Archangel Tyrael Posted June 12, 2012 Report Share Posted June 12, 2012 On the face of it there seem to be few games that can be considered more of a guaranteed hit than Halo 4. But Microsoft are clearly aware that there's no such thing as a guarantee in gaming, especially not when this is the first mainline sequel by anyone other than series creators Bungie. And certainly not when real world military shooters like Call Of Duty and Battlefield remain flavour of the month. So after months of curiously restrained marketing they went all out at E3 with the first reveal of the campaign mode, as well as hands-on with both the multiplayer and the new co-op orientated Spartan Ops. The story-based campaign footage was only shown at Microsoft's media briefing and you can find our description of all it contained by following this link. But on top of this Spartan Ops and War Games were also available, in various different forms, both behind closed doors and on the E3 show floor. That made for an awful lot of Halo 4 to digest in one go, so luckily we were also able to talk to franchise director Frank O'Connor (appropriately enough while interrupting his lunch) about his experiences working on the game. War Games The only thing that's really been shown of Halo 4 up till now is its competitive multiplayer, now referred to as 'War Games'. That's presumably because, at first glance at least, it still looks largely the same as usual. Obviously it benefits from the campaign mode's greatly improved graphics but there are also a significant number of gameplay changes hiding just under the surface, some of which are already proving controversial with fans. The main issue, as discussed by O'Connor in our interview, is the idea of customised loadouts, which along with a few other features (not to mention the name 'Spartan Ops') seems to suggest an undue influence from Call Of Duty. On the face of it though custom loadouts seems to be a perfectly welcome idea, allowing you to customise your Spartan character with different weapons, armour, and support upgrades to compliment your playing style. This is never as simple as just emphasising attack or defence though, with a range of new gadgets with their own specific advantages. The Hologram and a variation of the Regenerator returns from previous games but there's also the all-new Hardlight Shield which switches to a third person view and creates an impenetrable forward shield similar to the ones used by the Covenant Jackals. Promethean Vision is an x-ray overlay that lets you spot enemies through walls, and the Autosentry allows you to drop a remote gun turret wherever you want on the field. The Thruster Pack meanwhile allows you to shoot forward a few feet horizontally - which is obviously ideal for melee combat. We expect the Thruster Pack to be particularly popular simply because melee combat itself now seems much more violent and physical than before. There are also similar minor, but noticeable, tweaks to the reliability and accuracy of the guns and an attempt to make the Warthog vehicle significantly less twitchy than before. It's not a reinvention of Halo's multiplayer but then nobody was really asking for one - and even if they were there's always co-op mode… Spartan Ops The most significant multiplayer changes in Halo 4 are all based around its new four-player co-op mode, called Spartan Ops. The old Horde-style Firefight mode is not in Halo 4 and instead you get a series of episodic missions with their own storylines and even cut scenes. The idea is that this will be consumed like episodes of a TV show, and although it's possible to play them all on your own that's both missing the point and considerably more difficult. The War Games and Spartan Ops modes are connected not just by your customisable character but also by using the UNSC Infinity (the giant human-made spaceship featured in the campaign trailer) as a central hub. Particularly for Spartan Ops it underlines the idea that the whole of Halo 4 is an ongoing story that continues to unfold long after the campaign mode is completed. Although the Halo 4 game disc will ship with a starter episode containing five story missions, new episodes will be released every week and follow the ongoing adventures of Majestic Squad on the newly named planet of Requiem (the same one glimpsed during Halo 3's Legendary ending). Microsoft are quick to point out that subsequent downloads will be completely free, although our suggestion that this is just an online pass by any other name is not so readily admitted. Still, ignoring the politics of the situation Spartan Ops does look like an impressively ambitious concept and although the cut scenes we viewed were only work-in-progress storyboards the promise of a strong ongoing story element is clearly no lie. The mission being shown at E3 involved investigating a Convent structure covering some sort of archaeological dig. The Grunts and Elites guarding it don't prove any special obstacle but as soon as you disturb the peculiar shields blocking your progress the game's new Forerunner enemies make an appearance - and these prove just as difficult to deal with as the campaign trailer implies. Here we learn that the tree-climbing enemies from the campaign mode are called Promethean Crawlers. These laser beam firing critters not only swarm towards you but can also scale vertical walls and jump at you like cybernetic sewer rats. Spawning the Crawlers are the Watchers, the flying enemies with what look like two circular propulsion engines on either side - and which can also be glimpsed in the campaign footage. Watchers not only heal allies but can also catch grenades you throw at them and warn others of your approach. These in turn are spawned by Promethean Knights, the larger humanoid enemies with the fiery red skulls. These are more conventional opponents and the source of the Hardlight Shield and a shotgun-like weapon whose shots bounce of walls and dissolve enemies on contact. The whole mission takes about 10 or 15 minutes and ends with the collection of a Forerunner artefact, which is then taken back aboard the UNSC Infinity. Assuming Microsoft don’t go back on their promise of the whole season of episodes being free then Spartan Ops seems like a more than welcome addition to the series. Some may be upset that story-related content is being released in this way, but even if you're not skilled enough to play through a mission on your own