Articles: Halo Reaches end of Bungie’s rope

Can it be true? Can Tone honestly report that Reach is Bungie’s last Halo game? Executive producer Joseph Tung assures us that this time, after working on the game for 15 years, they’re for real.

“All I can say is that as far as I’m concerned, and as far as I know, it’s going to be our last Halo game,” he says.

Of course, Halo 3 was Bungie’s last Halo game, too. Then we got Halo 3: ODST. And now we’ve got Halo: Reach. (Don’t mention the real-time strategy Halo Wars; Bungie didn’t make that.)

You could hardly blame Bungie if it changed its mind again. The series has been one of gaming’s most popular – and lucrative – franchises, with the trilogy’s ‘final’ instalment making a blistering $231 million on its first day alone.

“We knew [this would be the last instalment] from the beginning, so certainly we wanted to make it the most ambitious Halo game, the definitive Halo game from Bungie,” says Tung.

The producer’s team began work on Reach, conceived as a standalone episode to the trilogy proper, almost immediately after Halo 3 shipped.

“I was part of the team of four guys who sat down and really said, in broad strokes, what do we want Reach to be?” says Tung.  “Right away we knew we wanted to go to Reach, we wanted to go to the birthplace of the Spartan programme and tie it into the overall Halo universe.”

Tung explains that the story of Reach is a classic in-the-trenches, boots-on-the-ground ensemble war story, taking inspiration from some the best examples of the genre, including movie Black Hawk Down and TV series Band of Brothers.

“At the beginning of Reach we actually talked about The Magnificent Seven and The Seven Samurai quite a bit,” he says. “Bringing new Spartans to the table, we wanted to make Noble team instantly iconic in their own right.”

The team took a modular approach to storytelling, letting the mission designers come up with their craziest dream levels, then adapting their storyline to suit.

Bungie also took the opportunity to improve on elements of the game it felt it got wrong in Halo 3.

“From the ground up, animation was one of the systems we rebuilt. It really hadn’t been touched for a number of years. It wasn’t a big investment in Halo 3,” admits Tung. “We got to Reach and realised this was something where we absolutely had to make a big investment.”

Cinematics and human faces were given an overhaul, using motion capture and facial motion capture technology to record precise movements.

“The character models, the marines and the human faces in Halo 3 weren’t something we were super-happy with,” he says.  “I think you see the results of us not being super-happy with it in Reach.”
It’s looking like the high hopes for Halo: Reach are entirely deserved. Tone took a sneak peek at the campaign’s first mission and found Reach darkly atmospheric, grittier and more realistic than Halo 3, which even Tung describs as a “galactic space opera”.

“[In Reach] there’s huge open environments with much greater detail than Halo 3, dynamic rain system, tonnes of atmosphere, skyboxes that are real geometry,” explains Tung. “These are things that we absolutely wanted to make sure were there for Reach.”

Tung lets very little slip about what he’s up to now that the studio is freed from the franchise that made its fortune.

“It’s bittersweet to say goodbye to the franchise for us,” he admits. “There’s a team right now working on our next big action game universe. Beyond that, we’re not saying anything yet.”
Tung, who confesses to being “the best player in the studio,” when he joined Bungie is also pretty cagey about his Xbox Live player name.

“I made the mistake of actually saying what my gamer tag was in an interview. I’ll never do that again,” he says, advising that joining a games studio is not the way for gamers looking to improve their score. “I think that there’s an inverse relationship with tenure at Bungie and skill.”

This article is from Tone issue 84. Click here to check it out.