Here is the whole interview:
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/bungie-s-back-part-one
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/bungie-s-back-part-two
Bungie's Back - Part One
A few weeks ago Bungie released a teaser trailer for a new title on its website, and speculation immediately mounted as to what that would be.
At the Microsoft press conference during this year's Tokyo Game Show that title was revealed as Halo 3: Recon, a follow-up to the main Halo 3 game released last year.
GamesIndustry.biz sat down with Bungie's community and PR director Brian Jarrard and writer Luke Smith to find out more about what this game means for the company.
Q: What are the key details on the game?
Brain Jarrard: It'll be out next Fall, and essentially it's an all-new campaign experience based in the Halo 3 universe, but the big twist is that you're actually going to play from the perspective of an ODST (Orbital Shock Drop Trooper) this time - so it's not about Master Chief, it's a little bit of a new direction.
There's a lot of familiarity, it still feels very much like Halo 3, but it meant a lot to the guys on the team not to just do more of the same and just tack on more Master Chief - so instead this is more of a prequel. The timeline of this game overlaps events in Halo 2 and Halo 3, so you're picking up at a point in Halo 2.
It's not a full-fledged game, but there are eight hours of new campaign experience, and a couple of new twists and turns for fans to experience - but all the great stuff from Halo 3 will still be available, such as four-player co-op, all the website integration, it's all being piled on top of this, and then we're also going to throw in some new multiplayer content in there as well.
So it should really inject a lot of life back into Halo 3 and give fans what they've been asking for.
Q: There was a lot of discussion about how and when the game was going to be announced following the confusion at E3 this year - it must be nice to finally get it out there?
Luke Smith: The team's really pleased to be able to finally talk about it, that's the main thing. We ramped up pretty considerably to be ready to talk, and now that we finally can it's pretty exciting for the guys back home who are working on this project.
Q: Was it a bit of an anticlimax at E3 when you weren't able to make that announcement?
Brain Jarrard: A little bit - I think one of the biggest concerns was that the whole mythos of what happened at E3 started to spiral. It just really put more and more pressure on the inevitable announcement. We're very excited for what we have here, but we were afraid that just the backlash, the repercussions, the expectations would just go to such a huge level that no matter what we did show would never be able to live up to that.
Q: Ultimately though it's Halo, so the expectations were always going to be fairly high...
Brain Jarrard: Yeah - it's a continuation of more Halo 3. We're working on a reduced timeline here, it's a little smaller in scope. I think that a lot of fans are going to love it, and in our minds I think it's going to raise the bar for what people are going to expect from a traditional expansion pack if you will.
We're trying some new ideas here, some things that were left over from Halo 3 that we never fully explored, and like I said rather than just do more of the same, the guys took it as an opportunity to take some risks and give the fans what they've been wanting for a long time. Hopefully next Fall it'll all come together and be glorious.
But it's definitely going to be a little bit different from what people are used to.
Q: So does that make it a two-year development cycle then?
Brain Jarrard: Two years since the Halo 3 release.
Q: How long has the actual development cycle been?
Brain Jarrard: The game started just a little while ago in earnest, so it's nowhere near our typical three-year cycle. This is just a small subset of our team right now. We have three projects underway in the studio at all different levels of status - some further out than others.
But this is a really small, agile team that represents a lot of people that have been around for...
Luke Smith: ...a long time.
Brain Jarrard: Since Halo 1. The lead designer's Paul Bertone - he's been around since the early days, one of the designers on Halo: Combat Evolved, 2 and 3. Joseph Staten is the lead writer, the creative director of the project. He did cinematics and writing for 1 and 2. So there's a lot of old blood, and some new hires and new blood fused into it.
I'm really excited about what that team's going to pull together. They have a really nimble production process and this will be a first for us to put out something like this, in a much more streamlined fashion, and not have the full weight of the studio for three years cranking on it.
Q: Is it the best of both worlds to be able to work on something that's close to your heart, but also to be able to flex in other directions?