there's full matchmaking support for finding others of a similar skill level - so you don't just have to rely on your friends being into the game. Frank O'Connor interview We were only meant to be having a five minute chat with 343 Industries' franchise director but as usual we managed to wangle a bit more out of him than that, with some interesting comments about listening to fans and Halo not being a military shooter… GC: It's been a long time since a numbered Halo game and obviously this is the first title from 343, so I wonder what were your first steps in designing this new game? How did you decide what needed to be kept and what needed to be changed, and why did you focus particularly on co-op? FO: That's a great way to phrase it. I think we probably approached it the way any developer would - I hope we did - which is to look at what the core strengths of the franchise are and to try and retain those. You could probably make a lot of money just making a higher fidelity version of the last game, you could. And people would probably enjoy it too, but it wouldn't ultimately be satisfying. It wouldn't ultimately be good for the franchise or the direction of the franchise. So when we started 343 Industries we looked at literally every single aspect and definitely we're concentrating on Spartan Ops here [here as in E3 - GC] but we've put just as much effort into the campaign and just as much effort into the competitive multiplayer as well. But Spartan Ops is a really big addition and you're absolutely right that we looked at co-op kind of as a bridge between three things actually: between storytelling, between the traditional co-op experience, and actually between the competitive multiplayer space as well. But I think the seed of the idea was a really simple conversation… you know if you watch an episode of Game of Thrones and something particular outrageous happens and you go in the next morning and you talk to colleagues or friends and you talk about that sort of water cooler moment of 'Wasn't that amazing when this happened!' And we thought about that feeling, that engagement that you have with your friends, and that shared experience and thought, 'How can you apply that experience to a video game?' And from there Spartan Ops was kind of born. And so you have these five playable missions, and they contain a lot of storytelling and they contain emergent storytelling too - so things that you're doing with your friends are little narratives in themselves. So in our ideal scenario, the next day when you get into work after playing through those five missions with friends you're going to talk about the fiction. You're going to say, if it was Lost say, you're going to say it was incredible when they went into the hatch. But in our case they're also going to say, 'I thought it was really cool when you threw that grenade and cleared out those Grunts because I didn't know they were round the corner'. Or, 'I can't believe you accidently blew us all up with the rocket launcher just before we got to the Pelican and made it to safety'. Or ideal is that people are learning a lot about the game and the story and the universe, and the ability to interact in a kind of multiplayer environment - even though it's co-operative in nature rather than competitive. But there will be emergent competitive gameplay too because naturally people are going to have rivalries and are going to be trying to get more kills than each other and so on. So we're really looking forwards to seeing how that works and we think that the idea of releasing it like a TV show is gonna help people to digest these fairly short chunks rather than a campaign experience where it's eight to 10 hours of gameplay and people play at whatever pace they feel like. So there's no shared experience really, because everyone experiences it very differently. GC: One of our general observations at E3 this year is that companies really need to stop listening to fans in some instances. There really should be a lot more of giving them what they need, not what they think they want. But I imagine doing that is even more difficult for you given how vocal Halo fans can be and how this is your first gig after the departure of Bungie. What was it they were complaining about in the first teaser? That the codpiece didn't look quite right on Master Chief? FO: [laughs] Yeah, and things were the wrong colour… GC: But how do you deal with that sort of response? FO: You just go back to the drawing board and redo the codpiece. All: [laughs] FO: Your fans are your best friends, they're absolutely a part of our extended family. But you're absolutely right, you can't design a game by committee because… it's hilarious to watch reactions on the Internet. They're completely contradictory and yet people think that they're mathematically correct. So there is good information in there and we take information from test data, we take information from boring drawing numbers cycles that happen on servers. And we do look at anecdotal information, because often people can capture the essence of what they mean in a way that raw numbers can't on their own - and vice versa you can't do everything anecdotally. So we do take that all seriously, but there's some things where even where it looks like you have a kind of core element in the fanbase that is convinced something is wrong or that something is awesome we know that their reaction to that is not based on gameplay, is not based on experience. It is not based on, say, three months of building a Spartan career. So there's a lot of things that we do that fans will object to or embrace. It's not a monolithic community so you get all ranges of opinion across the spectrum and you have to look at that but you can't use it necessarily as a guidepost - but you can absolutely use it as useful context for the decisions you've already made and the ones that you're tuning and working on. GC: Can you give a specific example of where you think the fans have misinterpreted something you're trying to do in Halo 4? FO: The controversial ones are the ones where they think we're taking ideas from other games. So right now we've added this loadout system so you can customise your Spartan. Which is as much based on our fiction for the Spartan forces as anything else, but the irony is people say, 'that's lifted from Call Of Duty'. But it's really… like even the UI [user interface] looks like the loadout system from Gradius III