"We hired people who hated Halo"
"Having the Halo franchise was burdensome in a lot of ways -- meeting expectations, for example -- but it was great for hiring," O'Connor admits. Many of 343's problems were big, practical, logistical conundrums having to do with growth and recruitment. The studio needed to attract top triple-A talent -- talent that was in high-demand, and probably already employed at other triple-A studios. All of 343's staff came from triple-A; the studio's staff now represents over 25 triple-A studios.
343 actually couldn't tell interviewees that the studio was specifically working on Halo 4, just that the studio was working on something involving Halo.
"We had people who we hired who hated Halo because of 'X,'" says O'Connor. "But what that really meant was, 'I feel like this game could be awesome because of 'Y input' that I'm going to bring into it. I want to prove it, and I'm passionate about proving it.' So we ended up with a bunch of people who were genuinely passionate about the product. That is a huge advantage, and that helped in hiring and forming our team."
The growing pains threaded throughout the development of Halo 4, as the studio came to terms with firing up an motor while trying to build up the rest of the car around it. For Holmes, the growing pains were familiar, and ones that he encountered when he co-founded Propaganda.
"As a leadership team, we'd go from being able to have everyone sit in an area or a room and organically talk about the experience we're building, because we were small enough to do that," says Holmes. "When you've got multiple missions, five missions in flight, and all of those teams are trying to rapidly turn things around, there's a point at which all of the feedback and interaction starts to bottleneck, and you're not able to move quickly enough."
In February 2012, just nine months before Halo 4's ship date, the studio had to address this bottleneck that was brought on by the rapid growth. Project directors found themselves handling too many line-level decisions, which was causing "inefficiency and frustration" within the team, says Holmes.
"To address this, we introduced a new production process and restructured the team around feature teams, which focused on creation of vertical game experiences, and foundational teams, which focused on game elements and experiences that support multiple features or vertical experiences.
"For example, the campaign was a feature team and the audio was a foundational team. These teams worked toward monthly goals as established by the project directors, but were empowered to make day-to-day decisions and adapt production processes to suit their individual team needs. The project directors checked in with the teams on a weekly basis and provided daily feedback on builds, but we tried to drive as much decision-making as possible down to the teams. This gave the feature and foundational teams a high degree of autonomy in pursuing their project goals, which was important in allowing our large team to remain agile, preventing the directors from becoming a bottleneck to decisions on the floor."
"E3 was sort of a validation of all the things we wanted to do"
Finding the appropriate talent for Halo 4 was one thing, but getting everyone on the same page creatively and process-wise was a different challenge. With so many people from an array of different backgrounds, there were communication issues and cultural incongruities that arose that needed to be fixed.
"There are a lot of technical mistakes that you literally fix. There are cultural things too, but you can't fix your culture, you have to evolve it in a healthy fashion," says O'Connor. "I think we got there through this crucible process. We forged a culture, and a real one.
"We said, 'What are you like? Bring whatever you have to the studio. Bring the reasons we hired you into our culture, and form it naturally out of your persona, your contributions, and the atmosphere you bring into the studio. I think that's the healthy way to build a culture from scratch.
"Maybe 10 years from now we'll be a little less malleable. But I hope we remember that process as we grow as a studio, and remember that we are successful because of what new people bring to it, and not in spite of it."
One of the most interesting moments of making video games is when a developer or a team comes across those moments of epiphany when they realize that they are going in the right direction. Creating anything for an audience is in many respects a blind endeavor until you get to a certain point in which you convince yourself that you have something special on your hands.
These epiphany moments are uniquely interesting to hear about in triple-A projects that involve so many moving parts; sub-machines that are working in parallel with one another, which at some point need to come together in a Voltron-esque fashion and inter-operate seamlessly.
"It's during that time you're questioning yourself: 'How is this going to work, will it be as I envision it in my head?" says Holmes. For Halo 4, he says there were a few epiphany moments that helped boost the morale of the team. One of the earlier ones that Holmes recalls was when the team completed a small piece of the Halo experience that he described as a "very traditional" Halo. User research showed that people thought it was a lot of fun, and it showed that the team was capable of making a Halo game that was true to what the series was about.
343 scrapped it, Holmes says, as it was too traditional. But that first build showed the new team that this amalgamation of different studio cultures could work together and achieve a common goal.
A year later, 343 had finished the first mission for Halo 4. Later, the team injected the new enemy, the Prometheans, into the encounter space, displaying their new AI behaviors, representing a culmination of a year-and-a-half of iteration. Even later, online multiplayer was in place -- members of the team could play the game against each other from their homes. It was another morale booster, a tangible signifier that things were coming together.
