http://kotaku.com/5354944/how-and-why-halo-3-odst-was-made-in-14-months
How And Why Halo 3: ODST Was Made In 14 Months
Is your Peter Jackson Halo project not coming together on schedule? Got a year to make something else Halo-ish? Then construct a creative plan B, spelled ODST.
During my visit to Bungie last week I got a chance to learn more about the origins of Halo 3: ODST a game that has all the makings of an enjoyable Halo experience but whose existence never made a lot of sense to me.
Why would Bungie, after concluding the construction of an epic Halo trilogy and establishing its independence from former owner Microsoft, make a spin-off that overlaps with part of the established saga?
The June announcement of Halo Reach, a new, full-sized 2010 Bungie Halo game left me even more confused about the origins and intent behind ODST.
My confusion was relieved in all of eight minutes as the game's creative director explained to me how the game came about, who the star of it could have been and what movie director Peter Jackson's shelved Halo game/project, Halo Chronicles, had to do with it.
"The core of the ODST team was the old Peter Jackson Halo Chronicles team," Staten explained as we sat in a conference room at Bungie headquarters in Kirkland, Washington. "During Halo 3 — and before I started working on ODST — I was the point man for Bungie working on Chronicles. I spent a lot of time with those guys dow in New Zealand when the movie was happening. Gradually that team built up in size. Paul Bertone, the design director of ODST, Mike Woo, our art manager, started to wind over to Chronicles."
But the Halo movie lost its financing, Jackson's involvement diminished and Chronicles was no longer a viable option for Bungie. "When that project fell apart we were left with this really experienced core team of guys, all of whom had been around since Halo 1," Staten said. "At the same time, the [Halo] Reach team was spinning up and we were left in this position where we had a team, we had a good vibe and we had this window — a very narrow window of about a year. All we needed was this spark to light a fire to begin an idea. Literally, Paul and I and [Bungie co-founder] Harold [Ryan], the studio managers and a couple of other people sat in a room for a month — Harold wasn't there for a month — and when we came out and Harold looked at the numbers and the budget and said, 'Yeah, let's do it.'"
The Bungie guys had batted around a number of ideas for what would become ODST, confident all along that it would not star Master Chief or another Spartan super-soldier like him.
"We knew we had an engine," said Staten. "We knew we had this universe. We knew we had about a year, give or take, to do it. Who are you going to be [as a player]? We knew we didn't want to be a Spartan. We wanted a different main character. We had crazy ideas about maybe being another Covenant character like the Arbiter in Halo 2. We had a crazy special operations elite strike force story.
"But, eventually we came back to the human side of things and we tried to look at: Who are those interesting characters in our universe? We talked seriously about a game starring Sergeant Johnson, being a young Avery Johnson early in the war. We talked about just being a marine, maybe palling around with Spartans: What's it like to be on the battlefield surrounded by Spartans? But then we hit the ODSTs and, for us, they've always been really interesting. We put them in missions when we need really tough marines. They have different combat capabilities than normal marines in Halo games, but they were always kind of mysterious characters... and we knew our fans liked them a lot."
Once they had their stars for the game in the ODSTs, Bungie next needed a setting and scenario. Given that the game involves urban fighting rather than the storm-the-beaches and large open combat of the earlier Halo games I guessed that Bungie was inspired by the prominence of such close-quarters situations in the United States' active conflict in Iraq. Staten said that wasn't the case.
"We honestly didn't really think about current day things at all," he said. "What we did was look inside the Halo universe. We know the kinds of problems Master Chief solves. He goes to ancient, alien ring artifacts, fights galaxy-consuming parasitic alien monsters and destroys alien empires with their vast military industrial complexes behind them. The ODST, they maybe take small parts in that larger struggle. But the kind of fights they usually get into are usually the kind of fights they can tackle in a day. They drop into a city and try to secure a sector of it. They take out an installation,. They really are special forces guys. For us, it was trying to narrow down the scope of the larger war and pick a specific place that ODSTs felt right operating in. For us, an urban environment made a lot of sense." For a setting they picked New Mombasa, the city that is destroyed in the beginning of Halo 2.
