Halo Reach: Joseph Tung Interview

Conrad shoots the breeze with Halo Reach Executive Producer, Joseph Tung

When Bungie announced that their next Halo title would be the last in the nearly decade long series, teenage Halo-Heads on Xbox LIVE bawled their eyes out. More mature gamers stoically dabbed at their tear-ducts and bit their trembling lips. But all good things must come to an end. And Halo: Reach, the developer’s fourth standalone installment, it is set to wrap up the franchise once and for all, bringing the epic fable of the Halo universe to a final close.

NZGamer.com had the chance to sit down and discuss the new title with Joseph Tung, Bungie’s executive producer for Reach, who was fresh off the plane from Seattle. We were also privy to a showing of the first mission of the campaign, which Joseph demonstrated with his masterful gaming skills (and insider knowledge of all the spawn sites).

Things are really getting rolling for Reach. Just yesterday it successfully achieved Xbox Functional Certification which Joseph informed us was “a huge weight off [his] mind.” And I don’t blame him. That fancy sounding jargon means that to all intents and purposes, Reach is virtually complete. All that remains is to slap the age restriction stickers on it, tweak a few minor details, and get it onto our shelves.

Straight off the bat, Joseph made it clear that Bungie knows how much is riding on Halo’s last bite at the apple: “Reach is Bungie’s last Halo game, and we knew that from the beginning, so certainly we wanted to make it our most ambitious Halo game. We wanted to make it the definitive Halo title from Bungie.”

These are bold words, but Joseph was quick to remind us that behind this fourth title is a lot of sentimentality; not just for Halo fans but for the developers themselves. “We’ve had a team that’s had over ten years experience creating the universe and so we really did want to make it the biggest Halo game we’ve ever shipped. And I think we’ve done that, I really do feel extremely proud of the game. It’s a huge game; it has the most features we’ve ever packed into a Halo game.”

At NZGamer we’ve already dipped our toes into Bungie’s offering, having a peek at both the Multiplayer Beta, and the clips presented at E3.

Because of Reach’s position as Halo’s final chapter it was important that we got a sense from Joseph about what direction the singleplayer campaign was going to be taking. Gamer’s are looking for a title that is still quintessentially Halo, but adds something impressive to the final instalment. Joseph felt the same: “Reach was a different campaign for us. As such it has a darker story, and it has a story with no Masterchief. We wanted to provide new, novel game play experiences. We knew we wanted to go to Reach, we wanted to go to the birthplace of the Spartan program.”

In acheiving this Joseph was quick to mention that the style of narrative has changed from previous installments. “Halo 3 was more a galactic space opera, Reach is a much more boots in the mud, told from the trenches, type of story.“ Angsty war-stories and gritty realism; that’s all well and good, gamers always like a good grunty ‘Hoo-ah’. (In fact, Joseph did acknowledge that iconic sources such as the Magnificent Seven, or Band of Brothers strongly influenced the narrative’s development) but I put the question to Joseph to ask how all of that would all be reflected in the game play.

His response hinted at some structural changes to the story telling itself. “We’ve taken a more modular approach to story-telling this time around; it’s a very different process from Halo 3. In Halo 3 you sort of have to continue the story that was laid out for you. With Reach we wanted to be more flexible about the story – up to a certain point – and really create the campaign around the backbone of missions. We asked the mission designers what were the craziest missions they wanted to make, and then built the story on top of that.” Halo fans that are panicked that this sounds like Red Dead Redemption in space, fear not. It’s still a Halo title at heart, and these changes will be story driven not game play driver per se: “It is ultimately a linear narrative. In Halo 3 you were going from point A to point B, in Reach there are going to be periods in the campaign when a day or two has passed between missions.”

Casting my eyes over the first campaign mission provided an example of this new narrative in action. The game play starts with Noble 6 joining his squad and after getting a stern word from Noble Squad leader Carter (he tells you to “keep that Lone Wolf stuff behind” – a subtle tip to teenage trigger-happy fanboys perhaps?) you are soon flying off into the hills of Reach to investigate some MIA Marines. Against all odds, they weren’t sitting at a campfire singing Kumbaya and eating candy floss, so Noble squad is set off to hunt them down, and on the way runs smack bang into the middle of the Covenant fire fight. It’s clear that in the campaign special attention has been given to creating an immersive environment. Joseph told me that “huge investments in facial animations and motion capture animations had been made,” since Halo 3. In addition, Bungie is clearly intent on making sure that environmental features play a big part in bringing the single player world of Reach to life. Civilians hiding from the Covenant came out to attract the attention of the marines, ambient features like dynamic weather effects abound, the skyboxes are geometrically rendered and there were even large flightless birds running around getting caught in cross fires. Joseph joked they were based off New Zealand Moas. But I think that quip was just to please the home crowd. He’s a quick one, that Joe Tung.