But when I asked Holmes, Wolfkill and O'Connor what the moment was, when that enormous, collective sigh of relief occurred, all of them had the same answer. I had interviewed Wolfkill and O'Connor in person, together. When they replied, they looked at each other and replied simultaneously, "E3."
"At E3, at a purely production level, was the first time we were able to express our intent with what the experience was going to be, and have an entire segment of the team delivering on the experience as opposed to delivering on their pieces of the puzzle," says Wolfkill.
"On an emotional level, it was the first time we showed anything publicly, so it was sort of a validation of all the things we wanted to do, and the team really needed that at that point in the cycle."
At E3, Halo 4 was at last in the hands and in front of the eyes of a large audience, in front of press and in front of fans. Reaction was positive, and Bungie staff at E3 were able to relay the feedback back to the team in Kirkland.
Holmes concurred that E3 was the prime epiphany moment. "You have an idea for this experience, but you're not exactly sure how people are going to react to it. Yes, you're doing user research testing, you're having groups of people come in and play, you're analyzing the results, but those are really just small slices of people at different moments in time. ...We'd worked the last two-and-a-half years on this game, wondering how they would react. We think they'd like it. We hoped so. But we weren't 100 percent sure."
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Halo 4 even messed with the control scheme sufficiently for me to hate it.
Even if Halo might stand for a lot the Indie-scene despises, I must admit the people behind this Leviathan have my utmost respect. The passion to perfect the Formula and to do their universe justice is more than I can say about the current montearization sell-out of a lot of small and middlesized mobile studios.
From the formentioned "Studio switches" (DMC, Gear of war, COD) is imo Halo 4 the one which delivered the best overall experience (Gears delivered the worst) and I seriously hope that next Years Arkham "switch" (from rocksteady to WB Games) will be at least on par with 343i version of the Halo-universe
Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the passion that the core team brought to the game, and I respect the fact that they finished it, but this design-by-committee stuff just doesn't work. Someone needed to take ownership here.
The sad thing is though, is that these people are patting themselves on the back when they've made literally the worst Halo game ever (admittedly the bar is high...but still). Not that I didn't enjoy the game somewhat (I did)...but I think everyone was expecting a lot more.
Check out http://halocharts.com/2012/chart/dailypeakpopulation/all to see the rapid decline.
Randomness is what creates frustration and not having in-game ranks takes away a reward that COD players and old Halo players have always enjoyed. 343i grossly exaggerates the negative effects of ranks in terms of boosting but everyone knows the MM experience was infinitely better in Halo 3 than Halo 4. Randomness is creates by AA's, ordinances, sprint, no weapons on map, terrible maps, and instant respawn. None of these things belong in Halo, they ruin the experience. You CANNOT have sprint and then have slow kill times. It means stupid plays like running into the middle of the map are not punished because you can just run away.
In the end, 343i is out of touch. Look at the current population, it's a joke. The game will be a graveyard in a few months. A halo game has never had even remotely close to the sharp MP drop off that Halo 4 has had. We just want to play an actual Halo game, please, please don't put sprint, AA's, and ordinances back in.
Good article devs are devs AAA or indie, Coexist <-- Somebody do this with a mix of indie and AAA game characters please...
As another person already mentioned if you look at the games MP population you notice the sharp decline of players. Some decline is expected but you now have the game peaking at 30K. Many times if you are on at night its very very low. Last night while I was playing it hit 6K. This effects my experience through playlist search times and quality of the matchup I receive. As a knowledgeable semi-skilled Halo player the chance of me and my friends getting a quality game is very very low. We usually are just trying to see at that point how much we can beat the enemy team by, not IF we can. This leads to some very non-challenging games without a true ranking system. Alright stealth brag over. The reason is because this game has introduced elements of CoD, and this cannot be denied. Instant Respawn, More one-shot overpowered weapons to reduce the importance of Halo's Shield/Health player dynamic, Personal and Global Ordnance to introduce more randomness and take the focus off map control as traditional Halos have always rewarded map control. These things are inherent beauty spots of the game that have been removed to pander to the masses to get CoD sales. That may have worked looking at the sales figures and I will never mention Halo 4 was a failure as a product, not even as a game. It was a good game, just not a good Halo!