Staten kept referring to only having a year to make the game. That puzzled me, but once he explained it, ODST's connection to Reach and Bungie's overall structure finally made sense.
"If you have a studio like ours where you don't have multiple teams working on stuff — you just have a big monolithic development group — there are waves you want to roll people on and off of projects," Staten said. "We knew the resources we were going to use for ODST [which included a] massive amount of environment artists, the designers. It was a great opportunity to give those guys real work while Reach was getting through concept and pre-production." Once Reach would be ready for them, the ODST team would need to be done. The timing worked more or less, Staten said. ODST development took 14 months and the game was pretty much finished this spring.
Looking back, that choice to make it star its breed of special ops soldiers seems appropriate to Staten: "ODST itself, the project, was. in the beginning, a skunkworks, special operations, small team, limited time frame, do the most with what you can — with what you have — sort of a battlefield-expedient project, generally speaking." It didn't take them just a day to finish. But, in scale of game-making, it was close.
Halo 3: ODST is now prepped for its September 22 launch on the Xbox 360.
Is your Peter Jackson Halo project not coming together on schedule? Got a year to make something else Halo-ish? Then construct a creative plan B, spelled ODST.
During my visit to Bungie last week I got a chance to learn more about the origins of Halo 3: ODST a game that has all the makings of an enjoyable Halo experience but whose existence never made a lot of sense to me.
Why would Bungie, after concluding the construction of an epic Halo trilogy and establishing its independence from former owner Microsoft, make a spin-off that overlaps with part of the established saga?
The June announcement of Halo Reach, a new, full-sized 2010 Bungie Halo game left me even more confused about the origins and intent behind ODST.
My confusion was relieved in all of eight minutes as the game's creative director explained to me how the game came about, who the star of it could have been and what movie director Peter Jackson's shelved Halo game/project, Halo Chronicles, had to do with it.
"The core of the ODST team was the old Peter Jackson Halo Chronicles team," Staten explained as we sat in a conference room at Bungie headquarters in Kirkland, Washington. "During Halo 3 — and before I started working on ODST — I was the point man for Bungie working on Chronicles. I spent a lot of time with those guys dow in New Zealand when the movie was happening. Gradually that team built up in size. Paul Bertone, the design director of ODST, Mike Woo, our art manager, started to wind over to Chronicles."
But the Halo movie lost its financing, Jackson's involvement diminished and Chronicles was no longer a viable option for Bungie. "When that project fell apart we were left with this really experienced core team of guys, all of whom had been around since Halo 1," Staten said. "At the same time, the [Halo] Reach team was spinning up and we were left in this position where we had a team, we had a good vibe and we had this window — a very narrow window of about a year. All we needed was this spark to light a fire to begin an idea. Literally, Paul and I and [Bungie co-founder] Harold [Ryan], the studio managers and a couple of other people sat in a room for a month — Harold wasn't there for a month — and when we came out and Harold looked at the numbers and the budget and said, 'Yeah, let's do it.'"
The Bungie guys had batted around a number of ideas for what would become ODST, confident all along that it would not star Master Chief or another Spartan super-soldier like him.
"We knew we had an engine," said Staten. "We knew we had this universe. We knew we had about a year, give or take, to do it. Who are you going to be [as a player]? We knew we didn't want to be a Spartan. We wanted a different main character. We had crazy ideas about maybe being another Covenant character like the Arbiter in Halo 2. We had a crazy special operations elite strike force story.
"But, eventually we came back to the human side of things and we tried to look at: Who are those interesting characters in our universe? We talked seriously about a game starring Sergeant Johnson, being a young Avery Johnson early in the war. We talked about just being a marine, maybe palling around with Spartans: What's it like to be on the battlefield surrounded by Spartans? But then we hit the ODSTs and, for us, they've always been really interesting. We put them in missions when we need really tough marines. They have different combat capabilities than normal marines in Halo games, but they were always kind of mysterious characters... and we knew our fans liked them a lot."
