The Sprint: Warzone Wednesday

The Sprint: Warzone Wednesday is a video documentary by 343 Industries, about the development of Halo 5: Guardians.

Transcript

• Announcer Sprint : Making a game on the scale of Halo takes hundreds of people with different skills, a singular vision and time. Lots of time. But before a game reaches store shelves, the team must create thousands of assets that are tracked in two-week deadline, we call Sprints. 343 Industries invites you to join us on our journey, creating Halo 5 Guardians from the ground up, one painting, sound and line of code at a time. This is The Sprint.

343 Industries
May 20, 2015

• Brian Lemon : This is embarrassing because it was filed November 26th. It's gotta be one of our longest-running bugs here.

Four Weeks Until E3

• Brian Lemon : Have you seen this lately?
• Lawrence Metten : I saw it yesterday. Oh sorry no yesterday it was the issue with no thrusters at all.

Warzone “Top 10” Bugs

• Brian Lemon : That's fixed today.
• Lawrence Metten : You see it intermittently every week.
• Brian Lemon : Here all the E3 related AI bugs. Baron ‘Sraom leaving his assigned area.
• Kevin Franklin : Didn't we talk about what about just letting him fly around the entire map ?
• Lawrence Metten : So we've expanded his zone for sure.
• Kevin Franklin : I guess the point is like more people are going to see him if he flies around more of the map and if it's not the end of the world.
• Lawrence Metten : We don't want him flying into rocks, we don't want him flying into the ground. Like we need to be able to author where he lives and right now, we can't because of this bug. One more for top ten.
• Brian Lemon : 10. We have 10 issues in our top 10. I know we have a lot. I mean there's so many bugs right now.
• Kevin Franklin : 700 bugs in 70 days. It's crazy.
• Brian Lemon : It is.
• William Archbell : Let's go, we gotta play test.

Episode 3 : Warzone Wednesday

• Tim Longo : You can see the… the peak of the space needle right on the far right. Or maybe that's something else. Warzone is our new huge multiplayer mode. It literally is all the pieces of the sandbox from Halo for the first time in one multiplayer mode. We have unique weapons that are sort of tired. Different types of BRs with different attachments on them that you can acquire. There's also different tiers of some of the power weapons as well and then we also mythic items which will be sort of unique items like Linda’s sniper rifle, or something like that is sort of like this uber epic thing that’s super powerful in a different way.
• Nicolas "Sparth" Bouvier : First person… great!
• Brooke Branch : These are concept pieces coming in.

Warzone Weapon Skins
Concept Art Review

• Sparth : You know what I would do? I would… put that back into blue, that section here blue, and having like some stripes of orange on the side. This way we still identify this as the base blue weapon and then we'll have the stripes on the side.
• Christopher Blohm : Who does the needles, is that the effects team? How quick could they flip colors on those needles?
• Sparth : We couldn't give it a time. Personally I don't mind at all.
• Christopher Blohm : The only thing with that though is the needles if we change what they look like here, we'll have to change the firing effect, we will have to change the muzzle flash. It might be an option for tier 2 where we could ask them if they could change the needle color, but then they'd have to change everything down the line.
• Brooke Branch : I'll take a look at this and see how many downstream…
• Sparth : That's the thing. Let's just investigate first but if you think it's not something doable with the schedule we have… let's just give it a try.
• Brooke Branch : We got oh the tier 1…
• Sparth : Wow, this is unreadable.
• Christopher Blohm : I like the details on the back of the stock but you never see that. I mean unless you're melee. So one question: we have Kelly’s shotgun, supposed to be a legendary, very rare weapon. Does the shotgun get too close to Kelly shotgun cause they're both white?
• Sparth : That's the thing I'm wondering: how these weapons that are specific to characters are inserting themselves into the into the tiers system? Where is their position on that two thing, are they above the tiers? In terms of power?
• Christopher Blohm : Yes. Well ideally, we haven't seen them yet.
• Sparth : So we have all these weapons and on top of that we have two legendary weapons.
• Christopher Blohm : Two legendary weapons. We have a third legendary weapon in the Arbiter’s sword which is called Prophet’s Bane, right, and then there's a fourth weapon that hasn't been finalized yet, they want to do a couple of different things. They might do a magnum, like a super throwback Halo CE Magnum but it is still being quiet.
• Sparth : Go ahead.
• Christopher Blohm : I just don't want to impinge it if they're the ultimate of our requisition system, the ultimate up these weapons, I just don't want to be it too close so.
• Sparth : Let me walk on tier 1 I'm gonna do it when I come back to my desk. I could I describe pretty fast in 15 minutes I can do all them.
• Brooke Branch : In 15 minutes?
• Sparth : Yeah, yeah, I can do that. I can do that really fast.

