Halo Anniversary Interview

Halo Anniversary is a smart and technically astounding love letter to one of the most important and accomplished games of all time, taking full advantage of today's visual supremacy and online functionality without compromising what made the original so very, very special.

Luckily for you guys Digital Gigolo got to grill Halo's franchise development director, Frank O'Connor, about Master Chief's tenth birthday bash.

How do you picture the audience for Halo Anniversary? Will it be the same people who were playing the original ten years ago and want to celebrate the game, or is it younger people who played the recent Halos but maybe weren't even gamers when the original came out - who's the ideal target?

Well it's sort of complicated, really, because the Halo audience is absolutely the least monolithic one that I'm familiar with. It spans a huge range of ages - to your point, there are a lot of kids who might be curious about this, and now that it has shiny new graphics they might want to give it a try.

With the Campaign mode remade, one of the things we thought is, you know, it's a ten-year-old game - the graphics are going to help, but will it still feel like a ten-year-old game. But the funny thing is, it doesn't, and that's in large part due to the qualities and the nature of the original Campaign. I mean, to this day - and I'm not boasting because it's not my software, it's Bungie's software - I can't think of another first-person shooter out there that does sandbox in its campaign mode as well as the original Halo does.

Still, to this day, you jump into a Warthog and you drive round in these vast open environments, and there isn't realy quite anything like it - certainly not in the FPS genre.

Things like Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption definintely do that in a third-person game, but for a first-person shooter - Battlefield's awesome, but it's not the same type of game at all. And so the beauty of Halo Anniversary is, with the new graphics, it feels like it was made yesterday and it feels like a lot of the game concepts and the physics and the ideas and the controls were made yesterday as well. It feels brand new.

So it's hard to say who our audience is in terms of new people. In terms of old people, we all know who we are - we're people who had System Link games in basements and blew fuses as we plugged in too many TVs in someone's house. And it's also people who grew up on Halo 2 and 3 and heard the kind of legends of the Halo: Combat Evolved gameplay.

Combat Evolved really has held up amazingly well - many still regard it as the best in the series. Contrast that to the remake of Perfect Dark, which clearly needed a lot more that just a visual update. How careful are you being to "tart things up" without tinkering too much with that much loved original formula?

Yeah, we had to be super-careful about that. The technology behind Halo Anniversary's Campaign Mode is really interesting; it's the exact Halo engine and physics, right down to grenade-jumps that you used to be able to make and weird rocket-jump tricks that you used to be able to do. It is the Halo engine running under a second engine, which is handling the new graphics. So it's actually a really clever piece of technology, but it is sitting on this ten-year-old foundation. And that's an incredibly strong foundation - it still works.

The Halo physics, quite apart from sort of feeling realistic, have thier own charisma and their own personality, and people difinitely missed the way that the Warthog worked in the original. [Bungie] actually switched to Havoc for Halo 2, so it lost a little bit of the personality. It also lost a bunch of bugs and stuff, but it lost a little bit of the personality that hardcore Halo fans really enjoyed, and so that was super important.

The second half of it was the multiplayer part. Combat Evolved never had an online component on Xbox. It did on PC - everyone complained about lag and people remember the Rocket Hog shooting rockets in completely the wrong direction - but that was the nature of the way the game was built. And we knew that, with the time we had and with the sort of people and budget restraints that we had to build this project quickly and efficiently, we just couldn't go in and re-engineer that code and re-engineer a bunch of game design to make that work in a timely fashion.

So we made this decision to go with the Reach multiplayer stuff, and the decision was compounded by the fact that we didn't want to break up the matchmaking population. You know, as the game gets older and the population dwindles, the last thing you want to do is come in and disrupt that, especially with Halo 4 coming out next year. So we've made the decision to use the Reach mutilplayer engine, and the Reach multiplayer population, to make the two things fit indirectly.

Hence the title update for Reach.

