Halo: Reach

[Flawless]

Game Informer put up a 5 minute video meeting some of the Reach team.

Quote:

Bungie's studio in Kirkland, Washington is home to a wide variety of gaming industry talent. Some have been around since the first Halo game, while others will feature Reach as the first title on their resume. Creative director Marcus Lehto has been around long enough to remember when it was an RTS game, while executive producer Joseph Tung joined the team after sending the company a screenshot of his Halo 2 beta stats. Take a look at the video below to learn more about the team behind Halo: Reach.

[Flawless]

Very awesome of Bungie.

Be a Hero! - buy a T-shirt, other Bungie apparel, or play Halo to help Haiti.

...

[Candyman5]

Quote: Originally Posted by Flawless

Very awesome of Bungie. Be a Hero! ...

I may just have to throw halo in for this reason alone.

[sportsdude]

I'll be on Wednesday and Thursday for some multiplayer or firefight for the cause.

[Flawless]

Some info from EDGE magazine:

• Now players will look the same throughout multiplayer, co-op and singleplayer (and the way they look will be customizable). Which confirms only Spartans in multiplayer.
• On the pause screen it mentions "grades and credits" but Bungie wont discuss them yet.
• There is a 3D radar (shows elevation) and the HUD can now highlight various environmental features and overlay information about them.
• Night vision is in.
• Longer interval between sniper shots.
• New AR sounds markedly more powerful, and leaves smoke and sparks when it fires.
• Explosions have been completely redone for Reach. They are apparently, huge, dirty and lingering.
• 3rd-person assassinations (by holding down melee) will feature in multiplayer and the instant assassination of past Halo games may not be featured at all. Bungie is using the Beta to decide.
• Huge landscapes, but you can visit each area. In co-op you may see your buddies fighting a long way off in the distance. Teleportation is far less strict.
• Flavor of the Halo 1 marines being brought back.
• Reach is the first Bungie game to use Motion Capture. Bungie will also be motion capturing voice actors facial movements as they're reading their lines.
• Gone are Grunts "squealing jokes and making pratfalls", Pink Needler Fire and the Halo theme song.

Halo: Reach - Tales Of The Fall

Quote:

So do players actually like being faced with such adversity? ML: Reach is like Titanic - we know the end from the beginning. Reach is going to fall and 700 million people are going to perish as a result. It’s a very dark story to tell, and our goal is to allow the player to experience Noble Team’s efforts and get satisfaction from them continuing to fight forward and achieve the final acts of what we can’t talk about today. That success is what’s so gratifying at the end.

Quote:

The approach we took to the campaign is a major turnaround from how we did it before. Earlier on we came up with a modular story, a wrapper, and instead of trying to write a linear narrative for the story that missions have to adhere to, we lived with the wrapper for a while and came up with a bunch of crazy ideas for missions and then fit them into the wrapper. Ultimately, the story can’t stay modular for ever, it’s got to solidify. We’ve ended up with a very different feeling to story and game as a result.

Quote:

With the events of Reach taking place before those of any other Halo, how are you explaining why we’ve never seen some of its enemies and weapons before? ML: One of the justifications is - and this is one of the things we had to play with - during Reach we have both military forces, the Covenant and UNSC - at the height of their powers. They are coming to Reach with everything they have and the assumption is that some of these things never made it off the planet. They were rendered extinct by the end of it. That’s one of the fictional wrappers we’re using. JT: You’ll see some objects which are like the prototype version of those in the earlier games, and they’ll feel like an earlier version - the DMR [Reach's new Marine rifle] is certainly in that vein.

Quote:

Reach allowed us to start afresh. We came up with a number of campaign experiences which engaged the player – brand new and exciting, and different from the usual 'I walk into a space and fight a number of AI'. That’s the foundation of what we've been spending so much time building, but we're adding brand new experiences throughout the campaign, and we continue to give players something new around the corner.

[Miles_Yuhas]

Night Vision. Sweet!

[Candyman5]

Seems like they are trying to slow down Multiplayer, which IS NOT a bad thing. Game sounds like the dark Halo game I have been wanting since Halo 1, still have a horrid taste in my mouth from Halo 2 and Halo 3.

[Flawless]

Some more bits:

• Human weapons now hit more or less instantly after pulling the trigger. They will feel more powerful and precise.
• "Halo Reach is probably the most powerful title we've built to date with regards to story, to character, new gameplay features we're throwing at the player, new experiences overall."
• There will be various dramatic weather effects.
• Making environments bigger than you've ever seen in a Halo game. Harkening back to Halo: Combat Evolved - the wide open vistas, the big pipe where the player can choose to go any number of directions, and really rewarding players for exploring.
• On top of being able to double the size of encounters (up to 40 AI and 20 vehicles active on screen), the new tech can depict battles far away with automated "flocks" which convert into higher resolution models as you near, flipping into scripted behaviour, then full AI as you get up close. Really makes you feel you're apart of the battle and this world is on fire.
• Story in the trenches and want it to feel very real. Stylistic choice of scenes depicted as if they were shot with handheld camera.
• As seen in the trailer, helmets will come off. You will see Spartans faces.
• "We're definitely bending the Xbox as far as it will bend. It's getting a wider breadth of characters, vehicles, weapons, all effects and vistas and the environment. We don't shortchange the environments. We don't limit the player to an isolated area, and everything outside that is totally faked." EDGE wonders though whether a world which has eagerly lapped up the highly scripted rollercoaster rides of Modern Warfare 2 and Uncharted 2 care about what Lehto calls the 'evolved gameplay experience' which Combat Evolved introduced all those years ago.