‘Halo 2’ and ‘Halo 3’ modding tools come to Steam

Halo: The Master Chief Collection Season 8 is here, and with it comes some brand-new modding tools for Halo 2 and Halo 3.

343 Industries has unveiled some new modding tools for Halo 2 and Halo 3 – allowing “even easier” modding of these classic FPS games.

“With the launch of Season 8 for MCC, new mod tools for Halo 2 and Halo 3 have come online in Steam,” they confirmed in a Steam blog post. “There are several programs that everyone will have access to. If you’ve modded in the Halo community before, some may be easily recognized, while we do have an entirely new one created for folks to make modding Halo even easier.”

In order to download these Halo 2 and Halo 3 modding tools, you’ll need to own a Steam license for Halo: The Master Chief Collection.

You can download these as their own standalone DLC packs on Steam or install them via the games in your Steam library.

Inside the toolkit, you’ll find several programs available to all players: Guerilla, Sapien, Tool, and Standalone. But there are some additional bits and pieces, too.

Guerilla is used for editing the values of in-game content – these files, known as “tags”, are used for AI, bipeds, bitmaps, etc. This tool allows you to update and alter those values.

Sapien is essentially a level editor for the games. “Internally, levels are referred to as ‘scenarios’,” the studio explained. “This program allows you to populate data related to the level itself including things such as weapon placement, AI squads, and more.”

Tool is described as a “command-line-only Swiss Army knife” tool, allowing you to import source content into the games’ tag files and build map files.

Standalone is the new program that’s touted as making Halo modding easier than ever – essentially a development build of the game itself. This is really aimed at more advanced modding, allowing modders who already know what they’re doing to improve iteration time.

In other news, Splash Damage, the developer behind Gears Tactics, has announced it’s working on a new sci-fi game.