After kind of teasing and hinting at it, we're going to do a title update for Reach later this summer. And that is going to add significant controls and functionality, and some changes in multiplayer that will better enable us to more accurately represent the original Halo: Combat Evolved multiplayer as you might remember on System Link. It's not going to be identical but it's letting us do some really significant things, instead of the little tweaks and slider changes that people are used to.

Would it be fair to say, while you're being authentic to the original Campaign experience, you're making the multiplayer side more consistent with the needs and expectations of today's gamers?

Yeah, and I mean there's a danger in trying to be all things to everyone. But certainly the multiplayer is a good compromise, we think, in that regard. It keeps a lot of features like saved films and screenshots and Forge, and of course the really awesome code in Reach multiplayer. But putting in the old classic favourite maps - including a bunch of small maps, which is a big complaint Reach gets, that it has a lot of big asymmetrical maps and not a lot of understandable smaller maps for Team Slayer - and also adding the features that this title update will allow us... the example we use is that you'll be able to turn off fall damage on a map like Hang 'Em High that people were familiar with back in their Combat Evolved days.

And that's just really a simple example - we're actually about to do much more significant things. But we're trying not to overpromise. Because what we don't want to say is, when we title update, that the Anniversary maps played in Halo: Reach will feel exactly like Halo: Combat Evolved. Because they won't. They'll certainly add some functionality that you haven't had in Reach, but we don't want to say it's going to be a verbatim experience.

Back to the Campaign and, while you're being true to the original, you're returning to a game that didn't know there would be sequels and novels and animated films. How much of that "future history" are you retconning into the original story, or is that something you're not doing at all?

Funnily enough, you're absolutely right. Halo 1 was built - I mean, I think everyone wants to make a franchise, right? When you make something new you hope it's going to be successful, but it was kinds built as a one-off. [When] it was very successful, that meant that is was a lot of work, a lot of heavy lifting to be done with canon and story to make it go forward - that's all been taken care of for years now. So we have a plan, here, that goes at least ten years in the future in terms of storylines, and we're lucky with opportunity to be able to go back and put some story in.

So we've put, sort of one of the Easter Egg-y features, is a thing called Terminals. You're going to find these Terminals scattered all throughout the Anniversary Campaign and they're going to add a layer of story that answers a lot of questions people had about Halo in the first place, but also hint gently at things that are to come in the future. So we're really excited about that and the Terminals themselves are actually beautiful.

And we're going to make them really easy to find - we think it's crazy when people really hide story. If the story is germane to the plot of the game then you should probably make it understandable or at least accessible. So if you play it on Easy or Medium they'll be fairly simple to find; we'll definitely make it trickier and add some bonuses for people who want to play on Heroic and Legendary, but this is a very easy to find and easy to understand story. It's absolutely not cryptic in any way, it's a very cool piece of the Halo universe.

Tell us a little about the so-called 'flashback mode' - the ability to flick back and forth between old and new graphics a la Monkey Island Special Edition. How big a pain has that been to intergrate?

It was a fairly simple thing when it was a menu item, and you went back into the menu and you reloaded. But once we made it a thing you could do on the fly, that introduced all kinds of crazy new problems - such as if you switch on the fly while a Warthog has just blown up off the beach, and is spinning through the sky, where is it in the sky when you switch back? And we have that down, now. The intitial switch takes about a second, something like that, and it gets a little bit faster each time you do it.

And it's really fun - we thought it was going to be just a cool historical bonus, but people use it all the time becuase your curiosity is never ever satisfied. You come round a corner and you go, I wonder what that bush looked like?' So people do it almost as a mania, at this point, even in internal testing and it's really fun. We still have to come up with a name for it - we're calling it Classic Mode for the moment, but we need to figure out what that's going to end up being.

Even though you knew the game intimately, there must have been one or two things you rediscovered that you'd either completely forgotten about, or perhaps didn;t even discover in the first place.

