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I actually prefer to play on Legendary, inch by inch, iterating the most difficult scenarios, not just blowing through the campaign in a dozen hours. I’d argue dying is a winning strategy in Halo 4, especially if you’re playing at the higher difficulty settings. But it was probably one of the most painful aspects of the Halo 4 development process, because of the amount of rework and the high bar we held ourselves to. That’s when people started to see the light at the end of the tunnel and realized we had something special. It wasn’t until we had a bunch of the core behaviors finely honed and polished, and we had this core visual style that was informed by a lot of the work on the Forerunner aesthetic, that it came together and we had animation going on that brought these characters to life. ( MORE: Ico Influenced Chief-Cortana Bond in Halo 4, Says Director) The team wasn’t happy with any of the previous versions, and yet people were asking, you know, “How many times are we going to throw these guys away?” For a while it felt like we really weren’t getting anywhere. We built I think probably six versions of the Knight before the final one that stuck, and that was painful for the design team. We went through literally dozens of different concepts. Again, we knew we had to get them right, to make sure they could stand up to the Covenant and hopefully become as well-loved an enemy to fight. On the visual side, we explored totally different concepts for the Prometheans. It was a very long process, almost three years of development and iteration. We knew we had to get it right, to make them feel very different from the Covenant, yet still feel like they fit in a Halo game. Those core behavioral components stuck from the beginning, and we just kept iterating and iterating. And we looked at the Knight and the different ways it could move around the battlefield to dramatically shift your focus as a player. Then we added the Watchers’ ability to resurrect the Knight. That was a core concept, and we started out prototyping simple behaviors, like the Watchers’ ability to shield other enemies. From the beginning, one of the concepts that resonated with the design team was the idea that the enemies would be collaborative, that they would represent a certain level of challenge individually but when you put them together, they would complement one another on the battlefield.
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That led us to explore Forerunner enemies. That really made sense as we were honing in on wanting to explore Forerunner culture and going to a new location that would be the core of much of our story. The obvious addition was a new class of enemies. With familiarity comes predictability, and we wanted something that would breathe new life into the Halo sandbox and really challenge players in new and exciting ways. We knew players had been fighting the Covenant for a decade - more than a decade by the time the game came out. That was one of the biggest bets we decided to make almost from the very beginning. The alien Covenant in Halo 4 still feel very much like the Covenant, but the new enemy, the Prometheans, as promised, are playing a very different tactical game.
Halo 4 spartan ops series#
Follow the final installment of my three-part Halo 4 interview series with creative director Josh Holmes, we explore the game’s refined tactics and deadly new enemies, illumination through death, the new episodic content and why Microsoft isn’t charging for it, and how Master Chief is still the man despite lagging technologically behind Halo 4‘s new breed of Spartan super-soldiers.