Halo SPV3 – The Halo CE overhaul that fans have always wanted

Halo SPV3 – The Halo CE overhaul that fans have always wanted

 

Modding is the lifeblood of the PC gaming community, whether it be modding games to improve our experience or modding our PC themselves to deliver greater performance or deliver beautiful aesthetics. 

At OC3D we typically look at PC hardware or case modding, but sometimes a game mod can come out of nowhere and completely revolutionise the way you think about a specific game or franchise, warranting a closer look and in this case an in-depth written overview. 

 

 

Today we will be looking at Halo: SPV3 (Single Player Version 3), a complete overhaul of Halo 1: Combat Evolved for the PC that includes additional weapons, enemies, gameplay tweaks and improved graphics. This is not just a simple graphical reskin but incorporates all of the best aspects of the Halo series and brings them all into a single game. 

In this article, I will be describing the many improvements that SPV3 brings to Halo CE on the PC. While researching this piece I have been speaking to the mods lead developer and well respected Halo custom map designer Masters1337, whose passion for the Halo: Combat Evolved and modding spans all the way back to the game’s original release in 2001. 

 

 

What is Halo SPV3? 

The developers of Halo Single Player Version 3 believe that Halo 1: Combat Evolved is the best game in the franchise, offering intelligently designed levels/maps, fantastic AI and a level of replayability that has had gamers hooked ever since the game released 15 years ago.   

A lot of changes have been made to the Halo franchise since Combat Evolved, some of which have been good while others have not. In essence, the team behind Halo SPV3 planned to take the best of what the Halo franchise had to offer and create a new and improved Halo experience that is both unique and possesses the same magical gameplay feel that Halo Combat Evolved has.

 

 

The mod will become available to the public on June 25th on the SPV3 subreddit and include recreated versions of the first 5 missions of the original campaign, as well as an extra bonus mission that is a total remake of “The Silent Cartographer” mission. 

Each mission will include new enemies, weapons, vehicles, and music, all of which are new and original assets and music recordings made by the team, most of which will be familiar to existing Halo fans. This will add enemies like Brutes to the game alongside other familiar weapons like the Battle Rifle and DMR, gameplay mechanics like vehicle boarding, skulls and armour abilities have been added to the game alongside several unique map mechanics to add some extra variety to the game. 

While the original Halo was released on PC in 2001, SPV3 brings the game into 2016 with a large variety of graphical options and update. Now the game can support 4:3, 16:9, 16:10 and even 21:9 display resolutions and contains an FOV slider, giving PC gamers a lot more display options than most existing AAA releases. 

 

 

How long has this project been running for?

Ever since custom map creation and modding was possible on Halo: Combat Evolved Master1337 and his team of modders have been working on Halo maps and other related projects. 

The name Single Player Version 3 (SPV3) stems from the fact that this is the 3rd campaign project that the team has undertaken, though the team also considers this version as the third release of Halo 1’s original campaign, with the Original release as number 1 and Microsoft’s Anniversary Edition as number 2.   

The story of SPV3 goes back 10 years, with the first version of the project coming out on June 25th 2006, this initial project was abandoned but thanks to some advancements in the Halo modding community in the summer of 2011 the team decided to come together again and finish the ambitious project that they started. Since then everything from the original project has been scraped been recreated from the ground up, creating what will be released later this month.  

 

 

SPV3 has had a huge team of passionate Halo modders and creators that have worked on the mod since its inception, whether it be temporarily or over several years. Many fans have helped create custom assets and soundtracks while others have worked hard on playtesting and balancing the game’s new enemy types, mechanics, and weapons.      

 

      The mod has had around 3-4 years of actual development to make what people are about to play… but in actuality the concept, and reverse engineering that makes this all possible goes back just over 10 years.

 The team has always rotated people in and out, and we do reach out to people to help us and provide assets and help in other areas where our own full-time members aren’t always the best in specific fields, but we pretty much always have around a group of 10 people who are working constantly on it, with other people signing on for tasks for shorter periods of time.

 

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