Brain Jarrard: Yeah, absolutely. I think that was some of the original intention and goals for when we split off from Microsoft last year - just to have the flexibility to explore the various options, and expand in different ways as a studio.
You'd be surprised - in as much as we do have different guys who have worked on Halo for 15 years now, there are certainly people who have kinda had enough. We've also grown tremendously, we've doubled in size since Halo 2 shipped - we have a lot of people who have never shipped a Halo game before, and they only came to join us because of Halo, they're really passionate about the franchise.
So I think there's a nice mix of old blood that has a bunch of ideas they still want to get out there, and a bunch of new blood that wants to get their hands on Halo - so we're not done with Halo. We still love the franchise, but it's also important for us to let our fans know that we're looking forward to branching out in new and exciting ways. There'll be more things to come that are Halo-related.
Q: As far as the company is concerned, from a franchise-fatigue perspective, was there a feeling that doing new things was important for the health of the team?
Brain Jarrard: A little bit maybe. There were some people who immediately moved on to looking at much further non-Halo projects, and were really excited to explore what that might be. But there's still a really healthy core at the studio that's very much into Halo.
Sure it's not our baby any more necessarily, but we still think we can bring a lot of excitement in. We have a huge fanbase that we built up from the ground, and we don't want to turn our backs on our fans.
Halo 3: Recon was a game that we just felt we had to make - a lot of our hardcore fans are maybe mildly disappointed that we're still doing Halo, but I think they'll be pleasantly surprised by what we actually do produce and if they can just be a little more patient I think we'll have broader horizons to get to.
Q: Ensemble are working on Halo Wars, and there are other Halo projects in the works - what's it like to hand over the baton in a way? Does it interest you to see how they're translating that franchise?
Luke Smith: I think it's definitely going to be interesting, and we're excited to see how it plays out, how the Halo franchise is being explored. Halo 3: Recon's a good example - that, with 1, 2 and 3 are Bungie Halos, and now we're going to have Ensemble's take on Halo, and whatever else is on the horizon for that franchise.
We're just really excited to see how it all comes together.
Brain Jarrard: So far we have been very eager - watching and anticipating where the franchise goes - but thus far Microsoft's only tapped top talent to work on the franchise and when Halo Wars was greenlit a while back... those guys are world class developers of RTS games, and if anybody's going to tackle Halo in that genre, they were the best people to pick.
It's good to see that the game looks like it's coming along really, really well. We're sort of watching from the sidelines, taking it all in, but our priority mostly is just making our Halo game awesome for our fans, and we'll stay focused on that.
Q: It came to light recently that Ensemble had put in some initial work on a Halo MMO, which was later canned. Do you think Halo is a good universe for an MMO? Maybe it's too story-driven?
Brain Jarrard: I'm not sure - there are like our lunchtime discussions at the studio. A Halo MMO wasn't something that at the studio we had a lot of purview on. We'd heard rumblings and on paper, if someone says "Let's take Halo, plus Warcraft, equals dollar signs..."
So it was interesting when that whole thing came to light, there was more there than we ever really thought there was. I don't know, we've had a lot of heated discussions - there's a big, vast, rich universe, but then again it's hard for me to imagine. Everybody wants to be Master Chief, they all want to be the Spartan. You'd have to create a whole new layer of fiction and new characters that don't currently exist - not that it couldn't be done.
Q: The Star Wars franchise found a way that didn't mean you had to play as Darth Vader or Luke Skywalker - there were compelling experiences with Kyle Katarn, and so on.
Luke Smith: Like the moisture evaporator farmer in [Star Wars] Galaxies...
Brain Jarrard: I don't know if I would want to invest and become a Warthog mechanic in a garage, when all my friends were out there kicking ass on the front lines. I'm sure there's probably enough there to work with where something could of come of it, but I think it would have been pretty challenging.
Bungie's Back - Part Two
In the first part of the GamesIndustry.biz interview with Bungie at the Tokyo Game Show, PR and community director Brian Jarrard and writer Luke Smith talked about their forthcoming game - Halo 3: Recon - and the challenges facing any Halo-themed MMO.
