Bungie's David Allen & Chris Opdahl just behind plastic cutouts of Noble Team

Last Friday, a lot of Halo fans got to check out Halo: Reach and meet up with Bungie developers David Allen and Chris Opdahl. Just before the onslaught, yours truly manage to have a friendly chat with the duo at OverEasy when not distracted by the campaign and Firefight demos in plain sight.

GameAxis: How did you guys started working in Bungie?

Chris Opdahl: I started nine months before Halo 3 shipped. I came in as Mission Designer; I took over Tsavo Highway (the third mission) and in the last three months, I wrapped up Floodgate and took care of some of the main encounters.

David Allen: I started about 7 months before Halo 3 shipped. I worked mainly with the art team, the skybox team, the effects guys. I came in as a contractor, but got hired full-time.

GAX: I noticed from snippets that the game’s combat will go back to the open-wide battlefields of Halo 1? Care to elaborate on that?

CO: One of our goals for Halo: Reach is exactly what you said. Let’s open up the spaces and give players many avenues they can enter and deal with encounters. Rather than a narrow corridor, we call our encounters “wide pipes” internally. The A.I adapts to that. There are all sorts of way the designers can help set up the mission encounters and scripts. It’s always about “how does the A.I react when the player arrives from this way?” or even another way.

Every mission has its own hook. You’re either fighting with Noble Team member Kat, Emile-A239 who’s a close-quarter combat specialist, or even marksman Jun-A266 in a sniper mission where you’ll have to use your night vision. Other times you’ll seamlessly pilot a vehicle taking care of a huge number of Covenant troops.

GAX: For these missions with hooks, it’s not necessary for you to follow through to its design, right? Like I could go guns ablazing in a stealth mission?

CO: Yeah, you can. That’s Halo at its best; it’s not heavily scripted to limit a player’s option. You can play that way, though it’ll make the mission harder.

GAX: How much hardcore will Legendary mode be this time around?

CO: One of the goals we notice is the aggressiveness of the A.I. We now increased it so that the enemies can flank you just so they can get a better angle to aim at you, with the intent of using as few enemies as possible. Rather than making it a war of attrition, it’s a battle of wits with fewer but smarter enemies. It’ll be a different as well as a tougher encounter with five guys flanking you and your group.

I actually believe that this makes Legendary a little more accessible. It’s still hard, but you’re now like “how do I kill these eight guys?” instead of “how do I kill these twenty-five guys in this wide-open space?” And of course, we still have moments in the game where it’s thirty-five guys fighting you, but usually you’ll have backup and vehicles to play around with.

DA: One thing to add; we actually have difficulty scaling for the first time that changes depending on how many players are on the map, Campaign or otherwise. So if you’re playing four-player co-op on Legendary, it’s going to be harder than one player on Legendary.

CO: If you’re playing on Heroic and your three other friends want to play, you don’t need to bump up the game to Legendary to keep the challenge going.

GAX: We’ve already seen Invasion, Generator Defense, Headhunter and Stockpile. Anything else I left out?

DA: We also have the Arena system in general which is our area for our ultra-competitive players to compete and get rankings. It consists of a bunch of playlists that changes seasonally where you get ranked based on how well you perform on those playlists. There are five divisions players get placed in: Onyx, Gold, Silver, Bronze, and Steel. At the end of the season, you’ll be told that, for example, you are in the top 15 players in the Gold division. (click here for more info on the Player Investment system)

GAX: How different is Firefight this time around?

DA: It’s now much shorter. One of the many complaints about Firefight is that (a) you can’t fight with other strangers and (b) it isn’t customizable. We’ve addressed those issues; now you can use matchmaking for Firefight matches and you can customize Firefight to either be classic ODST-style or even different variations of your customizing and choosing. Firefight matches now last up to eight-or-ten minutes, instead of the system last time where the game ends when everybody dies.

CO: It’s really hard to keep the population of gamers to play [Classic Firefight] for 45+ minutes, so we create these shorter experiences for player diversity; they can jump in, play a game, and tinker around with the tools if they want to.

GAX: Can you explain the Firefight variant called Gruntapocalypse?

DA: Gruntapocalypse is actually [lead Firefight designer] Lars Bakken’s idea. One morning he got all the latest code and was synching it on his Xbox and wanted to shoot grunts. He just decided “I want to shoot a bunch of grunts right now,” and went through the custom options to get the game that he wanted to play at the moment. He then showed it to other people and everyone enjoyed it. Hence, it’s a mode on its own.

CO: Gruntapocalypse in our mind is exactly the Firefight options the player can access. If you want to just fight Hunters or Elites, you can go in there and set it up.

DA: It’s interesting too because, the normal Firefights on ODST were a little tougher. While you’re trying to get a high score, you’re also trying your best to just survive. In Gruntapocalypse, it’s slightly easier to survive but still tough because they’ve got flak cannons and they throw grenades all over the place. But once you get used to it, it’s then not about whether you’ll make it at the end of the game, but whether you can score the most points.

In Firefight this time around, apart from matchmaking, they are now leaderboards so you can see your friend’s scores for comparison; just to see if you’ve beaten them in the different Firefight modes.