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Halo Waypoint goes live: first impressions

Friday 30-Oct-2009 10:16 AM New Halo destination arrives for Preview Program members

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Users of the Xbox Preview Program have received a new extra alongside Facebook and Twitter: Halo Waypoint, Microsoft's new online destination for all things UNSC.

The server is being a tiny bit temperamental at present, probably because half the planet is trying to use it, but we've been able to have a go and bag some Avatar swag.

It's a separate program, like the Facebook client, and like it is accessible through the new My Community section. You go into Career mode to have it scan your Halo Achievements and give you a Waypoint Career rank: our partial collection from Halo 3 and ODST got us up to Milestone 17, with a cheery note saying we were only 5g away from the next level. There are 40 Milestones in total.

There are also Waypoint Awards, which indicate "excellence in a specific game speciality." So if you get five vehicle-based Achievements in any Halo game, you get the Tier 1 Vehicle Specialist award. Apparently you can get first tiers from single Halo games; to get to the top you've got to play all of them. Including Halo Wars.

It'll be interesting to see how the meta-Achievements thing takes off; are you dedicated enough to get separate achievements for earning Achievements?

And would Avatar bribes help? It's very keen to give you Avatar awards; we got a Guilty Spark prop just for signing in, and another load once it worked out how much of ODST we'd completed.

There's also an Intel section, which holds soem existing videos, interviews, and the ODST Premium Theme. The main page has a showcase highlighting the best Halo screenshots from the community, not unlike the tools at bungie.net.

We're just getting some screens to put up; if you're on the Preview Program you can grab it now. Let us know what you think - do you think you'll use it? Leave us a comment or drop us an email, we'll be writing about it in the December issue.

Jon Hicks