Now lets talk about change. Change is inevitable, in life there are factors that you cannot control. Death, the rising taxes, your gut getting larger with every night gaming session you know should be spent on the elliptical. However the gaming world is different, its a magical world where programmers can control every little knob and lever of the world we play in. You technically could release Halo 2 and just cross out the title and put Halo 3 and re-release it. While Madden adds new features, the core game is still football a game that hasn't changed in forever besides a small number of rule changes. So every year a new one releases and every year players buy the game for the new player changes, the graphical enhancements, and possibly a new feature or two. Or you have CoD, a game that's stayed sort of true to its core gameplay besides the CoD4 to MW shift, and even Blops tries to alleviate that gap. Halo has done nothing to alleviate the changes it makes, they try and shoehorn a classic mode in Reach and Halo 4 and always fall sort of flat. Mainly because the core is so warped and changed you cant set options to make it feel like the past Halo's.
They constantly talk about how to make Halo more accessible to players and new players. This ends up catering to the masses of casual players who will play Halo for awhile. They will play through the campaign maybe once or twice, play through it with friends maybe once or twice, and maybe play through it a year or two later before the next game comes out so they can remember more about the game. They will step into MP for an average of 24.5 games* (*this number is completely made up) and then they will stop after winning 20% of their games and never care to notice the intricacies of everything they've just played. Then they will say oh yea "that game was fun". Meanwhile you have hardcore players playing a game that wasnt designed with their needs in mind, and these players now probably make up a much higher percentage of the people who are still on your game night after night. The CoD players left the week after Halo 4 was released when Blops II came out, you can even see the sharp decline of players right after Blops release on the Halo population charts. You can see the Christmas spike that lasted a week and you can see other small bumps that are mostly weekend and DLC bumps, but besides these bumps its been a game of pure decline.
Another note now that players can choose loadouts with perks, AA's, and everything that is locked behind unlocks. You actually have to grind to level up and unlock gameplay altering abilities. This means a kid at SR-130 the highest experience ranking has every ability unlocked in multiple loadouts. You can switch loadouts throughout a game. So this person essentially has more things available to him in game than a player who just started does. Gameplay altering abilities should never be in Halo. The only thing keeping a player from beating another player is his knowledge and skill. If a kid comes home and gets to play eight hours of Halo 4 all week and I have to be at work come home make dinner and put the kids in bed and then I finally get two hours to sit down at night and play I shouldn't be penalized before I even pick up that controller. Unlocking of items needs to be purely aesthetic.
Also maps, because of the fact players can have two mobile AA's at once. Sprint is now default and then you can have say jetpack, you now have much more mobility and abilities all at once. This is too much. It makes larger maps feel smaller so Halo now has to have all these large maps, and what small maps are there Haven and Abandon? Then they released the first DLC which was once again all large maps!? Really!? Give us some arena maps like Halo has always had! Halo has always been about sort of knowing what your enemy can do and predicting and analysing what hes going to do based on that essential assumption. You no longer can do that though because there are so many abilities and variables players can have and you never know if they just got some random ordnance drop that gave them a sniper that can one shot even if they hit your body? Really!?, you are more playing rock paper scissors guessing what he has against what you chose at spawn. Nobody wants their gameplay that close to a gamble.
So lets stop catering to the casuals who leave because you've removed all depth and skill gap so they could play, let people learn the game figure out what works what doesnt let them evolve their skill and feel great about it, let them rank up to 50 and let them say "I am now good at Halo!" and feel proud of their accomplishment. Lets create a game with competitive players in mind. Lets release a game with a ton of smaller maps and maybe 2-3 large maps. Then your first DLC can be 2 small and 1 more large and continue in that fashion. Lets focus less on having the players fix your map problem by using Forge World and subsequently getting less than par maps into MM that effects everyone's experience when they play. Lets bring back campaign theater and scoring for communities like High Speed Halo. Lets get this game back into MLG so people can watch tournaments and play Halo professionally again. Lets have a HaloTV feature where when we dont want to play we can stop in and watch preloaded files of good games recently played, lets be able to chat about it too, lets be able to stream to JTV or Youtube from within the game. Let us remember that you can keep a game true to its roots and have great sales like Madden. Halo 2014, The next great Halo, HALO game, not CoD. Halo.
Also Hiring that Juices would be a great idea.
The site is starting to gain popularity.
Other sites like penny arcade have a pretty substantial following and many articles get linked.
The bad:
And then you have the internet fuckwad theory:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19
Articles like this are great for the community, these people don't even have to do this but they did it anyways, and you get people come here just to bash the game and not even address the article itself. They should at least abstain from posting, we have enough places on the internet where you can go and criticize games you don't like. Oh well.
I'm not sure whether this is a good or bad thing. On the one hand, it's great that Gamasutra is getting more popular and the articles are being more widely-seen. On the other, the comments on this site were, and probably still are, the best on the whole web - keeping the quality comments visible with this increase in low-quality comments will take some effort.
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