Vignette Animation

• Nick Whitmire : All this is actually on the bottom of an ocean. There's a whale. So you can see that they built the structure to keep the water from rushing into where they're mining. But I didn't really get that because they hadn't been arted up enough to see the actual waterfall and water. Someone at all kind of came in and was like oh wow. So we're gonna be right now just reviewing the intros in the outro’s cinematics for that specific level. So we're gonna be going over the animation and the camera passes and then we're also going to go over all the boss vignettes.
• Juan Carlos Larrea : Lighting is a little bit off, so we should have a lighter review it just to make sure that they are covering for the areas that we're seeing. See how the vehicles are getting darker. And they're popping and everything is washed out.
• Nick Whitmire : Sure yeah I'll bring that up with Brian.
• Juan Carlos Larrea : Exactly and just need to make sure that the lighting is working and also that we get the effects on there.
• Nick Whitmire : Yeah, could you completely lose them here, as far as their saturation of color…
• Juan Carlos Larrea : So the way that lighting works is a lot of things that you're seeing in the map is baked lighting, so anything that's moving needs to be lit by dynamic objects, so it is possible that where you see it being black and dark, it's not taking any of the lighting that is dynamic. The second part after it is, what's happening after that is we cut straight into first person camera point of view, so that what you see is the movie of the pelicans arriving and then you see from your player perspective exit in the Pelican. We hover a little bit to let the players jump out and then we exit because it's essentially going down in the epicenter.
• Nick Whitmire : Sure you mean like just like staying longer. We're going to look at the attacker version of this so that's gonna be the other side of the map. But this is a problem.
• Juan Carlos Larrea : When did that change?
• Nick Whitmire : Just today, it was a really big issue with the war zone team, so they're gonna they're bringing it back.
• Juan Carlos Larrea : Okay good because there's no way that we can keep on…
• Nick Whitmire : We already said we're not gonna change it. So this is cool, they're just gonna cut it so that we skims over trees or something and then they're gonna move that rock.
• Juan Carlos Larrea : I actually like that case, it's gonna give us a lot more of parallax, things moving in, moving back and forth. So as long as it clear the path then that's great. In general looking it's not just in multiplayer but all of our campaign we have a little bit of an issue in which it's hard to communicate “here's where I vignette is happening”, so whether it's the ground that we're walking on or in this case the pelicans flying through a piece of space, art will go in and say hey, this is going to look a lot more beautiful if you do it this way and then we'll see things clipping into our animations.
• Nick Whitmire : That's too big of a change for us to keep kicking back and this has been through so many iterations. Now that we've got it where we want it, so we don't want to we don't want to mess with it.
• Juan Carlos Larrea : And sometimes if it's easy for us and if it looks good we'll do the changes. In this case it's a massive change so we request that environment helps us out in, you know, don't mess up that are already there. It's this map where you also see the elites, please show the elites. We have a couple quick character intros for some of the bosses. They are something that is a little bit more complex and difficult than the regular… the regular enemies.

