OXM
Of all the forthcoming shooters that are "tapping" proven multiplayer formulae to expand their offerings, Halo 4 seems most convincing.
The scale of the new game's Spartan Ops co-op component and Infinity War Games competitive multiplayer speak for themselves, and members of the Halo pro-gaming community have already given the intricacies of play their blessing. Here to discuss these latter, subtler changes in-depth is lead multiplayer designer Kevin Franklin.
This is your first original Halo project as a studio. It must be tricky, finding the balance between making your own creative contribution and respecting Bungie's achievements.
We knew we had this core Halo fanbase, but we also wanted to make sure to send it to all sorts of new players, but we also had to do that without breaking original Halo or changing it too much. I feel what we brought to E3 respects the Halo values but adds lots of new features as we rebuild the sandbox from the ground up.
While you'll still get some classic weapons like the DMR and AR, they're really still new components in our awesome sandbox. So we brought back some things like the Overshield, but we also add speed boost and damage boost to expand the experience.
How do you feel about the comparisons some have drawn between your new multiplayer unlocks and Call of Duty's perks?
We never really designed it with that in mind; we feel like our experience is and has always been distinctly Halo. Like when we look at the all the power-ups, the way people go at each other, all of it has a Halo feel to it. What we've added is the ability for players to earn points for when they contribute to the battlefield.
So when you do style kills, assists, help your team you're now earning points that go along with the medals that you were earning before. These points translate into rewards from the Infinity. That's the biggest addition we were concerned about, but all of our fears were gone as soon as we started playing it and getting it in people's hands.
There won't be a multiplayer beta for this, will there?
No, we ran an internal beta test but decided to focus on hitting strong in November. What we brought to E3 is more than representative of a beta test. We're pretty stoked for this.
How do your new assists work, and how have you altered the existing ones?
You have the classic assist, which is just every game you get an assist. We looked really closely at the tuning of assists. For Halo 4 we looked at how much damage it took before you were given an assist, but then we went further and said "how can we reward players for other things that are going on on the battlefield?"
So if you're running and an enemy starts stars shooting at you but gets killed by a teammate because he was distracted by you, you're rewarded for distracting the enemy. This came straight from players in our feedback sessions who felt they should have been rewarded for that.
There are all sorts of assists. For instance, the King assist in Regicide is the first ever assist in a free-for-all game, so even though you're all playing against each other, we'll still give you an assist for helping kill him, even if you kill the other player a few seconds later. All of these things wrap up into our assist spree so you can get a wingman spree.
We found lots of ways to reward players for doing things other than kills. We're really stoked to show off our objective games because that'll come through even more.
Can you give me some examples?
They're not announced yet but things like Capture the Flag have always been there, so similar things to that.
Are you keeping multiplayer Skulls and modifiers?
No, we've moved away from that. We're looking at the Infinity experience very specifically as a new one, and the only way to make things work across all the nodes to your progression - like if you're playing with or without your friends you're still earning the same armour and experience points, and levelling up the same character - to get that shared progression we really needed to unite the different experiences. So we went in a different direction which we're really happy with.
Have the various modes in multiplayer evolved a lot over development as you run internal tests? Is there an element of trial and error?
There was tonnes of iteration. Every time we change or add anything in the sandbox we have to work from the bottom up: "How does this affect this, how will this change things?"
We've revealed three new armour abilities - Promethean Vision, the Hard Light shield and the Thruster Pack - and to get those in the sandbox we had to go right from the ground up, look at how that interacted with all the different weapons, our health model, melee, spawning and put it all together. Then we added more. So it really is a monumental challenge but our team is incredibly talented, especially our sandbox design team and we feel we pulled it off.
Have the new enemies and the implications of new fiction had much bearing on what you're doing with multiplayer?
Absolutely. What we're showing today has a Forerunner map which is directly inspired by architecture from the campaign but we didn't really stop there - we've got Forerunner weapons in multiplayer as well.
So you can take the Spread gun, which disintegrates enemies, and use that - if you get close enough to a guy, it'll disintegrate him. It's an all-new weapon, it's got all sorts of multiplayer implications, you can bang shots off of corners. This is a way we leveraged the alien fiction in Halo and pushed it in the multiplayer. It's been great.
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