios. That said, all 10 episodes have some cool moments, including some awesome vehicle-centric sections. It should also be noted that Spartan Ops doesn’t suffer from the issue of having confined, linear levels that I mentioned in my Halo 4 post. Even some of the small maps feel very open which is refreshing when coming straight from the main campaign.

“Palmer and Majestic capture another Forerunner artifact.”

Presentation is another story. Individual chapters start and end with short in-game cutscenes and there are numerous radio communications from your mission handlers about your objectives throughout. Most notably, the biggest story beats are told via lengthy, beautiful rendered cutscenes created by Axis Animation that kick off every new episode and focus on a core cast of characters, many of whom you’ve already met in Halo 4. Honestly, say what you will about Halo 4, but these cutscenes are peak Halo awesomeness in my opinion and I’d love an entire series done this way.

The story itself is quite good too. Untangled from the legacy of Master Chief’s story and the perceived lore complexities of introducing the Didact and the Librarian, I’d suggest perhaps better than Halo 4’s. I definitely got pretty into it in any case. For one, I know he didn’t originate with Halo 4, but I thought Jul’Mdama was a great, more grounded antagonist. I also like getting some insight into the SPARTAN-IVs and the idea of Dr. Halsey feeling somewhat left behind as more advancements are made without her (which I feel is a more realistic narrative than making her cartoonish traitor.) Hell, I even started to like Sarah Palmer by the end of the campaign thanks in large part to the way her relationship with Lasky is depicted. The 10 episode story arc has a satisfying enough conclusion while also leaving some major developments wide open and begging for a sequel. I don’t know if one was actually planned or not, but sadly, a second season of Spartan Ops would never arrive, leaving the story to need to be fully resolved elsewhere.

“Fun times in the corridors of the Infinity.”

All in all, Spartan Ops is a pretty damn cool batch of bonus content that I doubt a lot of Halo fans have experienced. While I’m not sure I can heartily recommend it to solo players, there were numerous chapters that stuck out to me as likely being incredibly fun when played cooperatively while I was playing through. That said, in the exceedingly likely event that you’re unable to convince even a single buddy to play through this huge 50 mission campaign with you, watching a compilation of its awesome cutscenes is still an absolutely worthy investment of your time and that, at least, gets that my recommendation.

Next up, something completely different…

Halo Fest 2020 – Halo 4

The original Halo trilogy had been wrapped up for over 5 years and Bungie’s last two Halo releases, excellent as they were, were side stories. Now with Halo 4 we were getting an actual sequel, but the first crafted entirely by 343 Industries. Could they execute at anywhere close to Bungie’s level? What new ideas would they have to push the series forward? Most importantly to many fans, what would become of our beloved Master Chief?

As with the last several games, I’d really only played through Halo 4’s campaign once, at launch, though unlike those games I didn’t come away with an extremely positive impression of it. Instead, as I alluded to in my original brief mention of it here, I mostly appreciated it for simply allowing me to revisit a franchise I loved. While I did a fair amount of random matchmaking early on, the days of spending countless hours playing splitscreen and LAN games with family and friends were ancient history. Without those kinds of more enduring memories, Halo 4 is where the series stopped feeling quite so special to me. On top of that, for years now whenever I thought about its campaign I’d often remember it as a bit of a tedious slog. Oof!

“Master Chief and Cortana, 2012 style.”

As with almost everything else I’ve covered as part of Halo Fest 2020 up to this point, I replayed Halo 4 on “Heroic” difficulty as part of the Xbox One’s Master Chief Collection on my Series X. The MCC version of the game doesn’t receive much of an upgrade but, as with Halo: Reach, Halo 4 was already an incredible looking game in the first place. In fact, I’d commented that Reach might have been one of the Xbox 360’s best looking games, and while I think I still favor it artistically, Halo 4 surpasses it.