Here in part two they discuss new IP and the importance of community, both for the Halo trilogy and their efforts online with Bungie.net.
Q: So the other two projects that Bungie is working on - is there original IP in there?
Brain Jarrard: There is original IP in there, yes.
Q: Is that part of the refreshing experience? Was there a feeling within the team that there was creativity there that needed to be expressed in a new way?
Luke Smith: There are definitely segments of people at Bungie who are really re-engaged, really excited about what they're working on now, really excited to be creating something again.
Brain Jarrard: Not to say that we couldn't have explored new IP and still have been owned by Microsoft - it's just different. You know it's your own baby through and through, you know you control your own destiny. And whenever we do decide to do something new, we get to decide the fate of where that goes.
We'll sink or swim, but it'll be by our own doing.
Q: As a company now, thanks to Halo, you have such a huge reputation that people are going to sit up and take note - whatever you do.
Brain Jarrard: I figure we're entitled to one free shot, right? Honestly, everyone's waiting to see what we do next, like it's an all-or-nothing proposition...
Q: There must be added pressure for anybody that's had a huge success in the past?
Brain Jarrard: There is - we talk about this a lot, even on record. I mean, Halo itself was a bit of a perfect storm - there were a lot of things happening at the same time, and who knows if we'll ever hit that magic again. I certainly think that Bungie has an awful lot of really awesome game experiences and stories to tell. They'll be very different - are they really going to catch on and become a pop culture phenomenon, spawn dioramas, and worldwide marketing campaigns? Who's to say?
I know the guys who are working on this project are really passionate and invigorated. A lot of it just seems to be going back to the old school vibe of Bungie - now there are guys just doing what they do best, being creative, unrestrained, thinking about what they want to do, and what is our next project?
That's something we haven't done in a long time.
Q: Is the new IP something you're working closely with Microsoft on? Are you restricted on having to work on Windows or Xbox 360, for example?
Brain Jarrard: No, we're not. We haven't gotten that far yet to be totally honest. In theory we do have every means to go out and find the right ecosystem, the right partners, to align with. We're very happy with Microsoft, the Xbox 360's been great to us and they're a world class publisher.
So who knows what the future will bring us.
Q: It's a very compelling platform landscape now, with the maturing platforms.
Brain Jarrard: For us the 360 has been great because there's just been this great synergy with Bungie because all of our games have this inherent social community aspect. Everything we've ever done has this very big online component - we, together with the Xbox consoles, have continued to push that Live experience, the whole notion of a party experience forward.
I like to think that we brought a lot of that to the market, and we want to keep iterating on that. In that regard Live has been a great service to us. It's astonishing to look at how well Halo 3 is doing even now, a year after release. We haven't really seen much of a decline in play, and we recently surpassed the lifetime number of games ever played on Halo 2 - so we're talking about four years of Halo 2 boiling down to about 1 year of Halo 3.
It's been pretty astounding, and to see our fans stand by us, it's even more reason why we want to do Halo 3: Recon, just to give something back and extend the experience a little bit longer.
Q: What sort of lessons did you learn through the Halo 3 experience?
Luke Smith: With Halo 3 specifically we brought this whole new thing to the game which was the file-sharing system. We found that shortly after the game came out that the file-sharing system, getting files from users and certainly finding files on Bungie.net was pretty complicated.
So we actually just rolled out this pretty significant overhaul to Bungie.net to help facilitate file-sharing a little bit better. We introduced a tag system which is pretty much becoming common, but now you can associate tags with files, so that people can search for things more easily. It's creating a lot more discoverability for the file-sharers.
Actually we've found that, as the game has continued to mature, the file-share system has been used more than ever. So introducing something like the tagging system, along with a bunch of other things that we've added, is totally capitalising on that maturity. People are digging further into the game's features.
Brain Jarrard: That was kind of the whole intent. If you empower the community to really own the game experience it'll spin off from there into infinite numbers of new ways to experience the game, so hopefully it takes on a life of its own.
