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September 10, 2009 Link to this post

Halo 3: ODST's campaign length - one man's view
You might notice little tidbits around the net mentioning that there were media events in New York and San Francisco this week, and that press got the chance to play through Halo 3: ODST's campaign for the first time. (GameDaily has one, Dime Magazine has another, Kotaku has an extensive one (it's based on time spent with the game last week at Bungie's HQ, but Totilo was in New York yesterday, as well).) You can read these knowing you won't be spoiled - attendees had to sign NDAs, and cannot reveal much beyond the fact that they were there for some time still. I was at the New York event yesterday, and will have a full writeup when I'm allowed to. In the meantime, though, I thought I'd pass along a useful tidbit. Much has been speculated about the length of the ODST campaign - Bungie originally called it 3-5 hours, but then vastly expanded the content, and now hems and haws when asked for a specific number (since that number is dependent on a LOT of variables). Folks rushing through leaked games on Easy or Normal have finished the game in 4 hours, leading some to conclude that it really IS a short game. I'm not going to provide actual numbers - just a comparison. I played Halo 3: ODST for the first time exactly the same way I played Halo 3 for the first time: in a comfortable chair in front of a great TV (see the photo in the Dime Magazine article) in a New York Hotel, on Heroic difficulty - and it took me roughly 80% as long to finish ODST as it did to finish Halo 3. So if you whipped through Halo 3 in 5 hours the first time through, this one will be doable in 4. If you took 12 hours to get through Halo, count on 9-10 for ODST. And so on. It's a solid campaign - it did NOT feel like an expansion. And I'm looking forward to many, many replays. (Although I wasn't rushing, I still missed stuff, and I'm happy that the next few runs will still yield things I haven't experienced yet.) (Louis Wu 18:59:41 UTC)




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