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Forum index » Meta » General META Discussion

Halo Reach ARG
Moderators: imbri, ndemeter

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Sunburned Goose
Greenhorn

Joined: 25 Apr 2009
Posts: 8

Halo Reach ARG
A community based ARG to prepare for Halo Reach.

As the Halo community prepared for the next interation of our franchise, Tied the Leader hosted another ARG to build the excitement for Halo Reach. As the ARG has ended, we did a nice writeup to explain the story and let those who didn't participate share the experience.

http://blog.tiedtheleader.com/article/903/remeber-asch

Goose.

Posted: Tue Sep 21, 2010 2:18 pm

Sunburned Goose
Greenhorn

Joined: 25 Apr 2009
Posts: 8

If there is any feedback, I'd like to hear some. I've done two of these type of games for my community, and it seems to me, that the simpler of the two was more well recieved.

http://www.tiedtheleader.com/movement/index01.htm is the 'walkthrough' of the 1st ARG I put up for Tied the Leader.

Here's the post mortem I posted for PFS:

Quote:

Thank you everyone. I really can't thank those who participated in this ARG enough since without your time and effort, there wouldn't have been any story at all. You all did a great job at working through the story and unlocking the pieces of the puzzles, but at the same time, mamy of you inspired me as I was telling the story. Just looking at that thread, 65+ pages in just three days, I have to say that it was a great success and I can't wait to play HALO 3: ODST.

So to just give you some insight into what went on, I have wanted to tell this ARG for a long time. I really wanted to tell a story that would get you into the boots as an ODST and build the excitment for the release of HALO 3: ODST this month. As more was known about HALO 3: ODST, the live action trailer, I was excited. So many ideas started to come to me that this story just began to fall into place. It was only this past Sunday that I said to myself, "I'm going to do it, now or never!"

It was a lot of fun on my part to put this ARG together for you all. I bounced ideas off my brother in law, EpicGunslinger, and many pages of notes to build out a three act story around gathering modules to rebuild the superintendant of New Mombasa away from the city via the HostBootloader. We needed characters to help so we came up with an Admin Process (NMAP) that couldn't leave New Mombasa. The players would have to work with the weakened NMAP to recover the modules and load them into the Host. Over time, players would engage the characters and realize that they were role playing as ODST's tasked with the module recover efforts on the ground in New Mombasa. The NMAP would have you question if you wanted to support the Host after it was tasked with 'rebooting' a failed module install.

This was the choice that carried the game in the direction it went. Having been told the Host was trustworthy, the game moved on so that the Host would accept the final module. This last module caused a transformation in the Host to become a Covenant AI. Each module carried a payload that individually was benign but brought together, became a functional, powerful threat to the UNSC. So the HostBootloader wasn't actually a bad piece of code, it was the modules that were compromised. The UI of the silverlight application that we've been following transformed into a covenant theme of purples and silver with the Covenant lexicon being used.

The weakened NMAP was quickly overwhelmed by the Covenant AI and moved it self out of New Mombasa and into an ONI facility. If you saw in the password, there was a hint about the roots of the NMAP, 8-200N1-AI, 0N1 == ONI. This process was much more capable that it has appeared and it fooled the Covenant AI into believing its superiority. You could see that as it boasted on the TTL forums. Triumphantly, NMAP reapeared, and whiped the Covenant AI out of existance.

A final message from the AI was to get back into the fight and bring it back to the original premise, which is to get you all excited about HALO 3: ODST.

12 hours of sleep over four days, programming at night, and writing storylines during the day, it was a really good experience on my part and I want to say thanks to several Gunslingers for helping me out with this:

Dweezle
Cuteness
mvuakali
XerxdeeJ

Their help was one ready why this was possible.

Let me clear up a couple of things:

1. Not a single soul on this forum knew when this ARG or what the ARG was going to be about. Everyone was surprised and I got a lot of messages with legitimate anxiety about someone hacking our site. Those that knew that I was thinking about the ARG knew something was going on, but they too didn't have any idea aobut the story or how it would unfold.

2. H3WM El Duce == Axiom. I needed a forum user to post as Axiom and Deej created a user for me but no not raise eyebrows, we just created a user with the same username as the 'last created user', ie, H3WM El Duce. I then renamed the 'display name' of the user to Axiom. When the character was killed by NMAP, I just deleted the account but that revealed the underlying username. FAIL. This is what happens when you run an ARG by yourself. I deleted the user and then immediately went into the database to correct the username but many of you had already refreshed the page. You're too quick

3. You helped shape this story. Watching your reactions and comments, I took those into consideration as I wrote out the story for the next day. Thank you all for that.

4. The HARDEST thing about this ARG has been to not make any mistakes with my spelling

Well, thanks again. I'm glad to have finally done this ARG and quite surprised at how successful it was with you all. Now you know what Steganography means
Goose.

Goose.

Posted: Fri Sep 24, 2010 1:19 pm

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