Once they had their stars for the game in the ODSTs, Bungie next needed a setting and scenario. Given that the game involves urban fighting rather than the storm-the-beaches and large open combat of the earlier Halo games I guessed that Bungie was inspired by the prominence of such close-quarters situations in the United States' active conflict in Iraq. Staten said that wasn't the case.
"We honestly didn't really think about current day things at all," he said. "What we did was look inside the Halo universe. We know the kinds of problems Master Chief solves. He goes to ancient, alien ring artifacts, fights galaxy-consuming parasitic alien monsters and destroys alien empires with their vast military industrial complexes behind them. The ODST, they maybe take small parts in that larger struggle. But the kind of fights they usually get into are usually the kind of fights they can tackle in a day. They drop into a city and try to secure a sector of it. They take out an installation,. They really are special forces guys. For us, it was trying to narrow down the scope of the larger war and pick a specific place that ODSTs felt right operating in. For us, an urban environment made a lot of sense." For a setting they picked New Mombasa, the city that is destroyed in the beginning of Halo 2.
Staten kept referring to only having a year to make the game. That puzzled me, but once he explained it, ODST's connection to Reach and Bungie's overall structure finally made sense.
"If you have a studio like ours where you don't have multiple teams working on stuff — you just have a big monolithic development group — there are waves you want to roll people on and off of projects," Staten said. "We knew the resources we were going to use for ODST [which included a] massive amount of environment artists, the designers. It was a great opportunity to give those guys real work while Reach was getting through concept and pre-production." Once Reach would be ready for them, the ODST team would need to be done. The timing worked more or less, Staten said. ODST development took 14 months and the game was pretty much finished this spring.
Looking back, that choice to make it star its breed of special ops soldiers seems appropriate to Staten: "ODST itself, the project, was. in the beginning, a skunkworks, special operations, small team, limited time frame, do the most with what you can — with what you have — sort of a battlefield-expedient project, generally speaking." It didn't take them just a day to finish. But, in scale of game-making, it was close.
Halo 3: ODST is now prepped for its September 22 launch on the Xbox 360.
Halo 3: odst
Remote Control Halo Warhog, Mongoose and Hornets Incoming
Remote Control versions of the M12 Warthog, M274 Mongoose and AV-14 Hornet all go on sale in later this month as Halo 3: ODST hits shelves.
RC toy manufacturer NKOK tells us that the new line of Halo remote control toys will be on sale at Toys R Us, GameStop, Walmart Canada, Blockbusters and specialty retailers.
More »
Microsoft Starts Banning ODST Pirates, Not Players
Microsoft today began permanently banning gamers they describe as "illegitimate ODST players" from their Xbox Live online service.
Earlier today Xbox Live Chief of Police Stephen Toulouse wrote on his Twitter page that he had seen some illegitimate ODST players, referring to Xbox 360's upcoming Halo 3: ODST, online.
More »
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05:08 PM
04:56 PM
1. When it was first announced as a DLC add-on, I was interested, but then when it was upgraded into a full game, it stopped being something I would want to pay full price for.
2. By making the game a virtual Firefly reunion, I'm now FORCED to buy the game, bastards! It's like Batman AA. As soon as Conroy and Hamill were announced as voice actors, I had to buy it. Luckily it turned out awesome. Hopefully this will do the same.
05:10 PM
04:47 PM
Doesn't matter how many cool trailers, Nate Fillion involved video docs or brand new multiplayer modes are introduced, the hate seems to follow.
I also find it odd that so much hate comes from those who have purchased every Halo game released thus far. Certainly the hardcore anti-Halo folk have likely never played much of the series.
Not a single review has been released to date. No official word, at least from non-company sources as to what this game offers in terms of game-length, value, etc. Yet already we hear the cries of how this game isn't worth 60 dollars, Halo blows, its a Madden churn off, Halo 3.5, etc.
Although this answer never seems to stifle the many critics that frequent these boards, vote with your wallets. Don't waste precious time blasting this game or any game for that matter. Just don't buy it. If enough of you don't buy the game, Bungie will get the picture and MS will get the picture.
