Interview: Bungie on Halo's Evolution and 'Going Out With a Bang'

IG: Speaking of setting the bar, I'd guess you guys are feeling huge pressure to once again up the ante for the next Halo. Everybody is really chomping at the bit to see what you guys are going to do next to really push it especially since this might be the “swan song” for Bungie and Halo. Do you feel that pressure? What are you trying to do with Halo: Reach to meet those expectations? 

BJ: We say this a lot and its a little bit cliché, but the bulk of pressure always comes from internal. It really, really does come from ourselves and the desire to make each game we release better than our last game and give our best possible offering; and really for the bulk of the team, it comes down to doing your best work and not letting down the guy next to you pushing each other to rise to the occasion. Again, I know it sounds cliché, but most of the team is insulated from that and we don't stop and read the hype, we don't stop and read all the interviews where people are already calling Reach 'game of the year'. We just want to keep our eye on the target, we just want to keep making the best games we can, and hopefully, it will be something that people will share that same sentiment with us. In my world, I'm obviously a little more exposed to that, but we try and buffer the team and it'd be crazy not to realize the expectations out there and what is at stake for us, but in a lot of ways that's just more fuel to the fire. For the foreseeable future, this is our last Halo title. We want to go out with a bang, we want to set the bar really high, we want to know that we've made the definitive entry in this saga and that we've left our fans something super special that we can really look back on and be proud of.

Bungie's got some great enemy design as seen here in Halo Reach

IG: Do you have any specific examples, whether it's a narrative, gameplay or graphical element, that you're really trying to push to say, 'This is something we're aiming for that you've never seen in a Halo game and you're going to be freaking blown away by this.' Do you have any specific examples?

BJ: For me personally, with Reach in terms of the innovation of where we are pushing it, I think it's a sum of the parts, it's the whole package. We are looking back at Halo: Combat Evolved and drawing inspiration from what made that game so special and what's still endearing to fans today. We're looking at Halo 2 and some of the things we introduced on Live and social side. We're looking at Halo 3's community features, and we're looking at the character driven narrative aspects of ODST, so we have a decade of experience to look back on and draw from, and obviously we have a really robust, awesome fan community that's given us tons of feedback, so we're trying to pluck from all of those things. But it all started with a massive technical overhaul; we've... definitely heard [from them] and taken it on the chin a little bit in the past. For our team, we've built massive, truly simulated living breathing worlds with open-ended sandbox-like encounters, unscripted elements and with that, we've made trade offs between things like framerate or even resolution in some cases.

And, while I feel like every Halo game's been a beautiful artistic endeavor, for Reach we definitely went back and overhauled all of our tech to make sure we could do something that could hold up this holiday compared to other titles that we really did feel like would raise the bar on the visual side. And certainly, a more specific example would be animation. I think our team would agree that, from each title to the next, animation is the one area where we haven't really continued to improve and iterate. Not that it's bad by any means, but for Reach we've redone the whole system from scratch. We've hired a lot of great people now, we're utilizing a mo-cap facility with some hand animation on top of it, and we're really doing a lot more technical stuff to sell this goal of a more character driven story with human characters that give believable performances. Our old tech just wouldn't allow us to do that, and it's everything from our lip-synching to our facial tech – all those things that I would say historically have been one of the weaker sides of the Halo series was from the beginning something that we put a lot of investment into [for Reach].

IG: Speaking of the character-driven elements, and the story and the universe, which have obviously been very important for Halo in addition to the gameplay, where do you stand on the gameplay vs. story argument in video games? Some people say, “gameplay trumps everything” and there are some other people who are trying to really push narrative for the medium forward. You look at games like Heavy Rain from Quantic Dream where it really is all about the narrative and it's described as being more like a movie. Where do you stand on the whole narrative versus gameplay paradigm? 

BJ: I think at Bungie we definitely view ourselves as interactive storytellers. I think that the core Halo phenomenon that has contributed to years of popularity, a lot of that like I said before is based on the universe as a whole and how rich and interesting it is. Story is important to us, but that said, Halo's really known for visceral, twitch, highly responsive gameplay in these beautiful worlds, and for as much as I love games, like Mass Effect for example, they're very different philosophies and approaches. So in Reach, gameplay is definitely going to come first and foremost, but it's going to be developed in tandem with a story that just doesn't feel tacked on, but we're never going to sacrifice gameplay for the sake of telling that story. So I feel like through the Halo games we've gotten down to a pretty good science of how to balance those two things out, but we need to build encounters that are first and foremost super fun and rewarding for the player and then start to figure out how that folds neatly into an narrative arc versus trying to back gameplay into it. To me that would break the Halo experience people have come to know and love.

IG: I know that you guys are independent and obviously are looking to do other things besides Halo once you're done with Reach. What are the types of genres that you're looking at? Would you be looking at another first person shooter? What is it that interests you and the Bungie team in terms of what you want to pursue?

BJ: You know, it's interesting. It's an exciting time right now at the studio. The bulk of the team is still obviously working really hard to get Reach out the door, but we have had another group of people with Jason Jones at the helm who are working on pre-production and concepts for our next big thing. It's going to be a whole new universe and a whole new experience. I'm not really at liberty to talk about what genre it's going to be in but I would say that the studio has had a lot of success in the first-person genre. We've also made some third-person games that have been successful, the Myth series as an RTS game was successful, so we have a really broad array of interests, even outside of game development. We have a lot going on and I can't say much more than that right now. It's going to be something that our team is really excited about and I think our fans will be equally excited once we pull back the curtain and talk about it.

IG: I don't remember if it was you or a Bungie colleague, but in an interview recently it was mentioned that Bungie would consider PS3 support. Since you're independent you obviously don't have to stick with Microsoft – you can work on PS3, Wii, you can do anything, so of the platforms that are out there, do you have any interest? Are you interested in the Wii in terms of interface and its extremely different user base than the Xbox that you've been targeting with Halo all these years? Are you looking to take a very different direction with what it is you're doing or is it more hardcore still? 

BJ: I don't know if I would classify it as a hardcore focus. Definitely, we're not looking to make the next version of Wii Fit. I don't think that fits with our studio's philosophies, but we do want to make games that aren't limited to just a small segment of super-hardcore gamers. Hopefully they have something about them that's appealing and interesting to a wide variety of people: people that love great stories, people that love action/adventure... these are the kind of things that, throughout every Bungie game has been a pillar.

In terms of platform, I know these things are all still pending topics in the studio. It hasn't gotten to the point where we're unable to do great work and we're moving forward. Things are definitely coming together though. We definitely have plans in the works, and I think we're really close to understanding of what is next and who, what, when, where, that's all going to land. But we're not looking at one particular piece of technology right now. All options are open right now, so long as we find the best possible fit for our creative vision and what this project is going to be.