Halo 3

Halo 3's box art featuring the Master Chief

Halo 3 is the third instalment of the Halo game series and sequel to Halo 2. It was created by Bungie and initially released on the Xbox 360 in 2007 by publisher/owner Microsoft. In 2014 the game was re-released as a part of Halo: The Master Chief Collection on the Xbox One and later in 2020 was ported to Microsoft Windows alongside other halo titles in the collection.

Like other games in the series Halo 3 uses Bungie's proprietary Blam! with a multitude of upgrades over the Halo 2 version of the engine.

Xbox (Bungie, September 2007)

This is the classic first release of Halo 3 for the Xbox 360.

Modding

There are several tools and mods for the base game or external programs that users can grab to enhance their experience. Examples include:

  • Assembly - A cache editing tool for various titles in the Halo series. Users can use this tool to make permanent edits to cache files and poke changes in real time. While not traditional workflow for map creation, it is a powerful tool that can be used to create interesting experiences.
  • TagTool - A cache editing tool designed to allow porting of tag data between different versions and builds of the Blam engine, as well as importing brand new content.

Like all Halo games tags play a large role in modding.

MCC (PC and Xbox One, 343 Industries, 2014-Current day)

Halo: The Master Chief collection (MCC) is actively maintained by 343 Industries for both PC and Xbox One. It brings the Halo series under a single Game as a Service, including unified matchmaking and progression experiences. The PC port uses Unreal Engine as a menu and input layer over the respective engines of each included Halo game.

In 2014, Halo 3 was re-released for Xbox One as part of the Halo: The Master Chief Collection. Often called H3 MCC by the community.

Modding

There are several tools and mods for the base game or external programs that users can grab to enhance their experience. Examples include:

  • Halo 3 Editing Kit - The official editing suite released for the MCC version of Halo 3 largely based on internal tools developed by Bungie and later used by 343 Industries and Saber Interactive. Some changes were made to make the tools more user friendly and stable, as well as to support importing content from modern 3D modeling software.
  • Halo Asset Blender Development Toolset - A collection of tools for Blender that can be used to export the intermediate files used by the Halo 3 Editing Kit.
  • Assembly - A cache editing tool for various titles in the Halo series. Users can use this tool to make permanent edits to cache files and poke changes in real time. While not traditional workflow for map creation, it is a powerful tool that can be used to create interesting experiences.
  • TagTool - A cache editing tool designed to allow porting of tag data between different versions and builds of the Blam engine, as well as importing brand new content.

ODST

Halo 3: ODST is a 2009 first person shooter that uses a lightly modified Halo 3 engine. The content creation pipeline is largely the same as H3 and most H3 tags will work in ODST. Support for ODST tags in H3 is less stable but thanks to engine upgrades made to backport Halo Online levels there is some level of support.