Environment Art Review
Warzone “Wallbash”

• ? : Are we tied to this kind of, like, do not pass.
• ? : Well, yeah.
• ? : We're worried it might be telling the player you can't go through this thing, where the entire intention of the piece is to let them know it's smashed able, you can move through this space. Right now it kind of looks like, is this thing going to open as I approach it, is it, does it open based off a scripted sequence. If it felt more like this is a static piece in the space and the only way to get through it is to smash through it, I would be happier. And we also don't like how transparent it is because transparent objects in multiplayer can give us weird results for players are on either side in a game of chicken, who's going to break through first or who's going to make the move around the base. We prefer you can't look through it at all.
• Eric Agler : If it's going to be solid what kind of material? Because it kind of depends on I shatter it.
• Ryan Peterson : Yeah and it can be wrong for this space or what it says.
• Jacob Stone : What if it was just like a draw door, cuz I know in campaign they have the vents.
• Eric Agler : Just to be clear: entirely new look, entirely new asset.
• Ryan Peterson : Well if we have someone from campaign maybe see what they have. Is this something long?
• ? : Yeah that sounds good. Big things, super obvious that's breakable and it's opaque, you can't see through.
• Sparth : We're trying to have specificities for all these weapons. Expressing each tier in a different way. It's a vivid challenge we have a lot of weapons. So we have a lot of different designs. This is a bit of a candy approach to these weapons too when we come to skins. You want to obtain more, you want to have the one that looks funky, that looks really good. This is just too much like the original shotgun so we need to be putting a bit more visuals in there. We need to add more presence of reds to be sure that we identify the tier way better. We don't see it in first person. Red is going to be expressing danger. It's the tone of blood and we're talking about weapons here so obviously without going, without being gruesome, or whatever it's a stressful tone and you want to express the excitement a little bit of stress going on, adrenaline going on when it comes to the weapons. As you see before and after there’s more presence in first person. This is the tier 2. We need far more red presence in there. Red is a great combo especially when you combine it with white for example. The white weapon it's a bit more rare you know it's like there's something a bit more pure, that it's just expressing something that’s rare for a weapon. We still want to have a graphic system like a visual system that would just make sense. So we're gonna go with something similar to this. The bed is definitely gonna pop. All right, another one done.

“Have you played Warzone today?”
Warzone Playtest

• ? : The Warzone! It's like some sort of warzone!
• ? : Is that Lemon in the VTOL? Get out of the VTOL!
• ? : No! come get it! No, come and get it! Come and kill me!
• ? : There we go!
• ? : Is that a splinter turret?
• ? : I have speed boosts plus sword.
• ? : You're so fast! You are so bad, I could not hit you.
• Kevin Franklin : Okay look at his feets is that a triangle? We're not sure that’s something in 3D or it's a nav point bug’s. It looks like a cube, yeah.
• ? : It's a piece of geo.
• Kevin Franklin : Yeah that's definitely geo Cuddy. Johnson, can we get a bug in for the little triangle on your feet that follow you around? Hey we're missing the engine, the engine effects are missing for the Pelican too. James? The engine effects are missing from the Pelican, out the back. This is the first time we've had this Pelican deploy animations in. Oh there we go. Wow! That's a new one.
• ? : My scoreboard is gone when I'm in the Mantis is that intentional?
• ? : We're gonna bust through that wall and go for the boss.
• ? : Aaw, I froze.
• ? : We got one freeze over here. Anyone else?
• ? : It’s a combination of…
• ? : Another crash!
• Kevin Franklin : It’s crashing quite a bit. Did you see the spawning in a pelican stuff at the beginning were you here at the beginning of the game?
• Brian Lemon : One conversation, no, no raising hands. We're going in one more time running on profile so we can get more information on the crashes and the hangs that we had. We went through our top 10 list right before, the AI stuff that we've already talked about, nav markers.
• Kevin Franklin : We've got a lot to fix in a very short amount of time but I think we've got our the clearest ones. We have our stability I mean everyone is able to complete the game, we have the nav point stop which is just really gone backwards and we need to make sure everyone understands what's going on. And then we have the vehicle delivery scenes. Once those three things are coming together, when the game was working we were seeing the awesome potential we just need to fix some really bad bugs that are preventing us from bringing it all together.
• ? : Yes, the elites are working!

NEXT ON

• Tim Longo : We're getting down to sort of zero bug territory for the game, so people are really shutting things down. E3 happens right, smack in the middle of that, so it's super fun.