With the launch of Halo 4 just around the corner, its easy to wonder how the game will play. Halo Multiplayer is serious business, and people want to know: Will it stack up to previous Halo titles? Can 343i carry the torch from here on out and live up to Bungie’s legacy? Well, most of us haven’t played Halo 4 yet, (despite many of those who have answering the aforementioned questions with a resounding “YES”), but, with the release of the ViDoc, “Making of Halo 4: Infinity Multiplayer” on Waypoint, we get our first official glimpse into the design philosophy of 343i as they crafted their own unique version of Halo’s multiplayer offering.
Given the detail of this new vidoc, and the fact that Bungie also had a tradition of releasing extensive vidocs covering the development of their Halo multiplayer offerings, I thought it would be a good opportunity to compare our current one with those of past Halo titles. If the goals and design process of a game is any indicator of its success, this might function as a good way to gauge how well Halo 4’s multiplayer will fair when compared to previous titles in the series.
Below I will give the “making of” multiplayer vidocs for Halo 2, 3, and Reach in addition to Halo 4 (I’m leaving CE out because it wasn’t designed with xbox live in mind). I will put a summary below each video in case you don’t want to watch them all 
Halo 2
Halo 2 - Beyond Singleplayer, Multiplayer and Live
DESIGN PHILOSOPHY AND OVERALL GOAL(S)
- COMPETITIVENESS! “Game is a sport”- clans, skill level, ranked as team
- “It’s hard to play with people of lower skill than you even if you really like them because you’re probably going to lose more often and you probably aren’t going to have as much fun” Jason Jones - Project Lead, Bungie Co-Founder
- introducing team damage and death indicators
- introducing parties, voice chat and proximity chat for “trash talking”
- stats
ADDITIONAL DETAILS
- Asymmetrical map design for CTF
- Customizable Spartans for unique player identity
- Maps inspired by campaign areas
Halo 3
DESIGN PHILOSOPHY AND OVERALL GOAL(S)
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Bring Back a Balanced Starting Weapon- Let’s bring back the Halo CE Assault Rifle
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“The assault rifle works very well with the golden three things of Halo, which are: grenades, weapoon, melee.” Lars Bakkan - Multiplayer Designer
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AR design mechanics should encourage melee when necessary
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Dynamic and Replayable Map Design- “Coming up with scenarios that people play over and over again - how do we create that?” Chris Carney - Multiplayer Environment Lead
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We want good asymmetrical maps
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Environment should be dynamic for diverse gameplay, using things like man-cannons instead of simply teleporters, among other things
ADDITIONAL DETAILS
- Halo 2 set the bar. We want to exceed it
- Introducing equipment to mix up encounters/ add strategy
- Introducing Films to help the player get better and allow smack talk
Halo: Reach
DESIGN PHILOSOPHY AND OVERALL GOALS
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Balanced Gameplay Sandbox-“We don’t ever want to create one superweapon that works in all cases because that tends to make the game fairly dull” Sage Merrill - Lead Sandbox Designer
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Good weapon balance with Pistol, DMR, Sniper, Needler, etc
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People are passionate about multiplayer and we want to get it right
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We want “The perfect balance”
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How do we make armor abilities fit into this with balance? Jet Pack, Armor Lock look very advantageous.
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Make Gameplay Experience more Customizable, Give Players More Options - “Invest in your Spartan”
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Huge armory allowing players extensive customization
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Social Preferences. Choose what kind of people you match with
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Loadouts and AA offering players a more customizable style of play
ADDITIONAL DETAILS
- Introducing The Arena - a league based game mode for competitive players
- Introducing Invasion - An objective game type with core slayer elements
Halo 4
Making Halo 4: Infinity Multiplayer
DESIGN PHILOSOPHY AND OVERALL GOALS
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Bring INNOVATION- We want to make Halo 4 Multilplayer Innovative and Successful
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Look to bring a new perspective that hasn’t been seen before
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Make People Feel Like They’re Being Rewarded- “Because of all the objective medals and all the extra ways you can score in a match, no players are finishing the game with zero” Kevin Franklin -Lead Designer
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Players can contribute to winning without getting kills, and now we are recognizing and rewarding that.
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Players Each Given Unique Multiplayer Experience- Create your own Spartan, stick with him/her through the fiction of War Games and Spartan Ops
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Choose your own starting weapons, abilities, specializations. Tailor your loadout to suit you individual preferences
ADDITIONAL DETAILS
- Valhalla remake, “Ragnarok” now fitted to play well with AAs
- Vastly Improved Forge
- More vehicle friendly and strategy oriented maps
- Maps designed with the goal of creating dynamic encounters
- Objective game types such as oddball and CTF adjusted to encourage more teamwork
Conclusion: From comparing Halo 4’s developer commentary with those of the other 3 titles mentioned, it seems to me that the design of this game will be most similar to Halo 3 and Halo: Reach. Like was the case with Halo 3, there seems to be a focus on creating dynamic, memorable maps with high replayability (which didn’t appear to be a top goal when designing Reach). The similarities to Reach are to be found in the focus on player character and sandbox customizations.
It seems the design philosophy of 343i, despite wanting to bring a fresh perspective, is actually quite similar to Bungie’s in a fair amount of instances. Of course, I won’t ignore the fact that they are also bringing a lot of new things to the table. In the end, however, I’d have to say Halo 4 should be, at the very least, a good Halo game based on comparison so far. 343i seems to be using the same successful design fundamentals Bungie used. Whether it will be a great Halo game, though, is the real question. I guess we will see soon enough. Any other perspectives?