When it comes to the combat itself there is a “ton of stuff that’s new to the game.” Joseph mentioned assassinations, variable difficulty levels, new weaponry and improved AI. “We absolutely invested in the AI system in general, to make the elites the absolute, toughest, smartest, scariest enemy you could possibly find in a Halo game.” The pacing of the title has also changed from its predecessors; the combat “definitely has a slower pace, we did that intentionally. In [Halo] 3 it was like Boom! and you’re in combat with all the AI all at once. We really wanted the planet to feel like a real place so we wanted players to have a slower introduction, to set the mood, set the tone and then throw you into combat.” But this doesn’t mean that Reach is going to be a snoozefest; Joseph was pretty adamant about that. “There will absolutely be epic moments; you are going to see novel gameplay that you’ve never seen in a Halo title before.” What exactly that novel gameplay was, and how it was going to be linked into the entire Halo story arc and universe, he wasn’t quite yet ready to give away (although I did try in vain to tease it out of him).

With so much in-depth discussion around the single player campaign, it would have been a shame to pass up the chance to dig into the multiplayer side of things – arguably the longest lasting part of Halo’s charm. Joseph was especially proud of the increased multiplayer customisation now on offer. “If you wanna make a game where all the grunts have four hundred percent health, and when you shoot them their head explodes into confetti you can do that. We’ve actually made that game type! It’s called Gruntpocalypse and it’s going to ship on disc.” In addition, Bungie really took on board the feedback they received from the community, after Reach’s Beta wrapped up earlier this year, attempting to balance the multiplayer experience.

“With as vocal and passionate a fan base that we have, it’s a real challenge to [get the balance]. You know, you change the number of bullets a gun has by – one. Someone cared about that, someone was incredibly passionate about that. But we absolutely listened. What people really don’t realise is that while the beta is going on we are mining all sorts of data about the networking experience to make sure it’s absolutely solid, or how maps are flowing, or where are people dying, is there a particular weapon that’s too powerful? Are grenades too powerful? The feedback reinforces that data.”

So Bungie listened in (and to) the millions of testers, and it has resulted in some significant multiplayer changes. “Player movement speed changed after the beta, jump height changed after the beta, grenade radius changed after the beta, a bunch of weapons changed after the beta, mobility has changed.” However it seems that Bungie still have a little bit of work to do in balancing the new multiplayer classes, Joseph mentioned that the armour classes got slightly tweaked – but any further balancing will probably happen with patches post release.

The final tasty treat that NZGamer.com got a chance to see was the complete overhaul of the Forge World mapping software that is to be included with the game. “[Forge] has been massively overhauled as well. I think the improvements we can see are three pronged; the first is the palette itself – the pieces that you use to build stuff in forge. We’ve massively expanded that palette, we’ve made the pieces much more flexible so they actually are like virtual Lego.” This new approach will surely make the mechanics of map design easier, but there are added improvements. Not only have the objects changed, but so has the way you use them. Joseph was quick to recognise the earlier shortcomings of Forge and explain how they’ve been improved on. “In Halo 3, building a map was like a building a house of cards, you touch it and it gets knocked over, and people get frustrated and... hate Bungie...”

To improve on this, players can now alter the physics settings of objects, letting you float pieces in mid air, in walls or simply let them operate normally. “This is absolutely huge for Forge, it’s basically made it so that you can actually go in and make crazy creations.” Joseph was obviously pretty excited about Forge’s new mapping functionality and if his anecdote about the banshee racing track with “a rock dragon breathing big death fire balls,” is anything to go by – the experimenting developers were too.

But it was obvious that Joseph’s favourite is the expansive sandbox world that you get to mess around in. “It’s the biggest map of its kind that we’ve ever shipped, [excited laugh]. Without a doubt. It was actually a crazy experiment by one of the environment artists who over the course of development kept being told, you’re never going to be able to ship this, you’re never going to be able to ship this... and well, here it is.”

And looking at the Forge World you can see why. The possibilities are really only limited by your imagination, and environmental features pay obvious homage to favourite fan battlegrounds like Ascension or Blood Gulch. Sure, Forge does look a little complicated, but Joseph ensured us that while it’s not designed for casual gamers, the entire system has been simplified and will ship on disc, which is good news for both players and aspiring map makers. “If at Bungie fifty guys in a couple of weeks come up with a dozen... two dozen... interesting forge variants, I think that when a few million people play with this on day one, we can expect to see some pretty crazy stuff.”

The last instalment in the iconic Halo series might be a bitter-sweet ending for the good folks at Bungie – the developers that have done so much in bringing multiplayer gaming to the next-gen of consoles and for better or worse, to Xbox Live. But it looks like the new approach to the franchise will result in an interesting title with plenty of action, immersion and intrigue, and is clearly setting itself up to provide a gripping conclusion to the Halo saga. But for those of us who don’t get to go to work in Seattle every morning, we are just going to have to wait. Because it won’t be until September the 14th before we can tell for sure, how high this one will reach.