Now, the modern player expects to explore these vistas-they couldn’t just exist in the imagination.
In this game, the Chief must fight across Zeta Halo, a superweapon big enough to house a world on its surface. They wanted a game that felt like the original Halo: a game, in Crocker’s words, that always “said yes to the player.” The original Halo was famous for its skyboxes, where the painted sky and mountains suggested the idea of a sprawling world. He goes and beats the crud out of an alien and takes their weapon from their cold dead claws.” The Chief doesn’t need to go round and gather animal hides and herbs to make what he needs. “The Master Chief isn’t interested in crafting things. “You’re not meeting with quest givers and going and gathering things for them and taking them back,” says Staten. The team, says Crocker, never used the term open world that’s a genre they wanted nothing to do with. The most significant change to the campaign is, of course, the open world. “Well, people have been on Halo rings before, but when players land on Zeta Halo, we crafted the story in such a way that Master Chief doesn’t know what’s happening there.” “You know, Halo was a lot about landing on the surface of this alien ringworld not knowing anything about it, it being a giant mystery that you needed to explore,” he says. Keeping Chief out of the game for so long was intentional, says Staten, a spiritual call back to the original Halo trilogy. After taking a beating from a particularly buff brute named Atrinox-leader of the Banished, a rebel organization that broke off from the Covenant Empire-the Master Chief is found floating operatically in deep space. Halo Infinite’s campaign takes place 18 months after Halo 5. “And very quickly, we were all able to get in a room and just prioritize the things we were going to go after.” “Microsoft said ‘OK, what do you need?’” says Crocker. “A bright green hopeful hero,” in Staten’s words.Īdmittedly, they were incredibly disappointed.
These innovations underpinned a bright, colorful, sometimes silly sci-fi world, populated by corny aliens and ancient evils, elevated by the game’s soundtrack-a rousing blend of string orchestra and Gregorian chant-and the Master Chief. In 2007, Halo 3 added forge and theater where players could make and share their own games, along with deeper matchmaking. In 2004, Halo 2 brought online play, through Xbox Live, to the console. It set new standards for AI, vehicular combat, and ridiculously realistic-looking grass. Halo popularized couch co-op for campaigns, recharging health over med packs (controversial at the time!), and, most importantly, the dual analog stick controls for shooters. If you play any modern shooters, you know, even if you don’t. The original Halo trilogy transformed the first-person shooter on consoles. At that time, the future of games was Halo: Combat Evolved. Four Xboxes, four TVs, and 16 controllers. In a room saturated by a rippling navy light of the kind now favored by Denis Villeneuve, a Local Area Network game was humming through a serpentine tangle of black wires. Some of the original Bungie team that developed the first Halo- long before Microsoft and 343 Studios were involved-worked on Pong, while Space Invaders was the game that popularized killing aliens.) I skipped past 30 years of progress encased in plastic arcade boxes and entered the section that considered gaming’s future. What I didn’t know then was that Halo shared a direct lineage with both of them. (I remember that it was the first time I had ever played Pong and Space Invaders. I first encountered Halo, appropriately enough, in a museum, at an exhibition celebrating the history of video games. Now let’s keep refining this and finish this game.’” “That was the moment where I felt like, 'OK, we’re hitting our target where we need to go. “It finally felt like the moment that the fantasy we all had in our head for the past 10 years was realized on the screen for us,” he says. But what his team had done was capture the memory-the deceptive memory-not of how Halo was, but, paradoxically, how it lives on in the memories of those who knew it best. He says that to go back now and play a game like GoldenEye is a sad experience: The game is never like you remember it. He was a fan again he was at a LAN party.
And suddenly French, creative director of multiplayer at 343, didn’t feel like a developer anymore. In the hallways of 343 Studios he heard peals of laughter between anecdotes recalling that first “big team battle”-stories about fusion coils sent soaring like blue shooting stars and Pelican-dropped Mongooses splattering Spartans. It was after his colleagues had battled it out as super soldiers that Tom French thought of the good old days.