Halo 5: Guardians ViDoc: A Hero Reborn

Halo 5: Guardians ViDoc: A Hero Reborn is a video documentary by 343 Industries, about the development of the Halo 5: Guardians campaign.

Transcript

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• Jeremy Patenaude : They recognize that they are weapons and that they were made to be used to kill other things and to destroy other things and they've made peace with that as they've grown into who they are. And you notice that like when we talk about them in the books, we never have them bothered by the whole deal of them being abducted. They're almost always looking at that as, well, if it didn't happen there wouldn't be a human race to protect anymore. And so there's a really deep sort of gravity to their understanding of being a Spartan, to the recognition of the weight of that and to just the fact that they they're embracing it as their destiny. This is what I was made for, this is what I was born to do. They're not seeing it as a situation where they were given a short change. They're seeing as “this is how it’s supposed to be”. And so their attributes are solemn acceptance. They almost all of them have this sense of “we're here, we're going to die one day, and it may be tomorrow, it might be 10 years from now, it's going to happen, it will probably happen in battle, but we're going to do what we've been called to do until that happens.”
• Bonnie Ross : This is about Master Chief journey, his past and his future.
• Josh Holmes : For Chief it's interesting because he's reunited with blue team, and this is the first time ever seeing him actually rely on other people and be a part of a unit.
• Ross : There's also someone else looking for answers, searching for him.
• Holmes : On the flip side, you've got fireteam Osiris who's a brand new team. They've never really fought together before and I guess there's a parallel there for, you know, kind of where we were at with Halo 4.
• Justin Dinges : There's the fact that we built a studio and made a game at the same time. That's pretty crazy if you actually knew what that entails.
• Tim Longo : Next year will be 20 years for me in the industry and the stories I heard, you know.
• Josh Lindquist : I think a lot of us did and I definitely felt a lot of pressure.
• Holmes : the bar was so high and nobody believed that we could do it. And so it was kind of up to us to prove everybody wrong.
• Chris King : We brought in these amazing, talented people to make a game that never worked together before. They're working with new ingredients in a kitchen they're not familiar with and so there was kind of a craziness that came about from all that.
• Longo : Like I don't know how it happened, you know, all of the things that could be against a team.
• Ross : We had to earn some the right to carry that Halo mantle and I think that when you are in games and when you're entertainment, there is no sure thing.
• Brian Reed : You got this big galaxy-spanning story, “oh there's these attacks that are happening on colonies. There's this massive destructions happening, somebody stop it, somebody save the day! But at the heart of it is again the story of these two families and these two things that they want. And if you don't have those quiet little human stories, it doesn't matter how many planets you blow up, nobody's going to care.
• Alex Cutting : Anyone can get like he wants. This is our sophomore effort, this is where we prove whether we can really pull Halo off.