While Halo 4’s graphics might have been a technical feat, some major aesthetic shifts were less positively received. Bungie tweaked their designs with almost every iteration of the series but 343 took it a lot further. Front and center, Master Chief’s iconic armor was given a major facelift, with a far more futuristic design yet a more gritty and realistic texture and a darker color scheme. Cortana’s new design was particularly jarring, with her model looking far more voluptuous and, well, straight up nude. While I wouldn’t go as far as to say that I dislike her new look, I can’t help but find the choice just a bit questionable. On the sound design front we no longer have Marty O’Donnell working on the soundtrack for the first time in a mainline Halo game. That’s not to say the new soundtrack, which goes in some very different directions, is anywhere close to being bad, but it feels entirely underutilized and nowhere near as notable a part of the whole experience as it did in, say, Halo 3 for example.

“Not really what you want to see first thing after waking up…”

As with Halo: Reach, the campaign features a nice variety of different environments and of course, per Halo tradition, multiple vehicle-centric sections including a couple featuring the new Mantis mech suit. There’s also a level that feels very similar to the Falcon level from Reach where you instead pilot a Pelican gunship, and in a similar throwback to Reach, one that feels like a Star Fox level in which you fly a Broadsword fighter. There’s also a section featuring something of a super-sized Elephant from Halo 3’s Sandtrap multiplayer map called a Mammoth.

One issue with Halo 4’s level design is that there is a major lack of large open areas, especially problematic in those vehicle dominant sections. Really, as a whole the campaign’s levels are rather linear, complete with invisible walls and out-of-bounds kill timers. If you don’t attempt to explore or get too creative you may not even notice, but those hardcore Halo players who like to wring every last drop of gameplay out of each game will definitely be turned off by this. I was also surprised to see some QTE-like interactions very early in the campaign. These don’t make a reappearance until the final boss fight, and while QTEs don’t particularly offend me, having a game that doesn’t really rely on them end with one did feel a little anticlimactic.

“The only thing better than a tank is a tank filled with Spartans.”

I already mentioned the Mantis and the Broadsword, so yes, Halo 4 absolutely continues the trend of featuring a variety of new and updated vehicles and weapons. In fact, it goes even further than previous games by making changes to practically every piece of equipment at your disposal. They’ve also been renamed to designate that, canonically, they’re supposed to be different, newer versions of the classics we know and love. There’s also some new additions, like the Covenant Storm Rifle, the UNSC SAW, and the UNSC Railgun. More notably, there’s the huge addition of a whole arsenal of Promethean weapons. For the most part, these feel like counterparts to UNSC and/or Covenant weapons, but given that ammo can be fairly scarce and you’ll be fighting Prometheans most of the time, you’ll likely end up using them whether you want to or not, and you may not, as several of them are fairly lackluster. I’m looking at you, Pulse Grenade!

Halo 4’s equipment system has also seen some changes. While it works more or less the same as Reach’s Armor Abilities, it now includes several totally new abilities like the Autosentry, Hardlight Shield, Thrusters, and Promethean Vision, in addition to some Reach favorites like my beloved jetpack. The ever controversial Armor Lock is gone, while Sprint is now a standard ability anyone can do.

The new Mantis is badass, thouh not badass enough to shoot down the Cryptum, unfortunately.

“The new Mantis is badass, though not badass enough to shoot down the Cryptum, unfortunately.”

If you’ve not played Halo 4, you’re probably wondering what in the hell a “Promethean” is. In short, they’re a new variety of enemy that you’ll be fighting along with our old Covenant pals. There are three main varieties of Promethean. Crawlers, canine-like cannon fodder enemies that sometimes appear in pretty large groups. Watchers, which are flying Sentinel-like enemies that aren’t a huge source of damage but project shields onto their allies and can even resurrect other dead Prometheans. They also annoyingly love to dodge and dart away before you’ve managed to finish them off. Finally, there’s Promethean Knights. An Elite or Brute-level enemy, these assholes are bullet sponges who can wield a variety of weapons, including some high damage ones. They also love to dodge and even teleport away mid-fight, recharging their shields, which is goddamn annoying when you’re trying to finish one off. More frustratingly, these guys almost always have Watchers around them and can even spawn them themselves, which means extra shields you have to contend with and the possibility of coming back to life after you’ve killed them. Argh!

