OXMUK
Halo Anniversary is out tomorrow, 15th November, and our review will be live at 2pm this afternoon. In the run-up to release, OXM tapped 343 Industries producer Dennis Ries for his thoughts on the on-going evolution of Combat Evolved. Read our hands-on preview if you haven't already.
The Skulls you've added to the campaign really change things up. Were you ever tempted to go absolutely crazy with modifiers, give all the Grunts Grav Hammers and things like that?
That's an interesting idea. Something that we kind of tinkered with - and what you're saying is an opportunity to completely change the game in some way, have the AI carry different weapons and all that - it's something we thought about and were tempted by.
But really when we came back to it, the core pillar was to keep the gameplay identical. This shooter is so iconic, and really the gameplay even 10 days later still holds up, and so while we had that temptation, we felt like the Skulls that we inputted, given the production time we had, actually met a lot of the demands you suggest. If you have multiple Skulls on, you can get some crazy gameplay environments.
Like for example Grunt Funeral - if you preorder the game, you'll get the Grunt Funeral skull - and what that means is when you kill a Grunt, it'll explode like a plasma grenade. On the surface that may not seem like much, but when you get to a level like assault on the control room, which has a lot of Grunts and they're all sleeping, you could kill one Grunt and create a chain reaction.
And suddenly they become very dangerous! So those types of things, albeit somewhat minor, when combined with other Skulls can be quite a significant improvement for someone looking for a sweeping difference in how to play the game.
David Ellis told me that the bare bones of Firefight are an explicit part of Combat Evolved - the second mission's code mentions Covenant "rounds". Were there any other discoveries like that?The thing that you just mentioned about the genesis of Firefight, with that level in Halo - we always knew we wanted to make a Firefight level centred around an area in the campaign, and when we looked at all the different levels, Halo was the most obvious. It really is the genesis of what Firefight is. All these different waves of Covenant, and the whole mission is simply to fight them off.
And I'd forgotten how customised the game is for something like co-op. If you start the game in co-op, you actually have two Cryotubes, and you see two Master Chiefs getting out of the tubes. Bungie did such a good job thinking about and designing this game for whatever experience you'd like to play, it's just sort of custom designed for you. It was enlightening, going back and playing it.
What advice would you give Reach players coming to Combat Evolved, and Combat Evolved players coming to Reach multiplayer?The best part about the online side is that since we're using the Reach engine, for the multiplayer component, even the control scheme is going to feel very similar to a Reach user. The only difference might be the maps. If you're a long time Halo fan, you're very familiar with the maps. It's been very fun going around all these events, showing off the remade maps.
Some people who haven't played Halo since Halo 2 sat down to play, and immediately knew where to go to get things like power weapons. One of the big challenges around learning new maps is exactly that: figuring out where the power weapons are, where the best places on the maps are. These are really faithful remakes of the originals.
So I think that has helped a lot of those people who've been disconnected from Halo enjoy the multiplayer side as well. For fans coming out of Combat Evolved to Reach - I think the control schemes in general, having that seamless experience where the default control scheme in Halo Combat Evolved Anniversary is the Reach control set, for that reason.
We want them to have a unified experience between the two, between the multiplayer and campaign game. If you want to go back and change the controls to how they were 10 years ago, it's certainly available in there.
Were you never tempted to do something more adventurous with Kinect?
Kinect was an interesting one, because when we thought about what we could do given the production timeline that we had... Kinect has a great infrastructure for voice recognition, and obviously motion control, and so the types of things that we were thinking were all around and not interrupting that core gameplay mechanic. That was something we just wouldn't budge on.
What we have now is really in line with what we were thinking back then, because any movement or skeletal recognition would have disrupted what the original core gameplay was meant to be. So the implementation that we have now with voice recognition - essentially mapping some of the button commands - and then the Library, which is separate from the gameplay experience and allows people to dig deeper into the fiction, I think is a great implementation.
Do you play many Kinect shooters?I had a great time with The Gunstringer which recently came out. I think it's a lot of fun, I like the creativity. I don't know if you've played it yet.
I've been watching Log play it. He seems to be enjoying himself.I love the idea of the puppets, the skeleton marionette, the crazy balloon man. It's a very comedic title. When I think of that particular title, I really enjoy the creativity around it. And that's what I hope for in future, some sort of creative implementation.
Is the best way to do a Kinect interface to make it an explicit part of your game's fiction, as you sort of have with scanning and analysing in Halo Anniversary?It's tough for me to say. We looked at it for Halo Anniversary, we really looked at how we could introduce Kinect without disrupting that gameplay, and so yeah, if the implementation you're talking about is a way to do that, without disrupting the fiction or the gameplay you're aiming for, yeah that would be a great way to do that.
Frank O'Connor has said that Halo 4's faults will be laid at 343's door, while Halo 4's successes will be attributed to Bungie. Do you think that's going to be the case with Halo Anniversary?You know, Anniversary one of the things we were worried about was that hardcore fan who loved the way the game felt, and we were worried about changing that, and having the perception 'oh no you've destroyed the game'. So we wanted to be as true as possible, which is why the implementation boils down to running the exact same code-base that existed 10 years ago, with an upgraded graphics engine attached to it. Yeah, I think we worried about it during initial design, but with the implementation we came up with, I'm not so worried about it any more. You want to do the crazy stuff, like Warthog launching, you can. All that stuff is the same.
How long do you think Anniversary will last as an online game? The custom Challenges you've added to Waypoint suggest that you think it'll have a steady following.I think building up the whole Halo franchise to make sure it's as comprehensive as possible has been an overall goal, for 343 in general, and I think what we've done with Waypoint is an example of that. You'll find Halo Anniversary, especially the Reach multiplayer maps, there's a lot of life there, and I think it's going to keep that multiplayer audience happy for a while.
Can you say anything about Halo 4 at this point?Just that I'm not talking about it! We're here to talk about Halo Anniversary. There's a lot of terminals in the game, and one thing that we really wanted to do was take the concept of the terminal and enlarge it to mean so much more. We've worked to get these animated shorts, and there are 10 different terminals throughout the game. And if you watch all of them, you can piece together some information about Halo 4.
This is the return of Master Chief. What's your take on Halo games that don't feature him?I think Bungie did a great job with Reach, it was a really refreshing viewpoint, and even with Halo 3: ODST, it was a unique way of building onto the Halo franchise from a different perspective. And I think they did an excellent job building it out in Reach, especially all those cinematics, they were just so wonderful. I personally think that Reach was just an awesome campaign, with or without Chief. And multiplayer with all the load-outs, things like the jet pack and Armor Lock, it's a great way to change up multiplayer and keep it fresh.
I don't understand complaints over the absence of Chief, personally. It's not like he's the only strong, silent, visored Spartan out there. Though I suppose he has that special relationship with Cortana.Yeah, and that's part of the reason why there's a lot of excitement to see Combat Evolved come back. People get a chance to relive that, and remember what it was like to play as the Chief first time.
http://www.oxm.co.uk/36024/featureshalo-anniversary-343-talks-halo-4-secrets-kinect-and-matching-bungie/?page=3
