Bungie Talks About Halo Reach's New Features

Halo: Reach will be the first truly mature Halo game. My use of the word "mature" here shouldn't be taken for the misguided, misused sense that the games industry abuses as shorthand for excessive violence and gratuitous obscenity, though. Rather, Reach is poised to bring genuine maturation to the franchise. That's not to say Bungie has set out to make the game high art or anything; Reach will still be a shooter built around spacemen blasting one another in a bubblegum sci-fi universe, all in the name of good fun. But beneath the free-for-all action, a number of conceptual shifts are changing the philosophical underpinnings of the series.

Much has been made of the more obvious additions Reach brings to the series -- the new modes, the customizable ability sets, the reinvention of the Covenant Elite race -- but in visiting Bungie's headquarters last week to try my hand at the game's upcoming multiplayer beta, I came away most impressed by a feature that will be almost completely invisible to the end user. Bungie refers to it as "player investment," a system that rewards players for time spent in the game by allowing them to earn credits toward the purchase upgrades for their characters. Though one might assume this is simply an answer to Modern Warfare's experience-based multiplayer upgrade feature, Reach's player investment is in practice a completely different creature. For starters, multiplayer design lead Chris Carney tells me, Reach's rewards are entirely cosmetic, completely unlike MW's approach of rewarding players with new powers and mechanical upgrades.

"You put a lot of time in, get all sorts of credits, and get to choose what you can unlock as a reward," he says. "But we also want to keep it very competitive. If you've played the game for two years and I bought it today, you shouldn't have any advantage over me, besides your skill, that you've unlocked -- no scopes or powers to give you abilities I don't have. So it's all dress-up."

On its own, this is nothing particularly remarkable. But rewards are only a single facet of Reach's appeal for player investment; the real hook comes in the game's daily challenges, an ever-changing collection of tasks designed to motivate players to pick up the controller for a little while each day. "The time investment isn't crazy," says Carney. "It should be an hour, maybe a couple hours at most."

With these daily challenges, Bungie wants to keep gamers involved even when their friends aren't available. "You get online, and half the time your friends aren't on," says Carney. "You think, 'Oh great, I'm gonna have to jump in with randoms.' But now, we have daily challenges, and each one of those unloads a huge chunk of credits. So today's challenge might be 'get 15 headshots to earn this many credits,' or maybe it's to play some SWAT, or to play some other mode in a certain way -- it's a task list for the the day. Stuff you can do to earn more credits."

Bungie designer Luke Smith has been largely responsible for spearheading the behind-the-scenes work to integrate the concept of player investment into Reach, and he openly cites World of Warcraft -- a game he's played heavily for years -- as the primarily influence behind this new feature.

"The minute-to-minute gameplay of WOW isn't necessarily that great," he admits, "but the game always gives you new things to do, and it really keeps you coming back every day. We want to make use of that concept. Imagine awesome minute-to-minute gameplay like Halo's combined with a reason to keep playing a little each day."

With daily challenges, the Halo series doesn't simply take a page from WOW; it also moves in the direction of evergreen casual Nintendo franchises like Animal Crossing or even Brain Age. That's not to say Reach is hoping to entice Nintendo's expanded audience, of course. But many of Nintendo's most popular games walk the line between "daily tasks" and "busywork," providing quick daily tasks that are easily accomplished and therefore stop just short of becoming tiresome; by presenting a clearly defined task for players to tackle every day, they take on a compelling, addictive nature -- despite their simplistic gameplay and lack of obvious rewards. Reach's player investment system adopts a similar model, but with a greater emphasis on action-driven gameplay and tangible benefits. Though slightly buggy in its pre-beta form, I did have the chance to make use of the customization shop, which unlocks helmets, shoulder armor, chestplates, and more. The armor equipped and modified here is reflected in both multiplayer and campaign modes, for a more universal sense of customization.

Though the similarity to Nintendo's products definitely isn't a deliberate connection on Bungie's behalf, it's also probably not a coincidence. Player investment and daily tasks stem in part from the fact that Bungie's designers are getting older, like the rest of us. And, as so many of us have discovered, our play habits change over time. "A lot of our guys are in their 30s now," says Smith. "We don't always have the time to sit down and play deathmatches all night, but it's easy to sit down and jump in for an hour or two and take care of the daily task."

