Office of Halo Intelligence: Part 10

[343iBot]

Office of Halo Intelligence, or OHI for short, is a semi-regular diary-type feature brought to you by various members of the Halo 4 development team. Frank O’Connor, Franchise Development Director, kindly agreed to write the tenth entry. We hope you enjoy an inside look at the making of our next title!

From the 8.8.12 edition of the Halo Bulletin:

Where are we now?

Farther, higher and better than I would have ever thought. I've worked on the Halo franchise since 2004, 2003 if you count a brief and terrifying arrival in the middle of a tornado of development and the start of the road that would end in the launch of Halo 4.

In that time, I have been privileged to work with people smarter, cooler, more talented and erudite than I could ever hope to be. I have watched artists, engineers, designers, marketers, musicians, testers and a league of support staff, pour heart, soul, blood sweat and tears into a franchise that started with a kind of magic - a charisma and draw that was recognizable even when the game was debuted at Macworld a million years ago.

I've watched one team - Bungie, grow and flower and prosper and ultimately move onto something newer, different and almost guaranteed to be as incredible as the legacy we at 343 now have the honor to inhabit.

Bungie, every time they iterated on the franchise, they reinvented it, evolved it, built upon those foundations and occasionally revolutionized it. Their exit from the franchise left us with a gulf to fill. An unenviable task for any developer let alone a nascent collection of Halo enthusiasts with a mix of experience.

343 started as a tiny group, tasked with taking over the franchise, supporting Bungie through the creation and execution of ODST and then Reach, effectively as a publishing arm. But the ultimate goal was to develop a sequel and take the franchise forward.

We started with a few folks, experts all, and some incredible production, art and engineering talent - but so few as to be vanishingly small. Big hearts, enormous passion, and unbounded enthusiasm.

I've said this before and I'll say it again (especially since it's annual review time and a fantastic opportunity to suck up to management): The reason I left Bungie was twofold – an overwhelming, almost unhinged passion for every aspect of the franchise – but also the fact that in handoff meetings, where we were supposed to be handing over the keys to the franchise, it was incredibly apparent that the small group tasked with this transition was incredibly serious about it.

These weren't marketing wonks*, or bean counters, or cynical opportunists. They came to us and stated simply, “How can we honor this franchise and take it forward meaningfully, respectfully, and bravely?" What they wanted, more than anything, was to love Halo and make more Halo that players loved, too.

*Sidenote: Our marketing team is amazing. "Marketing" I think is a dirty word in some community circles – probably an assumption that these are soulless salesmen and snake oil vendors concerned only with shipping units. I doubt that's an accurate picture anywhere, but especially on Halo – these women and men are intelligent, thoughtful, creative Halo fans who look first to their own skills and experience and to 343, rather than focus groups, for guidance, and yet still apply science and thoughtfulness to the passion and process. Some of them are artists and creatives and all of them are gamers and players – and all of them are more or less embedded in this team and a vital part of how we are getting this game from dev kits to stores.

So I jumped ship. It was a tough decision. Bungie's plans, Bungie's innate ability, Bungie's talent – and in no small part the friends I made there, the colleagues I almost literally idolized, made it wrenchingly hard, but I joined Bungie because Halo spoke to me at some primal level. And I left Bungie because I had this feeling that we weren't done with it. That there were stories to tell, worlds to explore, and characters to meet. There were parabolic arcs that characters needed to soar into, and there were faces that needed to be teabagged.

Ultimately, while my input and influence on the game is light and broad and sometimes deep, I'm really just a very small cog in an ever-growing machine. I am often considered the face of 343 and now Halo – and that's desperately unfair to the people who're crunching on Halo 4, the people who're more erudite, influential, and intrinsically important to its success. And you will get to meet them as we close out this process and put the finishing touches on this game. This isn't some note of false humility or obscured vanity, it's a fact. If I throw a rock, I am likely to hit someone far more important to the ultimate success of this game than I am or will ever be.

But I have been with the franchise for so long that I know it intimately. Like you, I tend to prefer corners of it – I like SWAT, I like Slayer, I like exploring in Campaign, I rush through the game every time I find a vehicle, I try to use obscure and weird combinations of weapons and tactics. I love exploring the sandbox in MP and Campaign. In short, I'm kind of an average player – but that's a red herring. There are no average Halo players. There are no monolithic groups that like some core aspect of the experience-entire.

There are groups, subgroups, cliques, cults even, that love the sheer variety of experiences it offers. Take Forge folks – for example – for whom we've tried to make more and better tools, while retaining the playable, approachable tools that experience brings. We'll be working with community cartographers in the run up to launch to create maps for File Shares from day one – giving them somewhat early access to iterate and build game modes and maps that are familiar and original in equal measure.

We're working with players and testers who just want to do stupid tricks with physics and sandbox elements. We're working with players and testers to make sure we have Campaign and Spartan Ops environments that encourage exploration and imaginative approaches to combat and challenge.