Prometheans are, in short, not fun. I feel like 343 was trying to capture the more interesting aspects of fighting the Flood, yet missed the mark. Knights might be fine if they only made rare appearances, but in some sections they’re absolutely everywhere. Eventually towards the end of my playthrough I’d developed the reckless but effective tactic of charging them with a high rate of fire weapon and trying to empty a magazine directly into their faces before they could teleport away. Those types of weapons tend to burn through ammo though, and, as mentioned, ammo for UNSC weapons is fairly scarce which makes the best candidate for this the Promethean Suppressor. Much more importantly, the shielding and resurrection abilities of the Watchers means they’re always going to be your priority target, and that leads to favoring mid to long range so you can pick them off from safety, which is, yeah, not the Suppressor’s strength. Beyond these issues, I wouldn’t say Halo 4 isn’t overly difficult, but when you add in the fact that so many areas are, yet again, set up like Firefight style wave defense arenas it can be damn tedious.

“100,000 years of self-reflection and yet, still a dick.”

While Halo 4’s story is probably better than most Halo fans give it credit for, I personally don’t love the direction they took it in. First we have the new antagonist, the Didact. My problem with this plotline is that it totally kills the enigmatic nature of the Forerunners and their murky relationship with humanity (at least, as presented in-game.) With that, 343 Industries has had to really complicate the story to work this all in. Backstory that lived mostly in other media is now vital to the games and, worse yet, is clumsily presented, with the bulk being explained in a single, absolute lore-dump of a cutscene. Finding the hidden terminals on every level and watching their associated cutscenes is practically required to really understand what in the hell is going on, at least if you haven’t been keeping up with the books and the comics.

Hinted at in Halo 3, the other piece of the story is Cortana’s emerging rampancy. It’s a minor part of Halo 4’s plot overall, but it definitely affects how the Chief and Cortana are characterized. Beyond being more chatty than ever before, their flirty quips take on an almost awkward tone, as if 343 is suddenly trying to present their relationship as somehow… romantic?! Still, despite the risk of Master Chief developing a personality, I don’t feel like anything he says is out of character. He’s still the same stoic man of action. His actions, on the other hand? It didn’t occur to me until I wrote up the plot summary for Halo 4 for my next post, but he and Cortana fail constantly in this game. Practically every major story beat involves them utterly fucking up. Well, I guess that’s one approach to humanizing a character!

“Warthog run? Nah, how about a Ghost run? Bop!”

If it’s not obvious by this point, Halo 4 is a divisive game. A lot of the Halo fanbase considers it to be utter trash. As with Halo: Reach, some of that comes from the multiplayer community, who felt like things like custom loadouts and ordinance drops were desperate attempts to chase the Call of Duty crowd. While there is no shortage of genuine criticism of the game to be made, there’s also a lot of silly toxicity around the 343 Industries handoff that muddies the water. The ironic part is that much of what fans bash 343 over in Halo 4 is them continuing exactly where Bungie left off with Halo: Reach. Personally, replaying it again, I enjoyed it a lot more than I’d remembered. In fact, I suspect it was Spartan Ops, not the Halo 4 campaign itself, that soured my impressions of the game so much. I’ll be talking about that in my next post.

Bonus live-action media time! “Scanned” is a trailer for Halo 4 released just after Forward Unto Dawn started being released, also on Halo Waypoint. It depicts Master Chief being restrained by some sort of field and being scanned by what we’ll come to find out is the Didact. As the scan probes his mind, it zooms into scenes showing John as a child being abducted by ONI, his later SPARTAN-II augmentation, and being suited with his Mjolnir armor. It then fast forwards to Master Chief engaging a group of Promethean Knights before being subdued. This one is definitely very cool!

