OXMUK
Right now, you'll have more luck parking a Warthog atop a Scarab than getting anything Halo-4-related out of 343 Industries. The studio is eager to talk up its vision for the new Reclaimer trilogy, dropping a few nuggets on Cortana's impending Rampancy (the AI equivalent of senility) and treating us to a dazzling montage of Forerunner-flavoured concept art. When it comes to cold hard gameplay or plot specifics, however, 343's collective lips are sealed. Fortunately, there exist several Mystic Journalistic Abilities designed to break a developer's silence, psychological war techniques handed down from editor to editor over the centuries. One of them's the Art of the Ostensibly Unrelated Question. All innocence, we recently asked 343 directors and producers what they've enjoyed playing lately. The responses - which you'll find inOXM's now-available limited edition Halo special - are... suggestive
Intriguing. Halo's never had an open stake in the chin-stroky "player freedom" vs "developer intention" debate, leaving the bulk of its storytelling to cutscenes rather than those edgy, flashy emergent environments proffered by Bioshock and co. But factor in the series' wedding of tiered, intensely dynamic AI to linear campaign design, and you start to see where an open world game like Red Dead could be influential.
Missions like Silent Cartographer in Combat Evolved or the assault on Sword Base in Halo: Reach aren't just bouts of COD-style whack-a-mole, they're helter-skelter stages on which you thrash out living, breathing drama with the AI. No one battle is the same, as Grunts lose their rag, Elites decloak at different intervals and jet-packed Brutes accidentally bump heads.
While the overall plot arch is a hands-off affair, and the environments in themselves aren't exactly bursting with backstory, Halo's scenario design involves much the same sinuous plating of the nailed-down and the free-floating as Red Dead and its fellow sandboxers.
In terms of how NPCs behave, how they react to each other and the player, and how that feeds into mission plot, Rockstar's opus could have much to offer. It's worth noting, on a possibly important tangent, that Redemption's "free roam" multiplayer lobby and Reach's Forge World have a lot in common - they're menus reimagined as playable environments.
Advances in storytelling dominate the 343 take on competing developers. Executive producer Kiki Wolfkill looks to another Rockstar game, LA Noire, for inspiration. "I wouldn't say the whole truth or lie mechanic worked - or at least I don't read people well, apparently - but they're really pushing things forward in terms of characters and story.
"I'm mostly interested in storytelling," she adds. "And it's fascinating to see how games like LA Noire, Heavy Rain and even Call of Duty tell their story. It seems to be the place where games are evolving the most right now, outside of technology."
It's even harder to imagine what a game like LA Noire could add to Halo than Red Dead - we can't see the Chief grilling Covenant witnesses for clues, somehow - but again, the balance between flexibility and direction is one Bungie's existing work speaks to. Holmes feels Team Bondi didn't quite nail it, a criticism many players will echo.
"LA Noire was really intriguing for me in terms of the mechanics they tried to introduce - I thought it was successful in some ways, and not so successful in others. We had a hearty debate about how you could present that same experience in another way - it felt like the open world didn't really add a ton. But within games it's becoming increasingly hard to see real innovation and people taking risks. I though it was pretty exciting for that reason: it was a mechanic that we hadn't seen in any other games."
We suspect the new Halo will be more conservative than not - it's the first new Halo project 343 has assumed full responsibility for - but Holmes and Wolfkill's ruminations are encouraging evidence that the team isn't just out to revisit Bungie's best moments. Tempting as it is to call Halo a self-sustaining property, there are lessons to be learned from other franchises, and the developer seems pleasantly open to them.
http://www.oxm.co.uk/34287/features/halo-4-is-343-taking-inspiration-from-red-dead-and-la-noire/