We're working with pro and competitive players to make sure that the competitive aspects of the game meet or exceed that community's desires and expectations. And selfishly, to provide us with really good material for the multiplayer aspect of our Prima strategy guide, advice I will ignore as I yell “Leroy!!!” and run full speed into a flag base full of well-coordinated opponents.

We're working with our own designers and internal community resources to apply a new, more concise philosophy with regard to matchmaking playlists. We'll have plenty of variety, but we'll be doing our best to make sure that players are experiencing new stuff like Infinity Slayer, other modes we haven't explained yet, as well as classic Halo styles and more Spartan playlists. But let me be clear – the new stuff is awesome. We WANT you to experience it, to embrace it, to help us move the game forward, while still giving you access to the old school Halo you know and love.

And we're closing out bugs. Squillions of 'em. Some are polish items, some are experiential, subjective ones, and some are straight up regular old bugs. But we have a long polish phase for this game that started quite a while ago; a process of refinement, honing, balance and clarification that is essential for all the new stuff we're adding.

There's a thing that happens when we expose new players to the new modes. I'll use Infinity Slayer as an example. It feels like Slayer, of that there's no doubt. If you're awesome like me, you'll pick Recon, with Sprint on X, and inverted aiming and flight controls and rush out into a new level and immediately know what's happening. You'll know how to move, how to navigate, how to win even, but then something new, like an Ordnance Drop rewarding your killing spree will appear. And you'll make a snap decision on what to drop in – a new weapon? More ‘nades? A power up? This decision will be cued by the battle you've just been through. It will change according to your own momentum and your opponent's skill.

It sounds simple, but it changes everything. There's a newfound variety within those meta-experiences that retains predictability and encourages tactical adaptation, but still feels comfortable. You can drop in a weapon you don't even need, and use it as a honeypot to lure in greedier opponents. It's hard to describe how this simple change affects the pace and urgency of combat, but it does. And even simple stuff, like the warning music that plays towards the end of a game, makes everything just a bit more intense. Faster. Literally more exciting.

Some of these things are big deals, like loadouts. They don't radically alter the feel of the game, but they refine it, and oddly, maybe even counter intuitively, they create a sense of predictability in combat that's personal – tuned to your preference and play style.

The new, like any new stuff in Halo, will take some time to be fully utilized and embraced. But this isn't simply new for the sake of new. It's all carefully considered and crafted to speed the experience, to encourage combat, to drive engagement and reward both competition and cooperation. Teams and lone wolves will both appreciate this stuff.

I am not blowing smoke up your butts. You may end up disagreeing with me ultimately, either in toto, or on specific items, but the gameplay has reached a point where I genuinely find myself having more fun than I have in years, and Halo is and has always been my favorite FPS. This is an escalation of that experience, and I'm glad we took some of the risks we did.

When the game ships, and in some cases, before that, you'll be able to experience all of this for yourselves, but I am feeling pretty confident about the changes, the evolutions and the additions.

Technically, we're in that most exciting period of the development process – effectively the content is locked and complete, but the final layering of effects, technology, shaders, final performance tuning and as shallow as this sounds, the final graphic appearance.

It's a constant source of delight to me to grab a new build, or walk by an artist's monitor and see that a level or feature I already thought looked spectacular was just a foreshadowing of how impeccable or impressive that environment or object looks in the final pass.

David Ellis, Kevin Grace, Jeremy Patenaude and I often have MP matches with the conceit that we're just staying up to date on progress, but the truth is, we're playing because it is a ridiculous amount of fun. It's insanely addictive and the selection of levels we're going to ship with, I think, is a testament to building spaces that are flexible enough to be fun for just about anything, but find their sweet spot in the modes for which they were ostensibly created.

Graphically, you've seen some cool stuff, and the tech itself is a very nice hop above prior games in terms of boring fidelity and numbers – something that has happened with every successive Halo game and will continue to do so in the future. But it follows in the admirable (to me at least) tradition of feeling like the concept art. Bungie always nailed this. You need only look at fan-made screenshots of Halo 3 and Reach to see how close the in-game atmosphere matched that of the stunningly imaginative concept art. We at 343 have some near-legendary concept artists and their dizzying feats of imagination always seem like they'd be impossible to replicate in a real engine environment, and yet there they are. Vistas, ideas, worlds that you can explore, inhabit and affect.

I'd love to tell you that to achieve this fidelity without compromise, though I bet you a hundred dollars one of our engineers could tell me exactly what those compromises are (but I haven't seen them). It's smooth, the draw distances are massive, the effects are stunning and the atmosphere and scale are classic Halo scope. I'm finding MP perf to be buttery smooth, controls responsive and clarity of combat exceptional.

I am biased of course, to the point of shillery, but some of you have known me long enough to know that I tend to err on the side of terror and humility rather than hyperbolae. But I will hype this team, because it's hype-worthy.