This sort of gradual shift in a creator's perspective inevitably creeps into their work, and everything I've heard about how the game's changes makes it clear that Reach really does represent new ground for the series. For instance, Bungie is trying hard, as Carney says, to make it "noob-friendly."

"Dual-wielding is cut, and we've put all the important buttons on the two triggers and bumpers," he says. "There are some other things we'll be building in to make the learning curve a little easier, too. But on the flip side, there's a bunch of stuff we want in the game. We don't want it to feel like it's exactly like Halo 3. We want it to be something that we're excited to play."

Carney admits that catering to two very different audiences -- both the casual newcomer to the series and the deeply-entrenched Halo fanatic -- is a difficult task. Bungie has the good fortune of being able to build on Halo 3's rock-solid foundation, but this is a franchise that's always been known for its precise balance. The changes being made for Reach could be disruptive, but they also have the potential to reinvent the series.

"One of our goals for Reach is to take the foundation of Halo 3 that everybody loves and find ways to pull it in different directions without screwing it up," says Carney. "We still have our hardcore, four-on-four, perfectly balanced experience. You can even turn off all armor abilities and just give everyone Sprint, if that's what you want. But then we want to expand it into big multiplayer battles without making it 'clown town,' all haphazard with 16 guys randomly clashing. There were some cool elements we wanted to bring into it and try to add some versatility to create a different experience. Internally, we get excited about pushing in that direction... I don't know that there was necessarily some cry for that in Halo 3, but it's something we were interested in trying."

In short, Reach is shaping up to be the game that Bungie wants it to be. It helps that its single-player campaign liberates the sandbox from the constraints of fitting within the proper Halo trilogy. Being a prequel to the first three games, Reach doesn't have anything to do with the Master Chief and therefore doesn't have to maintain precise consistency with the core trilogy. As in ODST, the player controls a team of somewhat less impressive heroes, a squad of Spartan-III soldiers. Though more powerful than ODST's Helljumpers, the "mass production" model Spartan-IIIs aren't quite as tough as Spartan-IIs like the Master Chief. They're neither as fast nor as strong, and their armor doesn't replenish their health automatically. Instead, players have to collect medical packs in order to recover from injury.

"The Spartan-IIIs are a cheaper version of the Spartan," says Carney. "They were built more like 'fire and forget': You can send them into a mission and you know they won't survive, but it's OK because they were less expensive. It was a budget thing," he jokes.

"The thing with health packs, especially with multiplayer, is that they bring a valuable aspect of map control. We don't have power-ups, at least for the beta; no invisibility, no overshield. A lot of that is built into the armor abilities now. So health packs are a way to say, hey, you need to control this part of the level because the health packs keep regenerating. They're on something like a 15-second respawn, so they're aggressive about how fast they come back. But it's just another thing to keep track of in the map and another way that we as designers can establish areas of control on the map."

While the player has been downgraded, the bad guys have received a considerable upgrade. Specifically, the Elites -- whose role in the original Halo earned them universal acclaim as some of the smartest, deadliest computer-controlled foes ever -- have been radically retooled.

"We've had Elites since Halo 2, and we've always had dreams of this cool Elite-vs.-Spartan format," says Carney. "In Halo 2 and 3, we made the Elites competitive with the Spartans -- they're the same height, speed, their hit boxes are relatively the same. Essentially, they're just different variants of the same character. In Reach, we're like, 'Look, if we want to do Elites, and we want more of these fictionalized game types, the Elite needs to be an awesome, cool character to play.' So he's big, he imposing, he has more shields, and since he's so big he has more health, too. Then he has his custom armor ability where he can do that Evade... you know, the dodge-roll straight from Halo 1. So then, really, to balance those two guys: That was the big challenge.

"Elites are even faster, too! But their big disadvantage is that they're so huge. Especially with headshot weapons and at a distance, they eat a lot of damage. So, even with all these attributes that make them big and fast and tough and awesome, they're still a pretty big honkin' target compared to a Spartan. That's the trade-off between the two."

Since Halo's multiplayer and campaign have always been built around the same sandbox and tools, the two playable character types have always been shackled together. By reinventing the Elites and reducing the player character to a mere Spartan-III, Bungie is forcing a huge change on Reach's competitive multiplayer mechanics. For starters, the disparity between the races means that Elites will only be playable in certain special modes.

