The third and final map in the Legendary Map Pack has been announced; it is Blackout, a remake of Lockout from Halo 2. And, according to Bungie, “Blackout is a remake in a pretty strict sense of the word.” Rejoice. And then click the link below.

Dan Miller: Designing odds and ends, I kept stewardship over the level and fixed bugs. There wasn’t really a whole lot to do design-wise after the weapons and gametypes were placed. We tried to keep it as close to Halo 2 as possible and let the community Forge it up how they wish. [Bungie – 03/25/2008]

This should please an enormous amount of people. Not only is Lockout remade, but it is faithful to its original design.

It’s a UNSC research station set in the Arctic, and I am pretty sure that this is also where all of the R&D on military grade Otter Pop rations took place. Early on I thought it was going to be an oil derrick, but that changed over time. We have some cool racks of glacier core samples, Doppler radar and other pieces of research gear strewn about, which makes for a nice touch – and when you look up to see them make sure you notice the beautiful Aurora Borealis in the sky. There were other, more outlandish settings done in the concept phase, but we’ll keep those secret as you never know when we’ll dig into that bag and pull it out for a future project. [Bungie – 03/25/2008]

Words don’t do the map much justice. Check out the pictures at the bottom of the page; we don’t get a view of the Aurora Borealis, but the ice floating in the ocean below looks really great. And the cliffside rising to the side helps to add a sense of height to an already towering structure.

We also set the time to be the middle of the night, so it’s dark, but the full moon and ambient light from the facility make the map visible enough that it plays just like Lockout. And that took a lot of tweaking – there were weeks when the map was just too damn dark to do anything, or too light that everything looked washed out and you lost the cool midnight setting. In the end Paul and his cohorts found a really great balance to the aesthetic. [Bungie – 03/25/2008]

A nighttime map will certainly be a welcome addition to the Halo 3’s collection of maps. I can recall pictures of a nighttime Valhalla released before Halo 3’s launch; many speculated that there would be a day/night cycle for some maps, or perhaps a setting that would alter the lighting for certain maps. While none of that ever came to fruition, it will be great to finally see a true nighttime map, complete with a full moon.

We tried our best to keep the weapon layout, gametypes and spawns as accurate as we could to Halo 2. There are a couple of jumps that are easier in this version, but that wasn’t by design- they just kind of fell out of how we made this level. [Bungie – 03/25/2008]

Most of the jumps, even the crazy ones from Halo 2, are there. However a few are tweaked or removed and there is one spot that was altered that makes it less easy to lock down a specific quadrant of the map. Also, the small platforms next to the air vent are at slightly different elevations. [Bungie – 03/25/2008]

I would guess the main change would be that jumping has changed and it made certain jumps easier to make. I wonder if the Assault Rifle’s influence also changed how the level plays vs the smg. I think the level plays a little more mid-range because of the Assault rifle. [Bungie – 03/25/2008]

The general pacing in MP changed between Halo 2 and 3, and the sandbox changed drastically, so that affects all remakes, but for Blackout specifically we wanted to keep things as close as possible to what was built in Halo 2. That means that the biggest changes come from actually gameplay as the way weapons and equipment interact on the map make a game on Blackout so much more different than a Halo 2 game on Lockout. [Bungie – 03/25/2008]

It sounds like about as faithful of a remake as we could ask for. Changes from Halo 2 to Halo 3, like jumping, equipment and speed of movement are, of course, going to result in changes on any map ported between the two games. But none of the changes are as drastic as, for example, the differences between Halo 1 and Halo 2, so keeping the geometry the same will likely work great and cause the map to play extremely close to the original; probably as close as we could possibly hope for.

We’ve decided to go with a ‘less is more’ attitude with Blackout after some playing around with a bunch of different placements, we’ve settled on one regenerator, one bubble shield and one power drain.

…With such verticality to the map and the narrows spaces, the Bubble Shield is terribly effective for just shutting down certain lines of sight. It’s also fun to toss a Power Drain onto the helipad while everyone is fighting in the middle and just clean up. [Bungie – 03/25/2008]

Equipment will certainly add a new dynamic to the map, but, personally, I welcome the idea of something refreshing being added to the map that, at any time, we could remove with Forge if we wanted to.

We almost didn’t do it because we already have Guardian, which was similar and ‘inspired by’ Lockout. But when I started up the DLC project we gathered a ton of data from the community, looked at the most played maps on Live and did some very unscientific polls on Bungie.Net and other community websites and Lockout was leaps and bounds ahead of every other map in terms of games played and the public demand. It also fits a need in our overall map portfolio to help round out the small maps that are available in Halo 3 and was a great artistic exercise.

The toughest part of making it was trying to be as faithful to the original as possible while also accommodating the inherent gameplay changes between Halo 2 and 3. The second toughest was getting Paul and the gang to fix their bugs on time and making sure lightmaps weren’t screwed all of the time.[Bungie – 03/25/2008]

Well, there we have it. Fans have been asking for it and Bungie is delivering. And it seems, right now, that they have withstood any desire to change the map in even a small way. We’ll have to see for ourselves how well a true remake of a Halo 2 map will play, but seeing as how Halo 2 and Halo 3 don’t have any drastic changes, I have a feeling that the map will feel just like it did in Halo 2; and that will make lots of people happy.

Kudos, Bungie.

Screenshots released at Bungie.net (high-res shots available at their site):