A HERO REBORN

• Longo : Mechanics, system, fiction and world. There's many other bubbles we could talk about, and maybe in the future we will, but these are the ones I want to focus on today.
• Chris Haluke : We started really big. You know, new platform, can do anything.
• Ross : And those of you that have been at a platform transition, that’s not easy.
• Frank O'Connor : That changes a lot of things. That changes your technology, your tools, your pipeline.
• Stephen Dyck : We didn't want to do things that kind of fit into the mold of existing Halo.
• O'Connor : But it's mostly opportunistic.
• Dyck : It was more “what can we do to continue to evolve the franchise”.
• Tom French : But there was a lot of like how does Halo fit into this new platform.
• Holmes : There are things that we can do now that we could never do before. So everything that we're dealing is about trying to bring innovative new experiences that take advantage of Xbox one and showcase the unique capabilities of that experience.
• Chris Lee : We had our whole team rolling off before. We wanted to engage everyone in coming up with new ideas.
• David Ellis : We had a couple hundred people all pitching things of what the next games would be.
• Haluke : So we have to start massive, fail, fail, fail, we failed a lot so we kind of came up with spaces that we were happy with.
• Ian Jones : For us a lot of what we spent this time on was just kind of figuring out the long term roadmap for the studio and for the technology.
• Ross : I'm looking at how do we make sure you keep ahead, for making sure that we're moving forward, we made our engine and our tools the best for a creative team.
• Dyck : With the way that we're doing it we’ll continue to develop tech, but at the same time we kind of need to start on the next project.
• Matt Findley : Every one of those decisions to make is taking little chunks out of the end game from somebody. Reppin sandbox environment, like that. Whoever is doing work on that they're not doing other work that could go into the game.
• Cory Hasselbach : Maintaining the balance between what Halo is and what Halo could be or should be or needs to be.
• Findley : But you got to, you know, the engine was made, you know, 15 years ago. there's things in this thing we should take out and rebuild from scratch.
• Ross : It was a ton of creative minds coming together and trying to figure out what we could do with a new platform, what we wanted to do with gameplay, what we wanted to do with story.
• Findley : So between 4 & 5 we had some time and it was the right time the marketplace to go OK wa need 60 frames per second, we need to go dedicated server and if we’re ever going to do those, we got to do the math.
• Edward Buck : “Every other Spartan, every soldier, when they hear about this, they're going to hate us.”
• Patenaude : There is a certain limitation that you've got when you've got one character that's sort of driving the universe.
• Longo : You'll actually be playing as our new Spartan, Spartan Locke, as well as Master Chief and Blue Team. We need to answer that question of who else out there as a badass, who else out there is somebody you'd want to play as.
• Holmes : We wanted somebody who had a very distinct contrast to the Master Chief.
• Cutting : It's more interesting when Chief has, maybe not an antagonist but kind of a wild card.
• Brien Goodrich : He's gonna go try to capture the hero’s story.
• Jameson Locke : “I'm not so much hunting a Spartan as I’m hunting the Spartan.”
• Goodrich : How do we find the way so like Locke is just doing his job.
• Reed : Chief has always been very much shoot first ask questions later and while Locke is not slow on the trigger finger at all, he usually knows why he's shooting a little bit more than chief does.
• Kenneth Peters : That's an interesting perspective there, because usually the Master Chief has always been, just follows whatever order someone tells him to do.
• Longo : How do you put that question on its head ? Use characters in ways that we may not have expected and it might be even uneasy using that. You pitch him again the groups that he would normally be aligned with.
• O'Connor : Chief’s always been a man apart and has always been very very different than other people around him. The blue team, these are equals.
• Reed : And so getting him the chance to talk to these people that he's known for years means that we get to see another side of him.
• Morgan Lockhart : There’s a unique understanding that the rest of Blue Team has that even Cortana really didn’t have.
• Kiki Wolfkill : They have shared the same experiences of augmentation and being ripped from their home and growing up without their parents. And so I think that there's a different kind of bond there.
• O'Connor : Chief’s with his old team people who were his family, people he knows very well. Locke is a leader of a new team, so they have a completely different dynamic.
• Peters : They've all been drawn from backgrounds that comes into making the Spartan-IVs.
• Lockhart : Vale’s knowledge of cultures.
• Peters : The fact that she can actually speak Sangheili and understand the nuances of the language and the Sangheili themselves.
• Lockhart : Tanaka’s knowledge of engineering.
• Kyle Hefley : We got her a lot of sensing equipments or a little radio transceivers and things like that.
• Lockhart : Buck’s general badassness.