Why come here, and spend so much energy tearing this game, which has not even been released, apart? I will likely never understand how the web has created so many haters.
04:58 PM
I wouldn't be so miffed if they had stuck to the price they originally announced.
05:07 PM
05:11 PM
Microsoft controls all pricing decisions, and the first announcement that was made was the $59.99 one.
I'd be overjoyed if it were lower, but Bungie does not bear the blame for it.
05:22 PM
[www.gamespot.com]
Also, you're the one who brought up Bungie. Ca$h said nothing about who bears responsibility for the price of the game.
05:23 PM
Totally agree with you, but you're tilting at a windmill so big that Don Quixote would say "Dude, that's enough."
05:31 PM
I'm not blaming anyone for anything. I'm just pointing out they pretty much said it wasn't going to be full retail price, and then it was. I don't think that was very nice, is all.
Thanks slomo, that was the quote I was looking for.
04:44 PM
FYI, pink accounts, no one can see you troll save the stars (Who know better then to approve your comments without losing their stars) and the eds..the people who you need to approve your accounts before anyone else can see them. Just a bit of info.
04:49 PM
05:01 PM
05:04 PM
But have you heard of a triple edged sword Stephen?? HAVE YOU?? If you find me a triple edged sword, I'll factor my article enjoyment into the metaphor =D
05:12 PM
Understanding is a triple-edged sword. Your side, their side, and the truth.
04:42 PM
It's a real damn shame the Jackson/Bungie tag team didn't work out, but I'm glad we as consumers got both ODST and District 9 out of the fall out. I'll be waiting in line the night of the 21st to pick this up at midnight, I can't wait!
04:50 PM
04:51 PM
04:53 PM
05:04 PM
05:09 PM
Like you said - if you don't like it, don't buy it. I don't mind if people do that, I do mind all the unneccesary hate directed towards it though.
05:14 PM
04:41 PM
04:23 PM
04:37 PM
Except Madden comes out on a year basis.. whereas Halo had 4 FPS games in 9 years..
04:07 PM
Did Microsoft tell them to throw in all the extra Halo 3 maps and call it a bargain? Is this going to be a full-length game, or is the campaign going to take me like 8 hours and then I'll be playing Firefight for weeks.
I've already pre-ordered regardless. I'm just curious as to when that promise faded from all memory.
04:19 PM
04:49 PM
03:54 PM
I am a halo fan and hoping for something a little more than halo 3: repackaged.
Also, there has to be some sort of relation between the batman game detective mode and this games "night vision" or whatever. That's 2 recent games coming out the same time with a toggle outline mode. Although they are different engines...just sayin'
04:01 PM
1). The Engine, graphical assets, sounds, and everything else is already built and battle-ready. That left a few new models (silenced weapons) and some visual tweaks to be done. Level design. This is the bulk of the initial work in games basically pre-done.
2). The team in charge of Halo ODST has been making maps, assets, and everything else for Halo for a while. They likely know the engine inside and out, know what objects in a level work, don't work. Essentially, that the turnaround is going to be a lot faster: Chances are, most working are experienced vets.
3). Money is no god-damn object. Anything with 'Halo' will sell, and thus they can literally just throw money at it until it's fixed.
Bungie has a pretty good track record: You can argue that you 'didn't like' Halo for whatever reason, but you'll notice (hell, I do it to) that any and all criticism of the game is largely over subjective matters ('Looks generic sci-fi, crappy story). Nobody can really fault the gameplay because it does what it sets out to do about as well as it can. I doubt they're looking to take it down a peg.
04:03 PM
ps. ODST is not the second coming, it plays just like another Halo title, without shields.
04:11 PM
04:21 PM
I don't play games that I don't like. No game is perfect but halo entertains me. And like it or not it has changed FPS games across the board. How many new games have warthog equivalents now? How many games have ditched health packs thanks to halo 2? How many games have limited the number of weapons the protagonist can carry at once?
You may not like it but you are in the minority, claiming we are all mindless fanbois that can't tell a crappy game when we see it doesn't make it true.
Wait, I'm sensing something, you own a playstation. amirite?