from the 1989 coin-op. And so it's strange that people already have a kind of imprint in their mind about where ideas come from or where they're going, and that's a good example of one where we know it's fun and we tested it and we know that it's balanced but we just have to stick to our guns and make sure that when we execute on it, it's as perfect as it can be. And they might be resistant to the idea but so far we've discovered even on the E3 show floor they're embracing the feel and they're embracing the experience and that our call was correct. We're not always going to be right, but often we know better than they do how these things settle out. Halo 4 - dating must be a problem for the Promethean Knight GC: In terms of storyline the campaign trailer seems to imply that Cortana is going rampant [in the Halo universe the point at which an AI breaks from its programming and disobeys its creators]. And I think you've already stated Halo 4 is the first part in a new trilogy, but will Cortana and the other characters have a genuine closure to their story arc by the end of that? FO: We've sort of shifted our rhetoric a little bit and part of that is because of the way that Spartan Ops works, and so we're calling it a saga. Because all of the story pieces that we do from now on are going to be connected and actually matter. So a trilogy kind of limits it in a really weird way, because some of the bigger ticket story beat items that are gonna happen are actually gonna happen in Spartan Ops, before the next mainline sequel comes out. GC: But are you going to be brave enough to have an ending to that character, and other characters in the game? In terms of storytelling the most satisfying outcome is for something to happen to her that means she cannot appear in another game - or at least not in the same manner as she has been doing. FO: Well, that’s one path… GC: But video game characters they never do that. I mean, is Master Chief now doomed to appear in every mainline Halo game from now till the end of time? FO: All I'll say is that I completely agree with you, that when you make the fates and the meaning of characters irrelevant through safety you're doing a disservice to both the story and to the evolution of the universe. We have the Halo story planned out for… not literally down to granular details but in very broad terms and in some big beats for the next 10 years. And every big beat that we have is absolutely meaningful and the characters, they are not disposable - but I mean disposable in the sense that it doesn't matter what happens to them. They're not disposable, anything that happens to them, and even things that don't happen to them, has to actually have meaning and resonance, and sometimes gravitas. But that's about all I'm gonna say about the story because otherwise our fans will kill us! GC: Oh, sure I wasn't after spoilers, just the assurance that you are going to have a resolution to each character's story arc - and not just try and pad it out endlessly. FO: I basically 100 per cent, 110 per cent, agree with your basic premise. Which is that video games are sometimes risk averse in terms of the narrative. GC: Okay, great. But on another subject, obviously in the early days of console-based shooters Halo had a huge influence and was the number one title by a significant margin. But nowadays it must share that top spot with games like Call Of Duty and Battlefield. Is perhaps Halo's sci-fi setting now starting to hold it back, against all these relatively grounded military shooters? FO: I'm pretty sure that George Lucas isn't crying himself to sleep over the failure of sci-fi. But… GC: And yet that sort of fantastic, completely un-grounded, sci-fi is becoming rare, in both games and wider culture. FO: I think it's safe to say that one of the reasons that Halo succeed in the first place is because of a combination of contemporary feeling, anachronistic human weaponry - which is a very visceral and very identifiable technology for people, and it makes them feel like they have a real identity and it makes everything seem solid and real and dangerous. But I think that there's definitely some risks to working in a sci-fi universe, but the benefits far outweigh those risks. We are not limited to just driving around in Humvees, we're not limited to just shooting AK-47s, and we're not limited by real world physics and environments, skies, worlds… there are basically no limits to the kind of stories we can tell. And while there will be trends where super realistic military shooters are popular for a while, sci-fi hasn't really lost any steam since Edgar Rice Burroughs started writing John Carter of Mars. At least until Disney's marketing department came along… All: [laughs] FO: But you know, it's an absolute differentiator for us and I think one of our big advantages. GC: So you're never tempted to pull back from something that seems slightly more fantastical? FO: No, so we stick to the strange bifurcation that's already in Halo, in terms of the anachronistic human stuff - you know, with a Warthog that sounds like it has a petroleum engine - and contrast that with the alien stuff. GC: We discussed some similar issues with the Aliens: Colonial Marines guys , about whether you add new technology to the game which we, from a 2012 perspective, would see as inevitable. Is that the sort of conversations you have about Halo as well? FO: We do move things forward technologically, but every technology decision that we make has a bunch of discussion, and sometimes research, put into it. Even when we do fairly dumb gamey things, like how can you get ordnance drops pass through the roof of a building? Well, we invented a phase casket technology that works like quantum teleportation, so we did some quick searching on quantum teleportation and extrapolate that out to the 26th century and then that's our answer. So sometimes it's gamey and you're doing it to service what the needs of the game are and sometimes it's much more endemic and natural than that. GC: Okay, that's excellent. Thanks very much for letting us spoil your lunch. FO: That's absolutely fine, good talking to you. Formats: Xbox 360 Publisher: Microsoft Developer: 343 Industries Release Date: 6th November 2012 http://www.metro.co.uk/tech/games/901631-halo-4-preview-and-interview-master-of-the-chief 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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