Yes an no. The first time I got in a Warthog in new mode, the guys were watching me - because they know I've got a long history with it and they wanted to see what I did - so I grabbed a Warthog and I drove it up to this tree and just started smashing into the tree. And they're like, "You can't take a Warthog up there," and I'm like, "Oh yes you can." And I just kept doing what I remember doing and eventually the thing just slides through it, thanks to a physics bug, and it just slides past the tree and they're like, "Oh, you can get past there."

So people are going to do all sorts of different things and people played it in so many ways, thanks to the sandbox. Some people just did the whole thing on foot, some people never got out of a vehicle if they can avoid it and it's going to be interesting to see what people discover. We're already starting in testing to try to recreate classic bugs - things like Warthog launching, where you could super-combine dropped grenades to make things blow up and fly really far - we're trying to make sure that those things still work.

And we won't guarantee that everything works exactly the same - I mean, apart from anything else, the game's in 16:9 aspect ratio now, which changes things. But everything that would in thoery have worked in a 16:9 version of the original Halo should work in this, and we're trying some of the more elaborate tricks - tower to tower is a very popular tricking video right now.

How crazy is it that we're a decade on, re-exploring one of the greatest games of all time, and you know that's going to be the first thing the hardcore fans look for: "Have they got all the bugs in?"

It' definitely a weird situation, and this happened in a really compressed schedule to get it out day-and-date for the ten-year anniversary. And we had to have these really bizarre conversations with our developers and say, "Look, when he gets up there, you can't have that be all beautifully decorated, because it was just flat grassy texture back in the day. So by all means make the texture nice, but you can't have bushes and stuff up here".

The graphics change the gameplay a little bit in the Campaign, and we've used that as an opportunity in a couple of the levels that are sort of famously hard or confusing - the Library's always brought up as an example of that - and we've used lighting and textures and added some graphical features to make it a litlle more navigable. But without actually changing the gameplay; it's just that you're going to suffer less from being lost and turned aroundm and you'll pretty much know where to go. It's still going to be just as hard, but it should be prettier and a little more understandable.

The shooter genre is very different today than it was ten years ago, and certainly this game isn't competing with its 2011 rivals in the same way it was in 2001. But how do you think Halo Anniversary will compare to its contemporaries today?

I think the Campaign, as I mentioned earlier, it still feels modern - and bluntly, it's still doing a bunch of things that most FPS games haven't really figured out properly yet, and it's a testament to the original's strength. Multiplayer, that part is actually super-modern; really all we're doing is putting in maps. The irony is we're doing some retro-grade stats to make it feel like an older game! That'll all be corralled in matchmaking, so you'll absolutely be able to play old and new maps with the traditional and modern Reach ruleset and physics and speed and balance.

But we'll make matchmaking "hoppers" as we call them, with the kind of classic rules and things that you really, really enjoyed - without giving them away - about the original game. And some of those are a little archaic; there are some things in there that would be questionable in terms of modern gameplay balance. People like to create an approachable, even playing field in some ways, but you also want to give people power weapons and to feel strong and able in thier multiplayer games. So I think multiplayer's definitely going to feel like the most modern aspect, but with some retro flashback stuff thrown in. And as mentioned, Campaign still feels like this game could've been released yesterday.

We know you're not really talking about it yet, but you've got to give us something - tell us something we can look forward to in Halo 4 that fans might not have gleaned from analysing the trailer.

I will say this: everything in the trailer is there for a purpose. Everything from the music to the audio to even some gameplay features are all in the trailer - there bascially isn't a wasted pixel in the entire thing. A lot of people have asked us about things, like why does Master Chief's armour look different, and there's two parts to that one: one is the traditional 'we're moving into new technology and new artists are interpreting it', but there is actually an important story aspect to that, which will have some gampelay ramifications as well.

So all the internet sleuths with an unhealthy obsession with the codpiece - maybe they weren't wasting their time!

You know the funny thing is that there is actually a codpiece - it just isn't green. I mean, you don't want to go into an intergalactic battle with no protection for your cup.