Halo Fest 2020 – Halo Wars

Now for a complete change of pace from the original Halo trilogy, we have Halo Wars. Despite the fact that Halo actually started life as an real time strategy game, it still strikes me as incredibly unlikely that Microsoft would have ever greenlit this. I guess they figured a console RTS had more of a chance of success with the Halo brand behind it than without, and they were probably right. Still, I didn’t know many Halo fans who were all that excited about the prospect at the time, and console FPS fans and RTS fans were mostly two different breeds. Regardless, this badass trailer produced by Blur did a lot to get the Halo fans pumped up and RTS fans (well, the ones who would condescend to play an RTS on a console) would be placated by knowing that Ensemble Studios, responsible for the Age of Empires and Age of Mythology series, utter classics of the genre, would be at the helm.

“The badass cutscenes were also produced by Blur.”

Me? Well, as both a Halo fan and an RTS fan (and admittedly, not a hardcore one) and having played my fair share of Age of Empires II, I was probably about as close to their target demographic as you could get. Despite this, I wasn’t all that hyped up for it, and while I did play through the demo (which I briefly talk about here, though I somehow have no recollection of) I never got around to playing the full game. While it was pretty well received by fans and critics alike, it’s reasonable to assume that a similar level of disinterest (along with numerous internal factors) would lead to Ensemble closing its doors, sadly making Halo Wars their very last game.

For this playthrough I played the Xbox One Halo Wars: Definitive Edition on my Series X. The “Definitive Edition” is a remaster of the original game released alongside Halo Wars 2. With higher resolution textures and improvements to lighting and particle effects but not a lot else, it’s essentially just a re-release. While this means it’s not going to blow you away with contrast between the versions like the first two Halo games I covered, it is, at least, very faithful to the original. The game has aged pretty well, so that’s not a problem.

“Well, it certainly LOOKS like an RTS…”

I’d actually started my playthrough on “Heroic” just as I did with the first three Halo games, but I found that the effort to beat some of these missions on Heroic simply wasn’t worth it – I could beat them, sure, but it took longer due to losing units more easily, and that sapped a lot of the fun out of the experience. Lowering the difficulty one notch to “Normal” was a big improvement for me. I suppose I enjoy overcoming bumps in difficulty in FPSes a lot more than I do in RTSes, where my builds and priorities are the biggest differences in how I play from session to session rather than toying too much with tactics. That, and the kinds of scenarios you encounter in a single player campaign like this so often constrain your options for the sake of variety, not doing a great job of reflecting the full array of options present in a pure skirmish match as a result.

“The console control scheme makes excellent use of radial menus.”

I think another issue was the controls. Don’t get me wrong, I think Ensemble did a fine job with translating the RTS to the console, and from other console strategy game experiences I’ve had, I think the idea that strategy games don’t quite work on consoles is total bunk – there are plenty of examples of at least passable RTSes on console. Still, I have a lot of hours playing of RTSes on PC under my belt and playing them with a mouse and keyboard is in-grained at this point. For one, I found my ability to appropriately micromanage my units lacking. Halo Wars lets you select all of your units, all of your units on the screen, and all of the units of only a particular type in either case, which is just enough to allow you to do most anything you’d want to do with a little creativity. Still, that pales in comparison to being able to quickly make groupings of specific units of mixed unit types and assign them to hot keys for later use. Interestingly, I made the same complaint over 10 years ago when I played the demo. I definitely did feel slightly hobbled by this in some of my busier missions though, and this led me to coming up with numerous cheesy strategies of deploying tons of the same unit – masses of fully upgraded Warthogs being a particular favorite of mine, being both cheap to replace when they inevitably get blown away, and hilarious to watch bound haphazardly across the map.

Continuing the trend I started with my re-play of Halo: CE, I unlocked every skull and black box collectible on each map, though chasing them down really wasn’t all that enjoyable as it was in the previous games. Some don’t appear on the map until certain challenge conditions are met, making finding them more naturally impossible, and resulting in them being a bit of a distraction from the actual goals of the mission. More importantly, the reward for unlocking them is a let down. Skulls function similarly to previous Halo games, but in the case of the black boxes, each one unlocks a single entry on a giant timeline of the events around the game. This glorious lore dump is no doubt cool for fans of the franchise, but they’re just short text blurbs – no cutscenes, not even voiceovers. A little on the weak side.

“Marines clearing out a nasty Flood infestation.”

