Was there a multi-player mode you wanted to add but was scrapped for the final game?

DA: Not that I can think off the top of my head.

CO: There were ideas for multi-player we developed a year or so ago for Halo: Reach, but they end up intact for shipping in the end with polish.

DA: What [the multi-player modes planned] were back then are what they are [in the final game], only with a few pieces added here and there.

Which ones of the modes did the team had fun creating?

DA: Headhunter. I love it, especially when we’re in the playtest lab with that. It always end with everybody screaming and yelling, since there’s always the guy who manage to get ten skulls and win instantly, and you also have the guy who’s almost at the score limit, has three skulls left, and suddenly dies with all the skulls flying out of him. I’m also a fan of objective-based games, so I liked Invasion a lot. Near the last phases of a match, you’ll have tanks, warthogs, and rocket launchers used all over the place. It’s a lot of chaos where people barely finish Invasion’s objectives.

CO: I’m always a classic Slayer and Team Slayer fan, but I’m also into Invasion Slayer.

GAX: Concerning Matchmaking, is this the same server setup and engine as past Halo games?

DA: It’s the same idea where we match players through a peer-to-peer model. There’s definitely support for Campaign and Firefight matchmaking this time around. There’s also a psyche profile; you can set your preferences for the types of players you want to join up with. The game will attempt to team you up with people who are similar to you; if you normally don’t talk to people while playing, the system will put you with people who don’t talk. It doesn’t actually increase your matchmaking time, but if you can find multiple matches and three of them contain people with the same psyche profile as you, it’ll prioritize those games for you.

C.O: There’s a ton of work for the network guys to simplify the amount of data that has to go between two peers so that there’s less traffic. If you’re playing in Singapore against two other guys in the US, the latency is much better. Matchmaking will also prioritize the region you’re in over everyone else’s.

GAX: How do the both of you personally feel right now as you’ve reached this point where this is Bungie’s final Halo game?

DA: It’s definitely bittersweet. Chris and I started during Halo 3, and even then, it’s been 4 years and we’ve been working on the series. It is sad to let something go after working on it for so long, but it’s also exciting to try something new and see what lies in that road.

GAX: Now that Halo: Reach is already gold, how will post-release support be like?

DA: We haven’t announced anything specific about our DLC plans, but we will be supporting Halo: Reach post-release just like the other games we did.

GAX: Any chance for the spaceship-flying segments in Halo: Reach campaign being a multi-player DLC add-on?

CO: We don’t have any multi-player plans for that. We actually had networking technical difficulties. The ships move so fast that it was hard to share all that data on the network.

GAX: When all is said and done, do you have a general idea on what’s next and the direction you’re heading?

DA: Unfortunately, we don’t anything to talk about yet, apart from the fact that we’re working on a new I.P. I’ll say that there are interesting things to explore, but we can’t talk about it.

GAX: What can you tell us about the 10-year deal Bungie made with Activision Blizzard and the project you are working on at this time?

DA, CO: We can’t share anything at this time. That’s still a secret.

GAX: Off the top of my head, Bungie’s franchises include Marathon, Myth, Oni, Minotaur, and Pathways Into Darkness. If you had to pick any of these to reiterate now, which one would it be?

CO: I think one or two. I never played Marathon, but I know about it. I loved how the stories were told with the data cores. I love to do a shooter in Marathon’s setting.

I’m also a big RTS guy, so if I had a chance, I would totally make Myth.

DA: I would definitely love to do Myth because it’s such a departure from Halo and the FPS genre. I believe its tagline was “a real-time tactical game”. I’d be very curious to work on it; a lot of people in the studio who still have fond memories of Myth.