• Buck : “Check your mouth, find your chairs, and get checked for a combat drop.”
• Hefley : He's kind of bolted on parts of his ODST gear.
• Buck : “Let's roll out Osiris.”
• Locke : “Made it ?”
• Buck : “Yeah, safe and sound. Inside a crumbling building…”
• Reed : We still got our big guy center of all of it.
• Patenaude : What would the answer be from ONI ?
• Reed : He is our Superman, our Spiderman, like he's there.
• Patenaude : If some of their Spartans were to go off the reserve.
• Reed : But around him now we've built the Avengers.
• Patenaude : Osiris is the answer.
• Longo : Let's talk about creative pillars. The world is your playground is our first pillar.
• Sam Wolpert : You want to make the mechanics that enable the most cool stories to happen.
• Dyck : You can make the player feel really powerful or you can make the guns feel really powerful. That's where Spartan abilities really came online, where it was like what about movement, what about the suit ?
• TJ Perillo : You have all these different movement abilities, it changes all our metrics, our jump metrics, jump distances, it changes the flow of combat.
• David Ellis : How do you do an encounter where characters skips speeds () and then comes back to (). How do you make that encounter interesting ?
• Justin Dinges : You get to do more as artists, we got to build new ledges, secret tunnels, things like that, stuff that you might not necessarily do in a single player game.
• Longo : In the term we always have internally, your team is your weapon.
• Cory Hasselbach : We always assumed that there were four people. Even when people don't have a co-op partner to play with we're putting the extra Spartans in there.
• Josh Lindquist : I'm a long time Halo fan, and every Halo I have felt handsome big, big innovation. I would hope that people would look at Halo 5 and say “oh yeah, holy crap, musketeers.” They won't say Musketeers because that's our code name.
• Hasselbach : I don’t really know the origin of that. I think we just needed a term for our autonomous AI companions that kind of follow you through your campaign.
• Lindquist : We focused on the two fundamentals. The one being there a well integrated part of the sandbox.
• Brad Welch : They will play the game along with you, they'll fight with you, they'll revive you if you go down, provides a new mechanic in Halo 5.
• Chris King : One of the big draws of revive was how do you press that co-op gameplay how could we get players to kind of stick together and work together more.
• Lindquist : And the other being orders, which I think is potentially a big innovation for Halo. Getting that vehicle, move over to that spot, attack that enemy, pick up that weapon.
• Matt Findley : It's a balancing trick because you don't want the Musketeers to be too effective. You don't want a player to be running around, exploring the new Halo world and the Musketeers kill everything. We still want the player feel like a hero.
• Cutting : We will have had two programmers spend the whole project on that problem.
• Lindquist : Different players have a very different set of capabilities.
• Hasselbach : If you kind of tell them to rush up the middle, all the AI will kind of focus their fire on the Musketeers, allowing you the flank.
• Lindquist : And then the player is going to come up with ways of using it we have never thought of.
• Cutting : Maybe that's not innovation, but it's a crazy challenge.
• Lindquist : If that's a big risk, across the team I feel like we've taken 15 or 20 huge risks on a similar scale.
• Holmes : It's huge, it's super ambitious and big and crazy, but it's like half of what we started.
• Dyck : With Halo 5 I think to put it in that shell was about not getting too comfortable with knowing we could make a Halo game.
• Longo : You can do it once, you can do that crazy Halo 4 thing once, but that you don't want to repeat that. You want to get better and better at making a Halo game.
• Scott Sims : The confidence we've had in this project, to take on some of the technical challenges.
• Cutting : Just 60 frames a second would probably be enough to put on paper three years ago and have it go like “no way”.
• Peter Burzynski : There's a lot of work. We're establishing infrastructure, we're making you know, kind of laying the foundation and build on top of for the future, whether it's this game or whether the next game or whether, it's something else down the line.
• Longo : I hope people will look back and they'll say “oh that's where that started”.
• Gregory Murphy : It can be a tough transition, it can be hard, but then once you have that path, then you got it.
• Longo : Because I can see where we could go and where I want to go.
• Holmes : There's definitely a human drama at the core of that, how these two teams relate to each other as they cross paths.
• Ross : It is about heroism but not an individual heroism.
• French : It's a convergence of players abilities, the tools that they picked up along the way and then the situations they are thrusted into.
• Lindquist : Halo kind of got that in spades.
• O'Connor : I think will have done a good job if people are shocked at the end of the game and surprised by the direction of that took.
• Patenaude : I think the biggest question that Halo asks when someone grabs the controller and starts playing is “how far can you push this thing ?”