Halo: Reach Interview

03 Aug 2010 at 23:52:41 by Elly Davis

IncGamers recently caught up with Bungies' Brian Jarrard as they prepare to put to bed their mega succesful Halo series with the relase of Halo Reach in September.

What should gamers expect from this latest chapter in the Halo franchise?

We have tons of features but our bread and butter is telling a great story and throwing players into an amazing campaign experience.  Reach's campaign itself is a brand new story with brand new heroes. It's the first time this series you'll be able to fight alongside a whole squad of Spartans. It's going to be a little bit more character-driven story than you are used to with the prior Halo games.

The player, as Noble 6, will be right in the middle of this huge battle for the planet Reach and throughout the game we're going to throw out a lot of new and interesting experiences and surprises your way and ultimately tell the story of this planet that eventually gets destroyed by the Covenant but through the heroism and sacrifice of Noble Team you'll turn mans' darkest hours into one of its finest moments by catapulting Master Chief into his journey which ultimately results in the saving of all humanity.

So, how does Master Chief feature in Halo: Reach?

Master Chief isn't really a part of Reach.  The story for Reach is a prequel, before Halo: Combat Evolved, it's before the time of Master Chief.  This is a story about a new group of Spartans and we're really excited about them as characters. You're going to see them without their helmets; you're going to get to know their individual personalities.

For fans who love Master Chief, and we do too at Bungie, we've added some service options like the ability to unlock his voice in Firefight so if you really want to hear the Chief you'll be able to do that but Master Chief is not part of the Reach campaign.

What does the future hold for the Halo series?

Reach is definitely going to be our last Halo game.  It's the culmination of ten years of blood, sweat and tears and a lot of great memories creating, refining and working through this universe so right now most of the team is just really happy that the hard process of building this game is coming to an end and we are just about to hand off the final gold disks.  We're really looking forward to sharing this game with our fans and getting a chance to play it with our friends and of course to see what our fans do with these new tools and all the crazy customisation options and how they are going to breathe new life into the title.

The fact that we're not going to go back to Halo, I don't think it's really sunk in yet because we're just getting the game out the door to actually be able to play and share it with our fans.

What features can map editors expect to find?

The Forge editor got its roots at the beginning of Halo 3 and it's a pretty rudimentary way to edit major parts of a map that would affect its gameplay. Initially you could only do weapons and spawn points basics like a block here or a door there.  Once we started releasing these DLC maps like Foundry and Sandbox in Halo 3 it blew it wide open because we took it a lot further and added a blank map that had real building blocks that could be put together like a Lego set to create unique 3D spaces to play in and we wanted to carry that forward. It's been a huge and popular part of Halo 3 over the last 3 years and our fans have pushed it further than we even thought possible.

We learnt a lot by watching them and interacting with our community and we wanted to carry that forward and allow people to do even more and have an easier time building more complex maps.  We joke that Halo 3's Forge was kind of like a house of cards; people did some amazing things with it but it was painstaking and very time consuming and if one little piece came out of place the whole thing would come crashing down.  The goal for Reach was to make it easier, faster, much more powerful, and much more interesting and complex maps and make it easier to share. Forgeworld became this playground of enormous proportion set amongst the classic Ring that would become the canvas for people to build these creations.

What about multiplayer features?

We had the chance to introduce Firefight in Halo: ODST, its first incarnation and it turns out fans really enjoyed it and we love it.  It really takes that core Halo combat experience boils it right down to pure fun.  Just jump right in and you and your friends go head to head against wave after wave of enemies.  With Reach we had more time now to build it into a fully fledged feature of the game and the first major improvement is that it's got full support for match-making on Xbox Live.

One of the complaints of ODST is if your friends didn't happen to be on you had to play by yourself and it wasn't nearly as much fun. Now in Reach just hop online and we'll match you together with some friends and send you on your way. I think the more exciting addition to Firefight and Reach is just the wealth of customisation options. We're not going to limit you to just one singular experience now with Firefight. While we are still going to include a couple of default ways to play, it's really going to be exciting to see the fans go in and start to modify everything from what type of enemies and how the player behaviour is and what load outs are available and start to tweak all these different variables and create really radically different and unique Firefight experiences and be able to share them with the whole community at large.

And the coop group max is 4?

We feel great about having a 4 player coop experience.  Who's to say if 6 or 10 are better than 3 or 4 but 4 is a sweet spot for us and we've built our game, just like Halo 3 and ODST, to be a really fun experience for 4.  In a 4 player game each player would actually be playing as their own unique customisable Spartan in addition to having the AI members of Nobel Team supporting your battle.

Which of the previous titles influenced Halo: Reach the most?

The teams' goal was to really look back at, not one single thing per se, I think it was just trying to realise the vision for making a game that was to be the culmination of ten years of work, creating this universe.  We looked back at all the Halo games and tried to find the core elements that we felt were the strongest and resonated the best of each one and fused them into Reach. I think if you look at Reach and if you look at all the whole series of Halo games it's probably going to feel more like Halo: Combat Evolved.  That idea of getting back to the magic and getting back to that feeling of first setting foot on to the Halo Ringworld, that was a key part to the early part to the design of the game.

What's next for Bungie?

At this point I don't think the studio would be interested in going back to do a Halo game, who's to say, but we're really excited about what's next from Bungie.

We've already got a lot of work underway and lot of progress made. Halo's been great to us obviously, our fans, we wouldn't be here without them and certainly it's going to be great to share our final and bets Halo effort with them in just a few more weeks. 

At this point we're starting to accept and get excited about the fact that we are moving in to a whole new challenge and we're looking to redefine gaming for the next decade.  We're working on an all-new action game universe and that's as far as we're allowed to go right now. It is a great game and a great universe that you're going to want to spend a lot of time in.

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