In a crazy compressed timeframe, we've built a team from scratch (with the somewhat bizarre-but-cool advantage that they came from some of the best games in the industry, with new ideas and philosophies – because they loved Halo already), built a game we think is deserving of the Halo legacy, and created a culture built around a simple shared goal – to make an amazing Halo experience worthy of that game's history and achievement.

It won't be perfect, that's impossible. We have too many constituents and variables in our game, our audience and our community for that to ever happen. But I think the vast majority of people who've given us their trust and confidence, no matter how warily or askance, will find something in here that meets or exceeds their expectations.

And for the cynics, an understandable position and one we respect, I think the game may surprise even you guys. Of course time and player experience will tell, but there have been many moments that deepened my confidence in where we are. Some of those moments were big ticket brute force Rubicons, and some small, personal moments.

Let me tell you one from last week. A larger level, symmetrical, but definitely aimed at on-foot encounters, was the location for a dumb grudge match between me, Josh Holmes, Kevin and Jeremy. I was hiding, trying to use my Promethean Vision to find combatants, when suddenly I hear and feel the sweep of someone else's PV. That sense of panic, of maybe being discovered, sent me fleeing my hiding spot and grabbing the very powerful weapon I had dumped in an Ordnance Drop as a honeypot. I did it too late. Exposed myself for no good reason (his PV sweep had not, in fact, revealed my position) and got sniped for my troubles. It's telling that a moment of failure, of loss, was just as compelling as one of victory.

And loadouts or no loadouts, there's something about Halo 4 that pushes you to try sandbox elements. I can't quite put my finger on it, but a lot of us agree, the game, the UI, the circumstances often lead you to try new things, experiment, tinker.

That's not to say our more stripped down experiences don't have their charm. One particular game mode that has a cult following may end up with a mainstream breakout because of the features Kevin Franklin and the MP team have added to it to make it "legit." More on that later.

And music... well, we'll be updating our music story very soon. But the final recordings and mixes are now being integrated into the code, and it's definitely like the movie process in this regard – a scene that was emotional and intense with either silence or placeholder – is now genuinely moving. And as I've hinted before, we're going to do something with and beyond the OST for music fans that will really have an impact, at least on your commute. More on that soon.

I don't like calling out individuals in these pieces, because it's ridiculously unfair on the dozens, hundreds of other individuals who've contributed from every discipline to get us this far in the shipping/crunch process, but I am going to anyway. Our producers – unsung heroes and deliberate villains: Chris Lee, Sally Huang, Alex Cutting, Tyler Jeffers, Corrinne Robinson, Kiki (the head vampire of all producers) and many, many more are in the unenviable position of moving all these chess pieces around so we can move into the final shut down process. It's hard. Herding cats doesn't do the problem space justice. This is orchestrating Tribbles and feeding Mogwai after midnight.

Our bug-shutdown process isn't pyrrhic. It's careful. It's diligent and it's imaginative. It's an art as well as a science, designed to make sure we ship on time, but more importantly, that we ship the game we intended to and don't compromise experience for the sake of expediency. Watching this team collaborate and cooperate and just work like you wouldn't believe is both staggering and inspirational.

So that's all the positive stuff I can talk about right now. And there are hundreds of people and features and ideas and wonders that I haven't had time – or appropriate opportunities – to message here today.

But it's not all sweetness and light – we realize we've been short on stuff like BTS (Behind the Scenes) and even simple direct feed footage (easier said than done...) and even clarity on MP stuff. We PROMISE we're going to accelerate that kind of communication as we get further into our shutdown process, and have more people and bandwidth to throw at the community communication that is and will be a vital part of Halo's ouvre.

The reasons are simple, but not necessarily satisfactory – you guys want to know what it is you're going to spend $60 on this fall, and you shouldn't have to take it on faith, but this isn't just another numbered Halo sequel – the "machine" Bungie carefully evolved over the years had to be built from scratch in our case, and our dev schedule was necessarily compressed to build all that new tech and grow the studio from eight folks to 250 in record time.

So stuff like Reach matchmaking will suffer in that process as we shut down Halo 4 and continue building its Matchmaking content and infrastructure, and for that we apologize, but we think the benefits will eventually outweigh the downsides. And Reach and Halo 3 of course, will continue to be supported beyond the launch of Halo 4, but of course the focus will be on 4.

We have to earn your trust. We have to earn your loyalty. We have to do that by shipping a Halo 4 that you love. And that is all we're doing. Everything else is a secondary consideration and I promise you two things here without any dissemblance, exaggeration or dishonesty – I think Halo 4 has the potential to be the best Halo game yet, and if I didn't believe that, or we weren't trying at least, to achieve that, then we'd be doing everyone a disservice. Time will tell. Secondly, we can't do this without this community – without the enthusiasts, fans, critics, cynics, creatives and nutbags that comprise our community and we're nearly done.

Less than 100 days until you can decide for yourselves.

Frankie