Bungie Disappoints Community

Halo 3 offers several different armors for use in its online multiplayer modes. Most of these are unlockable through in game achievements, or by finding skulls. One of these armors, the Hayabusa helmet, was very meticulously hidden. Only by jumping through a series of hoops (literally) in the game in a certain sequence could you find the final skull (the IWHBYD skull) that give you this armor. According Bungie’s Luke Smith (lukems on the bungie.net forums), Hayabusa was supposed to be the hard-to-find, cool, hidden armor in the game.

However, a few intrepid folks found (via hex codes in the Halo binar) the required steps to unlock the Hayabusa armor only a few days after release. However, the community desired another armor, called the Recon armor. A forum thread popped up on September 30th, and quickly grew to over 10,000 posts, all searching for ways to unlock this armor. Bungie’s Smith posted the following in the thread:

When the questions are meant to be answered they will be. It would’ve been months and months and months before folks would’ve unlocked IWHBYD if not for the hacked hex strings being exposed.

You aren’t going to find the answers in the hex files for Halo 3.

10.08.2007 7:49 PM PDT

And:

It was neat when Hayabusa was going to be the big, hard to unlock helmet, but hex files kind of ruined that, eh?

The trigger isn’t something you can control. It’s not your finger that pulls it.

10.08.2007 7:52 PM PDT

With Smith not giving an explanation that the Recon armor was not available through the game, like every other armor, the community turned to searching every possible meaning from these clues. Every type of trigger that wasn’t “pulled” was searched, every map torn apart, every game of every person with the Recon armor was cross checked with each other to find similarities, and people dedicated hours and hours to looking for this armor. They pleaded for Bungie to give an indication that the armor was or was not available to non-employees. Instead, lukems and the rest of Bungie ignored their questions and allowed the wildgoose chase to continue.

When the truth finally came out on October 12th, nearly 2 weeks from the start of the thread, Smith defended his inaction with:

Explain what part of my “hints” were “fake.”

Massive amounts of users knew and posted the complete and correct interpretation of what I said.

• 10.12.2007 10:10 PM PDT

So he’s saying that his cryptic message about a trigger was supposed to be an explanation of whether or not the armor could be found in the game. I do not believe this was clear, or could be accurately inferred from his forum correspondence. A forum administrator (not employed by Bungie, as far as I know) named Recon Number 54 defended this as a joke among friends. As somebody who participated in the hunt (at least to a very minor extent), I feel that Bungie acted very inappropriately by not ending the search before it got as carried away as it did. Bungie led this dedicated and loyal community on a pointless, fruitless search, in what appears to be revenge for people using hex codes to find the armor they intended to be hidden. That is not how fans should be treated.