Nice. That hologram thing looks pretty cool, I can see myself falling for that a lot. :(

Yeah, actually the more I see footage of it the more I see myself using that one.

New ViDoc up:

YouTube Video

hyper lethal lol

New ViDoc trailer just launched at Bungie.net labeled "A Spartan Will Rise".

It can be located here

EDIT: Hahaha, wow, I posted last, so it's my Dupe. Whoops!

Ahahaha, I like how you both posted that at the exact same time, but with different links.

Take a break for like a week, man. Reach isn't going anywhere.

(which one of you is the dupe)

Yeah I lol'ed and fixed the title appropriately. My silly man couldn't resist to build this thread up on anything, even a small tidbit.

I approve of this title change.

I DISAPPROVE OF YOUR FACE

Dr. Halsey would get it.

So apparently there's Matchmaking for Campaign now, interesting.

For coop campaign, makes sense. Imagine there will be for firefight this time too.

Now maybe I have forgotten something about the halo lore in the first four games, but wasn't that Cortana in human form at the end there? Did they model the cortana AI after a human? I didn't read all the way through the Halo: Fall of Reach novel, so maybe I missed something.

Or am i just imagining Cortana's voice?

Well previous Halo games didn't have matchmaking at ALL for Campaign or Firefight; we knew that Reach had Matchmaking for Firefight, but the Campaign matchmaking is new.

I'm really rusty on my Halo lore, but IIRC Dr. Hasley (the woman at the end of the trailer, and the one who created the Spartan-II program) created AI's, and Cortana is one modeled after her. I think I got some of that wrong, but that's the gist of it. Hasley plays a very large part in the series fiction outside of the games; her journal is that book that comes with the CE/LE versions of the game.

Cortana is a "smart" AI (capable of creativity and inspiration). Her programming is based on Halsey's neural network (they used a cloned copy of Halsey's brain), so to an extent she thinks like Halsey, she's just got a lot more processing power. I guess using Jen Taylor as Halsey's voice actor is sort of a tribute to that piece of the fiction.

And I know all this because I listened to the Fall of Reach audiobook in the past couple weeks. :eagletear:

Of course it's Cortana. They had to shoehorn in at least one character from the other games and it was never going to be Master Chief or Sgt Johnson.

Even having never read anything about Halo and only knowing what's in the games, it's painfully obvious that the plot of this one is for Noble 6 to carry Cortana off-world so she can link up with MC.

Since she's a computer programme, I'll never understand why they can't just email her and don't keep backups.

I'm still betting MC will have a cameo in the last 2 sec and Johnson will be a early recruit or something similar. hrhr

Cortana was already on the Pillar of Autumn prior to the shit going down at Reach, so no. I'm guessing that you will be doing something to help the Pillar of Autumn get away, but nothing that direct.

I'm still not even sure where that whole video comes into play. There's a lot of talk within the video that makes it seem as though Dr. Halsey is talking before the Fall of Reach, but when it shows her, she's looking at a data screen that clearly displays Noble team and has "Emile" and "Kat" marked as "MIA" which would lend toward it being afterwards or possibly closer to the end of the game.

I would need to dig up the post, but I think someone asked that in the GAF thread and urk said something along the lines of "how do you know it was before the game?"

Additional Spam:
Also it's completely unconfirmed it's Cortana, and most signs point to a different AI (Auntie Dot). Skipped my mind since it's largely semantics, but if it's a different AI than the shoehorn thing doesn't apply.

Personally, the only one I'd think would even remotely be possible to shoehorn in would be Sgt. Johnson. It'd be a tight fit, but it is possible that he could appear within the game.

Though, I love that they've officially confirmed at Gamescom that Buck(Nathan Fillion) will make an appearance in the game. To me, that's worth ten times more than if they were to throw Chief, Cortana or Johnson in there.

Fuck that, where is Dutch. Best ODST.

"Well, like the good book says, payback's a bitch."

So why can't they email their AI's or take backups?

Serious question, I've never read any of the wider material and it always seemed like a massive plot hole to me. Why would MC bother going into the Flood infested ship to get her back rather than just getting the backup disk from last week and reinstalling her?

Because:

1) It would have been a terrible idea to leave an AI as brilliant as Cortona in the hands of The Gravemind
2) Her Data Crystal Chip is physically needed for portability.

as for the copying thing, Cortana has the ability to create copies of herself, but they are imperfect and not capable of the complexities that she is. She's done it before, and the copies at one point started creating copies of themselves and things got kind of ugly. I'd imagine they haven't touched upon (or tried) creating physical backups or copies of the original AIs because of some unknown difficulties involved. Smart AIs themselves are only made by copying (and destroying in the process) the brains of living human beings. Thus, you'd be making a copy of a copy and awww shit's getting rampant

(Fun fact: Cortana was created from one of twenty attempts to create an AI from the flash-cloned brain of Dr. Halsey)

why the fuck is Tails an expert on this

Before you insist on countering with more "yeah but still" Shin, AIs are pretty rare and "fragile" in the Halo universe. They prefer VIs because AIs are prone to start doing stuff on their own and going nuts. This is why when an AI does get made, they are designed to die out in, was it three years? I think.

Anyway, because AIs are complex and delicate creations, they're not only files on a harddrive, and can't be copied or the copies would deteriorate. And AIs with deteriorating thought process are a no-no.

And you really should read some of the books, they're pretty good. Especially Fall of Reach. They also explain a lot of the stuff you're wondering about.

Because I read all the novels as they came out~

"Smart" AI's have around a seven year (lol Bungie) life cycle before they start to go crazy nuts. "Dumb" AI have none.

e: oh and seconding that read the books sentiment. They're pretty neat!