> <mark>343: Halo 4 “can’t just regurgitate the same experience”</mark>
> 343: “Halo 4 can’t just regurgitate the same experience.
> But our changes will come under a lot more scrutiny than Bungie’s.”
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> 343’s campaign to theoretically say a lot about Halo 4 without actually saying much continues, as studio boss Frank O’Connor and his cohorts discuss the difficulties of fiddling with a treasured gameplay formula.
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> The Microsoft-owned studio believes any modifications it makes will be picked over ruthlessly by series fans. “Our goal is an amazing Halo game,” creative director Kiki Wolfkill told OXM during an interview you’ll read in our Halo Limited Edition Special, on sale now. “People looking back will probably be able to say: ‘this is the flavour that 343 added’ in relation to the games that came before.”
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> “We’ll come under a lot more scrutiny than Bungie did, even though their teams shift monumentally between games,” O’Connor added. "There’s definitely core people still there, but other than that vastly different people worked on each game. There’ll be differences in style that will be attributed to 343 that wouldn’t have been examined under the same microscope if it had been another Bungie team doing it.
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> “You get that between levels in a game - level 2 in Halo 3 is different to level 3 because slightly different pockets of the team are working on it. There’s little subtle things that we’ll be held to an exacting standard for, that would have happened anyway. But there will be 343 elements and there will be core Halo principles.”
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> Though mindful that Halo fans regard those core principles as sacred ground, creative director Josh Holmes insists that change is necessary. "There were so many ideas, and part of the challenge was to really focus on the things that we felt were the most important.
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> “The other big challenge was finding the strength and the confidence to take risks, and bring a new and fresh perspective whilst balancing that with the core of what makes Halo great - the things that made us fans of the series in the first place. We can’t just regurgitate the same experience.”
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> “For the team, I think finding that balance has been one of our biggest challenges: how do we push new ideas, whilst continuing to respect the legacy. In terms of specifics, we’re still pretty tight-lipped about what we’re doing.”
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> If 343 has yet to reveal anything concrete on Halo 4, a gallery of lush environment aside, the developer’s praise of competitor Call of Duty is suggestive. “There’s a lot of things COD does beautifully that we should do better”, O’Connor told OXM last month.
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> O’Connor has also revealed that the Halo 4 team isn’t afraid to tamper with Halo’s fiction, asserting that “the game is the king”. Master Chief has changed a little in the time since Halo 3, with modified armour and new “behaviours”.
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> Cortana’s advancing age will play a key role in the new Reclaimer trilogy - according to series lore, older AIs experience a condition known as Rampancy, short-handed by O’Connor as “thinking itself to death”.
They have to take risks thats a no brainer, but it still has to remain a sand-box shooter. If they take anything from COD it should be its scripted events, but having that within big open environment’s with lot’s of advanced AI.
> <mark>O’Connor has also revealed that the Halo 4 team isn’t afraid to tamper with Halo’s fiction,</mark> asserting that “the game is the king”. Master Chief has changed a little in the time since Halo 3, with modified armour and new “behaviours”.
People,prepare your flamesuits and switch them to [ON] mode when Halo 4 runs up and smacks the fiction in the face.
I don’t like how they think classic multiplayer won’t be popular. Reach added a ton of new features and it is a terrible game. I really hope the 343i additions aren’t gamebreaking.
I’m sure people will complain that its not going to be an exact copy of Halo CE/Halo 2, but I’d sooner see lots of innovation. Let’s make Halo 4 what it is, not try to replicate anything, not even past Halo games.
> O’Connor has also revealed that the Halo 4 team isn’t afraid to tamper with Halo’s fiction, asserting that “the game is the king”
Thereby implying Glasslands isn’t giving them much leverage to work with, story progression and pace-wise. It’s understandable, but confusion is bound to be rampant once this game clashes with the novels’ continuity.
Not to worry scared fans Halo will preserve it’s sandbox elements for all those who think it will change it’s direction. Here’s some info from another interview with 343 industries.
343 Industries’ Halo 4 will “live up to what gamers fell in love with” about Bungie’s original while “bringing new customers into the fiction”, according to Microsoft Games Studios corporate vice president Phil Spencer.
“The key question for me in managing the studio and the creatives is ‘what is Halo?’, making sure Halo lives up to what I think gamers fell in love with [playing Combat Evolved],” Spencer told OXM at E3 after the new game’s official reveal.
“What does that mean? Playing Master Chief,” he said. “We kind of lost our way a little bit, I’ll say. And that’s why I wanted to make sure that at the unveiling of Halo 4, you knew you were playing Master Chief, that John was back. Because Master Chief is the John Wayne character of that universe, and that’s who you want to play.”
Click to view larger image
343 Industries will preserve Bungie’s celebrated welding of sandbox dynamics to a linear campaign, Spencer confirmed.
“Halo has this interesting mix of open world, more varied gameplay. Some other of those franchises that I love have very setpieces which really kind of draw certain dramatic elements out of it. Halo has the vehicles, the weapon types, the deep fiction - the fiction around Halo is incredibly deep.”
The game’s announcement trailer depicts Master Chief and Cortana drifting in space some time after Halo 3’s conclusion. An explosion rips through their vessel, and Chief mounts an escape to the exterior with the aid of some nifty ankle-mounted jetpacks
> I’m sure people will complain that its not going to be an exact copy of Halo CE/Halo 2, but I’d sooner see lots of innovation. Let’s make Halo 4 what it is, not try to replicate anything, not even past Halo games.
Well it better emulate most of HCE+H2’s core mechanics and fundamentals or it just wont play like a Halo game or play right period.
Aiming(Static reticule,recoil and kickback is good but no reticle bloom)
Movement(Moderate default movement speeds,high jump heights)
Driving
Core game mechanic of a regenerating shield
Physics
Golden Triangle system of combat
Symmetrical starts(Earn your advantages everyone is on a even playing field)
Power-ups
Basic Sandbox guidelines(Everything is pick-up on the map)
All of these things should be present in H4 to make it “Halo” and then you build/add onto those things from there to improve it and you cant go wrong.
Come on people, really? We need something new to the Halo franchise. Regarding Bungie’s Reach, (even though it wasn’t the best Halo game to date) it had to include something new. If not it would be scrutinized like COD:MW3. People would call it a “60 dollar map pack DLC” or they would say nonsense like “all that was needed to make this game was the Copy/Paste function”.
Do you really believe that if they reshipped Halo CE multiplayer to the masses, with no changes whatsoever, people would play it over a newer, more redefined Halo experience? Even with the 3SK pistol and classic maps, there are very little players who bought the Anniversary Map Pack (at least that is what the Current Players number indicates). I loved playing Halo 3 BTB on Valhalla, but I didn’t want to see it in Halo: Reach with the same 4SK BR, the same weapon placements, and the same equipment.
You keep some of the core aspects (shields for players who like to go for crazy kills, power weapons that reward map control and team work, vehicles, etc.) but there needs to be change in order to hook your attention and keep it hooked for a long time.
I dislike AA’s a whole damn lot. But I believe that Bungie did the right thing in trying something different to hook some people in.
I used to buy NFL Madden every year it came out, until I realized it was the same -Yoink- every year with no innovations from the year before. Is that what we want from Halo? A stale and repetitive game that features no evolution and will play the very same as previous Halo games?