The 3rd and final map included in the Legendary map pack for Halo 3, coming out April 15th 2008 should be familiar to fans. This one is called “Blackout.” The map is basically a remake of Halo 2’s “Lockout” and completes the set along with “Avalanche” and “Ghost Town” in the Downloadable Content (DLC) from Bungie. This official Bungie site gives us a Q&A with “Blackout” design team members: Producer Allen Murray, Designer Dan Miller, and artists Paul Russel and Blake Low. But we know you just want to see what it’ll look like, so along with interview highlights here’s some Pictures of Blackout too!

Legendary Map: Blackout [Bungie]

What did each of you do on Blackout?

Allen Murray: I am the Producer for all of the Halo 3 DLC, which means I helped plan which maps were going to be made, when we’d ship them and who was working on them and generally kept them on track. So I was one of the guys early on who said we need to remake Lockout and then managed the process to make it happen.
I didn’t actually ‘make’ any of it, but Luke is taking pity on me and included me in the interview process. Thanks, Luke. Also, if any of you have any issues with other DLC maps, you can talk to me directly. My email address is frankie@bungie.com.

Paul Russel: I was the primary environment artist for blackout from concept to completion. I also invented the grommet.

Dan Miller: Designing odds and ends, I kept stewardship over the level and fixed bugs. There wasn’t really a whole lot to do design-wise after the weapons and gametypes were placed.
We tried to keep it as close to Halo 2 as possible and let the community Forge it up how they wish.

Blake Low: I was responsible for adding all the little details to the level that made the area seem functional. Things like power boxes, wires, pipes and more.

How is equipment placed on Blackout?

DM: We’ve decided to go with a ‘less is more’ attitude with Blackout after some playing around with a bunch of different placements, we’ve settled on one regenerator, one bubble shield and one power drain.

AM: With such verticality to the map and the narrows spaces, the Bubble Shield is terribly effective for just shutting down certain lines of sight. It’s also fun to toss a Power Drain onto the helipad while everyone is fighting in the middle and just clean up.

What’s some stuff we don’t know about Blackout’s creation? What was the toughest part to “get right?”

PR: This is the first time I believe we’ve tried a full-blown nighttime multiplayer map. Originally I wanted it to take place on the back of a giant llama. I’m still bitter about this.

Maintaining some of the little things that expert players liked to exploit. Those are all gone, now, your pets are dead, go home and cry.
Kidding, we did our best to keep it all in.

BL: Making an environment look cold and unbearable is always a challenge.

AM: We almost didn’t do it because we already have Guardian, which was similar and ‘inspired by’ Lockout. But when I started up the DLC project we gathered a ton of data from the community, looked at the most played maps on Live and did some very unscientific polls on Bungie.Net and other community websites and Lockout was leaps and bounds ahead of every other map in terms of games played and the public demand. It also fits a need in our overall map portfolio to help round out the small maps that are available in Halo 3 and was a great artistic exercise.

The toughest part of making it was trying to be as faithful to the original as possible while also accommodating the inherent gameplay changes between Halo 2 and 3. The second toughest was getting Paul and the gang to fix their bugs on time and making sure lightmaps weren’t screwed all of the time.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 10:47 pm and is filed under Halo News, Maps. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.