Bungie’s “heat map” for Halo 3
When you have a video game title as big a behemoth as Halo 3, you need to have an excellent beta testing phase to make sure that all possible issues will be ironed out even before the game is released. Bungie Studios understands this perfectly well, thus, the over 40 million preview games played in just three weeks.
Yup, that’s how extensive Bungie and Microsoft want this testing because the title, truth be told, is expected to generate truck loads of Benjamins. Anyway, the image accompanying this article is an example of a “heat map” for Valhalla maps. This graphs show the data samples taken during the testing phase.
The red parts of the map represent choke points and hot zones. Bungie refers to maps similar to this to find out where changes to the level’s layout, spawn points, or weapon locations need to be made. Think of the red area as blood, meaning a lot of kills have occurred there.
Quite curiously, the heat maps can also be used when balancing weapons. Just like what we said, the said maps also reveal weapon locations and spawn points. With this, Bungie can establish “themes and patterns” of issues with weapons and spawn points.
Via GWN
When you have a video game title as big a behemoth as Halo 3, you need to have an excellent beta testing phase to make sure that all possible issues will be ironed out even before the game is released. Bungie Studios understands this perfectly well, thus, the over 40 million preview games played in just three weeks.
Yup, that’s how extensive Bungie and Microsoft want this testing because the title, truth be told, is expected to generate truck loads of Benjamins. Anyway, the image accompanying this article is an example of a “heat map” for Valhalla maps. This graphs show the data samples taken during the testing phase.
The red parts of the map represent choke points and hot zones. Bungie refers to maps similar to this to find out where changes to the level’s layout, spawn points, or weapon locations need to be made. Think of the red area as blood, meaning a lot of kills have occurred there.
Quite curiously, the heat maps can also be used when balancing weapons. Just like what we said, the said maps also reveal weapon locations and spawn points. With this, Bungie can establish “themes and patterns” of issues with weapons and spawn points.
Via GWN