I've always viewed as the more the game goes on, the more we give control of the game to the community. They're the ones that are going to dictate what goes on in matchmaking, what map variants are the most popular, and we're just going to react to that. We're finally starting to see that happen.
I asked some other guys to pull some numbers together - for year one, life to-date, there's been 54 million files uploaded from Halo 3 to our website. But there's been 533 million files downloaded, which is to be expected, because although there will be people who want to make content, a lot of people are just looking to consume content. So how do we make that stuff easier to discover? That's been some of the motivation behind our recent update.
Some of the other interesting stuff - we've actually had, life-to-date, 760 million games played, just on Xbox Live, just matchmaking games, which represents 9.5 million actual players, including guests.
Right now we have 3.5 million people interacting with our file share, currently sharing 13.5 million files and 20 million screen shots that are available on Bungie.net - so you can see, just trying to get your arms around that, how do you see, sort and browse through the content?
Even now, in the past two months, we're still averaging almost 2 million games per day being played on Halo, which is ridiculous - and close to 700,000 new players every day. Obviously we're seeing peaks and lulls, and we watch Major Nelson's top ten chart - there's us an Call of Duty almost neck-and-neck, but it was always our hope that fileshares for things like screen shots, custom maps and films, would give us the legs to keep them playing and engaged, so we could bring them with us to our next game. Certainly Halo 3: Recon should actually be a good exclamation point to round out the whole Halo saga - in terms of Halo 3 at least.
Q: You've got three teams working on projects - is the plan for the guys that are working on Halo 3 Recon title to continue working on Halo projects after that?
Brain Jarrard: I don't think so. We've already put a couple of map packs out, we do have more maps on the way. We actually have a Mythic map pack coming out early next year. We don't have firm details or a date yet, but we do have one more map pack coming out, and then we do have some maps associated with the actual Recon retail release.
But I think when this project wraps up in a couple of months that will be the time when that team moves on to something else, and part of that team will move on to something else and part of them will probably be absorbed into one of the other projects that are already on the way.
Q: So it's a bit like a final statement from you guys?
Brain Jarrard: I think so. We've stood by this game, and we're going to keep standing by it. Obviously apart from the retail products releases we're updating the matchmaking playlist every month on Xbox Live, we're adding fun Double XP Weekends and we just rolled out a bunch of achievements that are all retroactive so people that bought our map packs previously now have about 250 new gamer points to go and achieve.
So it's fan service for us - the audience is there, they demand it, we're still having fun with it, so we're just going to keep going for as long as we can.
Q: What was the reception like for Halo 3 in Japan?
Brain Jarrard: It's not one of the stronger markets, but that's not a surprise - if you look at the genre alone first person shooters don't tend to do well typically in Japan, much less most of the Asian markets. I have been surprised just to meet a lot of hardcore fans - they are here [in Japan] - and the ones you find are just as passionate as the ones back in North America or Europe.
I couldn't tell you how many units have been sold here, but it's definitely not one of the stronger markets - but who's to say, with Xbox getting a stronger foothold here and Recon being part of the Microsoft keynote at TGS, maybe there's an opportunity to expand and reintroduce people to the franchise.
Q: Do you have any plans to work with the new Xbox Live experience?
Brain Jarrard: [smiles] Not at the moment. Not at the moment, no.
Q: Was that a dumb question?
Brain Jarrard: No, it's just a funny subject. Obviously opinions sway heavily in terms of the avatars and things like that. Luke and I have had many discussions on those matters. But we're just focusing on our core game, and none of that has much to do with it.
I do think it's cool that our in-game party system now bubbles up to a platform level, so hopefully that's going to expand on the social web that our game already sort of weaved on Live, and maybe helps people get together and experience Halo.
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Good find, some interesting tidbits in there. I find it funny that they do not like avatars. They pretty much openly mock them on one of the podcasts. But I think the game, whatever it is, is pretty much guaranteed to be on the 360 at the least.
slim 
1000
80GB 
