Halo Legacies: Project Announcement
Hello, and welcome to our home for updates and information on our upcoming project Halo Legacies. What is Halo Legacies? It’s an all new fan made Halo game being developed for the Master Chief Collection, in the Halo 3: ODST Engine. Why are we calling this a new fan game instead of just a mod like other projects?
Halo Legacies completely guts the content of Halo 3: ODST, and replaces nearly 90% of the textures and models, 70-80% of the animations, and 100% of the levels. The gameplay is completely new, with nearly every value used by Halo 3 or ODST and rebuilt to be something completely unique with a heavy Halo CE influence. The gap in content between this project and Halo 3, is almost as large, and in some case surpasses, the differences between games in the official titles.
Our end goal is to create a Halo experience as different to Halo 3 ODST as Halo Reach was to Halo 3, or Halo 2 was to Halo 3. Everything feels new and is designed to capture the feeling of booting up a brand new Halo game, to the point of being unrecognizable to the average person that this is built on the Halo 3 engine. Halo Legacies will feature one of the largest campaigns of the franchise, rivaled only by Halo Infinite both in play time and playable world size. Beyond the campaign, it will feature episodic co-op PVE modes that expand the story in the aftermath of the campaign, as well as a PVP Multiplayer tentatively planned to enter production after we have completed the campaign. This will be a full Halo experience that when completed, supporting Campaign, PVE modes including a new take on firefight, PVP multiplayer, theater, and forge.
HUD Concept by CodeLynx
Halo Legacies takes place in the months after Halo 3, in a unique time largely untouched by the franchise. Humanity having survived the events of Halo 3, has started to colonize the Halo rings and station forces on them in the wake of the collapse of the Covenant and the death of Truth. However, the UNSC has lost contact with the teams sent to Gamma Halo, and all ships sent to re-establish contact. You play as one of the first Spartan 4s and are dropped onto the ring in a high risk orbital insertion. Your mission is to figure out what has happened to the research teams and reestablish contact with the UNSC. Upon landing on the ring, you find your suit severely damaged and malfunctioning, and a new faction of Covenant who believe ascendancy is not achieved by firing the Halos rings, but rather through something else buried on this ring. With new leaders, motivations, and races conscripted into this Covenant, players can expect to fight familiar and new enemies, and new twists on existing enemies who will have some new tricks up their sleeves. Halo Legacies is inspired by Metroid Prime in its storytelling, as there is no dialog and the entire story is told entirely though exploring the environment. As the player explores the ring, they will find terminals and data pads explaining the complexities of this new post-war covenant, the findings of research teams and marines on the ring, and find clarity on the Human-Forerunner connection as Bungie intended it by finding logs of the archeological teams, who are investigating that very same thing.
Gameplay also makes many cues from Metroid Prime. Like Metroid Prime, this is an open world with no set missions. Unlike more modern open world games, Halo Legacies focuses on more traditional sized interconnected play spaces. The game starts off very linear, with players observing multiple locked doors around the ring and on their set paths. The more objectives the player completes, the more these doors open up, allowing new shortcuts, areas to explore, and enabling new objectives to be reached. As the player unlocks doors and progresses through the ring, Covenant and Forerunner responses will escalate as new enemies are introduced and old areas where the players may have only encountered grunts and jackals, will now feature new enemies that will lead those squads. These enemies are pre selected to have several variations, so you can revisit the same area dozens of times, and find a unique mix of enemies on each visit. The same applies for weapon caches, which will randomize based on certain criteria. The weapon pods containing things such as power weapons, can change over time so where you found a shotgun on your previous visit to an area, you may find a rocket launcher, a spartan laser, HMG, LMG, SAW or Grenade Launcher, changing how you will want to approach the mix of enemies that have been selected. You can wander around this open world endlessly and expect unique experience every time you enter the play spaces. Some of these play spaces have as many as 5 or 6 different entry points, which will trigger the enemies to change their behaviors to take up new positions within the environment as they attempt to fight you.
What do we fill this open world with to make sure it doesn’t feel empty, and prevent the combat from getting stale? There are many collectibles and upgrades to find throughout the open world. The first and most traditional Halo staple, are the data pads. These can be found throughout the open world, as one would expect. These bigger changes are suit and equipment upgrades. When you crash on the ring, your suit is severely damaged. Your maximum health is 1% of what it can be, your HUD is damaged and won’t fully display the expected information, the suit's water seal is damaged allowing you to drown, there is no health regeneration, and your night vision is disabled. Players can find upgrades not just to repair their suit, but expand your abilities, allowing things like new functionality for your shields, increasing your base health, adding EMP shockwaves or adrenaline boosts for when your shield breaks, and you can even find equipment upgrades so that you can always pull out a Machete, Jackal Shield and other gear from your inventory when necessary. How players decide to do side quests will largely determine how powerful their suit becomes and have ripples on the rest of the campaign and interactions with certain enemies. A great example of this is if you go off the main paths of the linear sections, you can find the machete and use that to cut down rampaging shieldless Brutes when they lunge at you in with a single slice.
Weapon and enemy rollout is also completely different in Halo Legacies compared to traditional Halo titles. When the game starts, you are only fighting Grunts and Jackals, and the full enemy roster is slowly introduced with often a new enemy type being introduced every 3-4 encounters. This means you may play through something around 30-40 encounters before you even meet your first Elite. Halo Legacies features the largest collection of Covenant species to date, with all previous races returning and expanded on, and new species being introduced, some for the first time in a Halo game. Players can expect to run into Slugmen, Keelbugs, Drinols, and the much maligned Yonhet. Prophets also return as a more rare, but still not uncommon enemy, finally fulfilling the teases of them in the lead up to Halo 2.
Flood Forms Materials Test
The weapon sandbox is also taking a unique approach, to avoid feelings of bloat and redundancies within the core sandbox. The core weapon roster is expanded on, as is the collection of power weapons. We’ll talk more about the core weapons at a later date, but there are a ton of power weapons to chose from. Since these weapons are randomized, outside of some base camps or specialized set pieces, you would never find all 3 types of LMGs together, or the 3 types of explosives. What weapon spawns, its expected range and special perks (lock on rockets, passing through multiple targets, zoom modes), changes how you will proceed. You will not be seeing situations where there is a crate of 3 LMGs, 3 explosives, 3 precision weapons, or a collection of rifles outside of a lifepod. Here in Halo Legacies, we are less focused on providing players a diverse set of choices to increase replayability, and instead challenging players to have diverse experiences by choosing for them. If you are still having trouble wrapping your head around this, think about the first encounter on Truth and Reconciliation. How would that play out if when you started that mission, you had a Rocket launcher and the CE pistol? Or the shotgun and the Halo 2 pistol? How those starting weapons would change the play through of that level, is what we are doing at a larger scale in Halo Legacies.
Plasma Repeater redesign by Dkrumpp
With all that said, this is where we are going to end this first blog post. Hopefully this gives you a better understanding of what this project is, and where we are going with it. We are currently looking for level artists to help polish up the encounter spaces, and extra encounter designers to flesh out the areas we have already built. As the game currently stands, all of the levels are fully explorable. They currently are just visual polish and have around 15-20% of the encounters built. If you have any relevant experience, feel free to reach out to us on our Official Discord. You can also follow us on YouTube (Previously Masterz1337's and the SPV3 Youtube Channel), where we will be uploading an additional update for our followers, with some extra footage and information in the coming days.
You can also follow and engage with us on
Reddit (currently SPV3 Subreddit)
We can't wait to share more on this project with you and get it in your hands!
- The Halo Legacies Dev team.
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