04:30 PM
Eh, they're just tech-visors. Snake had his Solid Eye System in MGS4, too, and there have been plenty of other games with similar concepts. Nothing particularly new, though because of its link with high technology, the concept tends to be used in Sci-Fi settings.
Anyway, 14 months is a bit light, yeah, but it's the end result that matters. I'm more wondering how the multiplayer is going to differ from Halo 3, if at all. How much of a role will the visors play, etc.
04:51 PM
@ Evdor: While I can't speak for wtf_g, I can give you my own reasons why I dislike Halo gameplay. Growing up playing games like UT, Quake, and Battlefield, I can say that Halo has nothing of interest to offer me gameplay wise. In fact, it embodies almost everything I hate in a shooter (floaty physics, slow controls/pace, rechargeable health).
My biggest complaint is that the whole game feels like mush to me. The controls feel imprecise even at higher sensitivity settings and the movement speed is painfully slow. While I can deal with rechargeable health, I greatly prefer the use of health packs. I like the kind of strategy that comes from health placement/consumption on a map.
It's part of why I've found that as of late I only play TF2/L4D and stuff like Quake Live or UT99/2k4 (even UT3 feels terribly slow). And L4D I barely even count as a shooter because of how the versus mode is structured. I really just want another Quake 3/UT99 style game with modern graphics (Scout in TF2 is about as close as one can get), but I see the "Halo-fication" of shooters and the tailoring of the genre for consoles as the two biggest obstacles for that ever happening.
I can say that I enjoyed the first Halo, adn would probably give it about a 7 or 7.5. But the subsequent sequels did next to nothing for me. I will say that ODST is the first Halo I've been even remotely interested in since the first one due to the similar Halo:CE kinda feel I've been getting from it, but I'm still not entirely sold. I'll probably do what I did with 3, and play at a friends or give it a rental first.
05:07 PM
05:13 PM
I don't think Halo is a god-awful series. It's extremely well polished and is on the high end of the spectrum for console shooters. But the "my-first-FPS" feel to it just doesn't gel with me. Tighter gameplay would make all the difference for me.
03:44 PM
03:47 PM
04:02 PM
04:02 PM
04:12 PM
I cackled like crazy when Starbuck and Wash started bantering back and forth.
03:42 PM
This also reminds me of how Red Dwarf got started (they used the funding for a series of a canceled show - just like using the resources of scrapped Halo movie).
03:39 PM
03:36 PM
03:40 PM
I bet you scream into a pillow about how Halo has ruin your life. :P
03:46 PM
"Hey, I have an interview in 10 minutes. Could you get off my wallet so I can show my ID and not miss my appointment?"
"No, I'm playing Halo."
"Hey, my little sister is dying from cracking her head open on the sidewalk. I need a car, can you help me get her to the hospital because this town has no ambulances?"
"No, we're playing halo right now."
"Hey, I think Rosie o'Donnel is coming up next on TV... The tv doesn't have any panel buttons, and the remote is in your chair. Could you please give it to me?"
"No, I'm playing halo."
NOOOOOOOOOoooooOOO!
Or...
Something.
03:51 PM
TWO tvs? In the same room?!
04:13 PM
"No, I'm playing Halo."
04:24 PM
05:02 PM
Nothing was said about same room... In my house, remotes wander all over the place, and I've been a lot of places that actually DO have 2 TVs in the same room. My friend has an SDTV and an HDTV in the same room.
05:03 PM
03:24 PM
04:05 PM
Which is nothing but awesome.
04:18 PM
03:24 PM
03:49 PM
(Hooray for ILB!)
03:49 PM
(Hooray for ILB!)
03:24 PM
03:23 PM
03:46 PM
03:54 PM
03:21 PM
But the other shit looks pretty cool, too.
03:20 PM
04:11 PM
Tits or ODST?
03:20 PM
03:26 PM
Okay, and thank you for you Anti-Halo PS3 fanboyish comment.
You may now proceed to crawl back under the rock from whence you came.
03:33 PM
03:34 PM
03:55 PM
03:57 PM