There was an “inside source” quote that came out last year that said “Halo Reach was like Gears of War but with Spartans”... is there any truth to that statement?

ML: No way, no. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Reach is absolutely Halo through and through. We’re not doing anything to destroy the foundation of what’s so important to us; as a matter of fact we’re building on a decade’s worth of experience building Halo one, two, three, and ODST – putting all the good things from each one of those into Reach and putting new features on top of that to make this really the definitive Halo title.


In the campaign there seems to be an emphasis on team-play. How far will that team-play extend?

ML: We don’t want to just see those Spartans in cinematics; we want to see them playing along with you during the gameplay of the campaign so that was a big challenge for us – how to make that work seamlessly and how to make them help you and not get in your way. So we invested a ton of effort into new AI systems and new behavioural systems for those characters to make them do really cool things and tell parts of the story as they’re coming along with you throughout the campaign.

With a bigger squad, can we then expect much bigger epic battles then as a result?

ML: Absolutely. In Halo 3 we could have about twenty active characters within the combat zone - that includes both friendly and enemy units. In Halo reach we can have sixty AI, or like forty AI characters and twenty vehicles – all of that with weapons and explosions going off everywhere. Yeah, we’re definitely going to have much, much bigger, open battles than ever before.

In the ViDoc, one of the guys said that you did a lot of soul searching after ODST and Halo 3. What came up as a result of that soul-searching?

ML: Well, I started working on Reach immediately after Halo 3. We had the opportunity to see how ODST was developing as it was being built and we definitely did a lot of soul searching to see what we did right and what we did wrong. There’s always ways in which we can improve and we definitely took a lot of feedback internally and from our fans to find out what they wanted – what they loved about the Halo series, what they’ve never seen, and what they’d love to see happen.

So what can we expect from this May’s beta? Run length? How many maps? Gametypes?

BJ: We haven’t actually landed on the duration of the beta yet, but ultimately it’s a beta and our goals are very specific. There are some metrics we need to get and a lot of back-end data mining that’s going to have to occur so we’re going to build the beta duration around what our team needs to get out of it. Suffice it to say we’ve looked back at the Halo 3 beta and that was pretty successful for us overall, so that’s kind of the model we’re looking at currently.

It also applies to the amount of content as well, so in terms of maps – you’ll see a few maps, you’ll see a couple of different game types – some old stuff that returns, but also some new stuff that we haven’t revealed yet. It’s some brand new multiplayer experiences that are big and risky and need to be in the beta to give us real stress testing and real balance testing. On top of that you’re going to see a huge selection of the weapons that the game has to offer, a pretty healthy amount of armour abilities like our sprinting and our active camo and some things we haven’t talked about yet. Because really, from a design perspective, those things have the biggest impact on how people are going to play Halo – hopefully in an awesome way, but also it’s the riskiest so we’re looking forward to that getting hammered on during the beta.

We have very specific goals in mind, but we have to make it still fun, still compelling, still something that people want to play a lot to give us what we need. Even though it’s just a beta, we know people are going to judge this game – they’re going to look at our unfinished beta and that’s going to influence what they think about our final game in the fall, so we have to do as much as we can to make it awesome. It’s a fine line; it’s scary and rewarding and Marcus is, I’m sure, terrified.