Reach Fans Spent Decade Trying To Save Doomed Character

Sadly, it’s not Kat they can save, but the surly jerk in the background, Emile. Screenshot: 343 Industries

A group of Halo Seed Hunters have found a way to save one of the doomed members of Halo: Reach’s Noble Team.

In Halo: Reach, you are tasked with fighting the Covenant as part of the famous Noble Team. Throughout the events of Reach, the members of Noble Team, heroically or by bad luck, die one by one until your character, Noble Six, is the last Spartan in not so long a time. Through an exhaustive process of stepping out of bounds, dodging cutscene triggers, and pushing an immobile NPC through the game, Trickocity Termacious– a team of Halo stuntmen – figured out how to spare one of your comrades, Emile, from his dark fate… sort of.

“The idea was born soon after the game was released,” Trickocity member Aaron Sekela told Kotaku. “As most of the characters die, the community rallied around saving them somehow,” Sekela said in an email. For 10 years, the team experimented, applying tips and techniques found through the Halo glitch hunt to achieve their goal of saving Emile.

Halo: Reach is my favorite Halo story. There’s a well-worn copy of Eric Nylund’s The Fall of Reach sitting on my shelf taunting me with a proofread as soon as I’m done here. I like the idea that the motivation to save the Noble team members was not just driven by a technical question: “How do we break the game? But from the point of view “We love these characters, how can we save them?” “

I just wish it was someone other than Emile. He’s one of the meanest and meanest members of the Noble Team, but Sekela explains that there’s a good reason he was chosen over Jorge or Kat.

“Over the years we’ve made a few plans on how to possibly save one of the Noble Teams, but ultimately they’re scripted to die in cutscenes. Even if we were to avoid, say, Jorge, blowing up on the Corvette during its cutscene. The game would continue, remove Jorge from the map after the cutscene, then continue the next mission without him. “

Emile, however, is the only Spartan who doesn’t die within a cutscene, so Trickocity decided he would be the best candidate for salvation.

Saving Emile is complicated but supported by a simple concept: avoiding what the team calls a “cleanup” trigger. Basically, there are points in Reach where the game decides to remove anything it no longer needs, including cutscenes. Finding out how to actually “save” Emile happened by accident. While tinkering with an issue that allows you to play two cutscenes at the same time, the team discovered that they could spawn Emile after his death scene.

Get them Noble Six.Screenshot: 343 Industries

Through an elaborate and confusing process of launching vehicles and themselves out of bounds, the team was able to position themselves outside of the cleanup trigger zone for the cutscene that makes Emile appear as a teammate. Once they’ve progressed enough in the game, they can go back to trigger the cutscene that spawns Emile. However, once they father him, Emile can no longer move around on his own. Therefore, in order to complete the game with him, Trickocity had to use all the tricks at its disposal to essentially lead Emile to the end of the game. You can watch the video to see exactly how. The level of detail involved in performing this trick is astounding.

During the “he’s not heavy, he’s my brother” part of the trick, there was no room for error. Due to the bypassed cleanup trigger, the checkpoint system was horribly broken, so there was no way to reload if an error occurred – and there was a lot of possibility for errors.

“We had to break down barriers, kick Emile off the map, launch ourselves up to the top of that mountain without dying, and conserve our ammo supply without messing anything up even once,” Sekela said. “You really had to be in our game to bring Emile to the end of the level. “

The funny thing is that Emile is still dying. There is no way to stop the Zealot from stabbing Emile to death in Reach’s final mission. However, because Trickocity was able to carry their brother Spartan’s lifeless model from his point of spawn to the end, he’s there with them as Reach ends by proving the old Halo adage, “Spartans never die. , they’re just missing in action. “