While I’m being negative, I also encountered a few bugs and other oddities during my playthrough. Probably an artifact leftover from the remaster, but in-engine cutscenes seem to run at a reduced, stuttery looking framerate, I had at least one total system crash during a mission, and on another occasion (on the same mission!) I lost the ability to control a special vehicle which made winning the scenario impossible and caused me to have to reload and lose a bunch of progress. I wouldn’t say these issues were numerous enough to ruin my experience, however, but there were enough of them to take note. That said, I didn’t have any real issue with unit pathing, which is a common complaint I’ve seen online.

There’s also the story. As this is a side story taking place out of chronological order and well before the main series, I’ll go ahead and recap its plot right here. While I’m fairly vague in these plot summaries they absolutely do still contain spoilers, so skip the next paragraph if you don’t want the plot to be spoiled!

“The Arbiter is back! Only this is a different one, and he has zero personality.”

The Story: As part of the Harvest Campaign, an effort to retake the planet of Harvest, having the unfortunate distinction of being the first human colonized world decimated by the Covenant, marines of the UNSC colony ship “Spirit of Fire” discover a newly excavated Forerunner facility containing an interstellar map. Using the map, Professor Anders, a researcher aboard the Spirit of Fire, identifies another human colony world, Arcadia, as being a point of interest for the Covenant. Arriving too late, the Spirit of Fire finds Harvest’s defenses breached and the colony already under siege by Covenant forces. Linking up with local defenses, including Spartan Red Team, Arcadia City is evacuated. Efforts to further repel the Covenant eventually lead the UNSC to locate concentrated Covenant activity around yet more Forerunner ruins. The UNSC push the Covenant out, though the victory is short-lived as the Arbiter abducts Professor Anders and flees Arcadia. In pursuit, the Spirit of Fire arrives at an uncharted planet being overrun by Flood, which they quickly learn is actually a Forerunner Shield World. Professor Anders manages to escape, revealing that the Arbiter planned to use her to activate a fleet of powerful Forerunner warships to help the Covenant decisively win the war. Captain Cutter approves a risky plan to use the Spirit of Fire’s faster-than-light drives to destroy the entire Shield World, keeping the Forerunner fleet out of the hands of the Covenant. Successful but now without faster-than-light capability, the Spirit of Fire’s crew goes into cryogenic storage while the ship begins the long journey home.

It all feels, eh, a little generic. I say this having already played almost all of the other games in the series, so perhaps I wouldn’t have felt that way at all if I played it at the time. It might have been utterly groundbreaking for all I know. Either way, this isn’t helped by the fact that the characters were all just a little flat. I really couldn’t convince myself to care all that about Sgt. Forge, Captain Cutter, or Professor Anders. Hell, I probably liked the Spirit of Fire’s AI, Serina, more than the lot of them. Everyone just came across as low effort archetypes to me, and I think I would have felt the same back in 2009.

“One of my Spartans jacked a Scarab. Ridin’ in style!”

While that all sounded more than a little sour, no, I didn’t dislike the game. In fact, I felt like Ensemble did a great job representing the Halo universe. The presentation is faithful to the original games and quite skillfully executed, with the new units added doing a lot to make both the Covenant and the UNSC feel more like actual military forces than what was represented in the previous Halo games. The soundtrack is great. The cutscenes, awesome! It also definitely succeeds as a RTS, with some interesting units, tech trees, a decent amount of variety in the scenarios you’re thrown into in the campaign, and an interesting take on the classic formula, with simplified resource gathering and some other concessions seemingly made around the platform. I think one of the bigger compliments I could give the game is that I had been feeling the urge to play some classic RTS games lately and Halo Wars managed to thoroughly scratch that itch. Once completing the campaign, I dove into several skirmish matches against AI which were a ton of fun and sealed my overall positive impression of the game.

I’d say if you’re a Halo fan, you should definitely give it a chance. If you don’t have any RTS (or other strategy game) experience you absolutely might bounce right off of the game. Then again, it might also end up being one of your favorite Halo games, and your gateway into a whole new genre. Now, back to Bungie…