"The Elites make cameos," says Carney. "All of our competitive modes like Slayer, Team Slayer, and even the Arena, they're all-Spartan. And the Arena, which is the hyper-competitive 'I'm better than you' mode, is strictly Spartan-on-Spartan. They're very balanced game modes. In the beta, I think there's something we call 'Covie Slayer,' which is Elite-on-Elite."

It's an unavoidable change, since Spartans' reliance on health packs forces them to be conscious of holding territory in a way that Elites don't need to worry about. Thus, Elites feature strictly in specialized modes. The most notable of these is Invasion, which sends a team of Elites into a three-tiered battlefield to lower the defenses of a group of Spartan defenders, claim a power core, and carry it to a waiting escort vehicle before time runs out.

Still, despite the Elites' advantages, Spartans don't feel entirely outmatched in play. A significant balancing factor comes in the form of armor abilities, a single specialized power that can be selected at the beginning of each match (and changed when respawning). Spartan armor powers are far more diverse than their Elite counterparts; the latter are more about stealth and evasion, while Spartans have those abilities as well as enhanced defense and the ever-popular jetpack.

Another equalizing factor is the pervasive presence of EMP blasts -- electromagnetic pulses -- which are a side-effect of several weapons and armor abilities. Releasing the "Armor Lock" armor ability releases an EMP blast that can knock down personal shields and temporarily disable vehicles. Carney adds, "The plasma pistol doesn't track, but the charged shot is an EMP burst that you can fire between two guys and it'll knock their shields down."

"EMP bursts are mainly for vehicles. How do you let infantry fight against vehicles without getting completely dominated? It's definitely something we're still tuning and will continue to tune even more, but the EMP can shut down a Wraith for two seconds to let you run toward (or away from) it. If you have the human grenade launcher, EMP is one of the side effects of that. Plasma grenades, too. It's another layer of complexity on the game."

Another leveling factor for fighting against vehicles is the addition of true progressive damage, which (unlike in previous games) actually works sensibly now. "The biggest change is the addition of a progressive damage system to vehicles. As your vehicle is getting hit, it's taking damage. In Halo 3 we linked that to your health, so your vehicle could be completely destroyed -- you could be flying around in a Banshee that had no wings, just a shell -- but as long as you had health you were fine. Now, your vehicle will hit a certain spot where it'll catch on fire and you'll start hearing certain sounds that mean it's time to get out."

On top of all of this, Bungie is still doing its best to maintain some sense of continuity within the Halo universe. While the fall of Reach predates the original Trilogy -- presumably meaning the Flood will again be absent from this particular single-player tale -- it features a number of weapons that didn't appear in the Master Chief's saga.

"Well, Reach was humanity's armory and research lab," explains Carney. "When it was lost, so were those prototypes. But we tried to make some of the weapons feel sort of old-school. Like, if you look at the plasma repeater, it's a sort of bulky prototype version of the plasma rifle. We absolutely want it all to be as consistent as possible, but we also want the game to play awesome."

"Ultimately, we want all the elements to feel like they belong. So, for instance, the plasma launcher, which is this crazy awesome gun. When we first started prototyping, we were like, 'What is this thing?' But then we realized, 'Oh, yeah. The humans have their grenade launcher, the Covenant have theirs.' They have totally different mechanics, but they both feel like they make sense -- tracking with the plasma grenades, while humans have this really accurate way of placing a grenade."

Still, all of these features, along with Reach's new multiplayer modes and its refined matchmaking system, may prove to be window-dressing for Bungie's work behind the curtain to change how gamers play Halo. If Reach really can appeal to casual and fanatical players alike, if it can pull in newcomers to play alongside hardcore fans, and then keep them all playing a little bit every day -- that would be no small accomplishment. But then, Bungie is pouring a decade of experience into this, their last outing in the Halo universe, in order to make Reach the definitive Halo game.

"We're trying absolutely to make everything feel as good as it can, without making it too crazy," says Carney. "It still should feel like Halo. This is bittersweet for us -- I've worked on the series for 10 years -- this is our last Halo game, so yeah, we want it to be awesome. And, also, we want it to be new and exciting. How you get that into one coherent vision has been a real challenge. But so far it seems to be working out."

Originally published on 1UP.com.