Feature | Halo Reach – Bungie Interview

When we were given the chance to talk to one of the biggest names behind the scenes of the up and coming epic game Halo Reach we  literally jumped at the opportunity. So off I raced over to Microsoft HQ and met Joseph Tung of Bungie who also served as the Lead Producer on Halo 3 (a title that went on to ship over eight million copies worldwide). Prior to his work with the studio, Joseph had earned his Masters in Literary Theory from Indiana University-Bloomington, he has worked as a Program Manager at Microsoft for six years, acted as a liaison between Microsoft and the record industry, and taught a course on Critical Thinking for his Alma Mater. Currently of course he is overseeing production as the Executive Producer of Bungie’s latest project, Halo: Reach.

Gamefreaks: Hi Joseph, could you start out by telling our fans a little about yourself and the part you played in Halo: Reach?

Joseph Tung: Hi, I am Joseph Tung and I am the executive producer of Halo: Reach, which actually passed Xbox certification last night (04/08/2010), which is a huge weight of my chest. I have been on the project since day one. It’s been a full 3 year project with Bungie, a real labour of love for the team. We have known from the beginning that Reach is going to be Bungies last Halo game, so we wanted to go above and beyond to make this the most epic Halo game that has been ever made. We think we have accomplished that in spades.

GF: Can you tell us about some of the features in Halo Reach?

JT: Well we showed the Beta to the world, we showed off the competitor multiplayer elements where 2.7 million people played the Beta, it showed off things like load-outs, armour abilities, the new game mode Invasion where you can actually play as Elites vs Spartans for the first time. There is some fiction wrapped around that game mode. We showed off a little of the player investment system where we really hope players over time will really customise their individual Spartan. At E3 we showed off a bit of Firefight, as it is back in Reach, not only is it back we absolutely rebuilt it from the ground up, its got brand new modes where the AI is not just attacking you it has objectives. We have vs mode where two guys can play as Elites and two as Spartans. You can create a game mode where for example there are all grunts, all the time with 400% health and spawned with rocket launchers and when you shoot them in the head confetti comes out of their heads you can make that mode. In fact we did just that it’s called Grunt-pocalypse and it ships on the disc. We fully expect the community to take those options and go crazy with them. In fact once you make your version of Firefight you can share that so that the community can play the game with you.

GF: Can you tell us about Forge?

JT: Sure, we recently showed Forge at Comic-con. Forge has taken some big leaps forward as well; it has a brand new palette which is much more flexible than Halo 3, its got brand new upgrades to the tool system, so for example when you place an object in Forge it no longer has to physically simulated right off the bat so people before would place objects and they would just be physically simulated and fall over like a house of cards, in Reach you can change the physics type of that object you can sync it into other objects and merge the geometry so that when you let go those objects are going to stay fixed exactly where you left them. That’s just the tip of the iceberg, we have fine tuned editing, placement by co-ordinates, all sorts of new improvements to the tool set so players can easily make the maps they want. Again you can share all that stuff if you want. Also there is the Epic campaign, which offers full support for 4-player co-op, and a brand new cast of Spartans in Noble team. It’s a much different take on the Halo universe than what we have seen before.

GF: Halo: As Reach is going to be Bungie’s last game in the Halo franchise. How does this feel for you guys.

JT: Well I can’t speak for everyone at the studio but it makes me sad, it’s bitter-sweet to be shipping the last game. We love the franchise, you know Bungie created the universe and we are really proud of it and we love it. We are also excited to work on brand new stuff, but that is not yet to be discussed and we are also excited to see where the franchise goes from here.

GF: Was there any sort of temptation to create Halo 4 instead of Reach?

JT: Sure we definitely talked about all sorts of possibilities at the beginning of pre-production, but we decided really early on about the core vision for Reach and that core vision has been remarkably consistent throughout the entire process.

GF: Why choose to go back to the events prior to the original Halo?

JT: You know I think for us we wanted to make a standalone Halo game, a brand new take on the universe and we didn’t want to start a brand new trilogy, we wanted a game that stood alone and Reach was a great environment for that, you know what happens, its an interesting point for the fans of the fiction, how the events on Reach that Noble team take part in actually lead into events in Halo 1, 2 and 3.

GF: Was there any trepidation in messing with the legacy of the original franchise, or pressure to live up to that lofty standard?

JT: Certainly there is expectation and pressure of that sort, but in reality the biggest pressure is that of the studio which is full of incredibly bright people and incredibly passionate people who are also incredibly self-critical. So really we say that we make games that we want to play and that’s true, so we have high standards that we have to live up to.

GF: In the trailer we saw spaceships being controlled by the player – do tell more?

JT: Space is a part of one mission in the campaign and it’s something that we were excited to show at E3 as Halo Reach is going to drive home the point that it’s going to be a different type of Halo game for people who have played previous ones. On top of space there are plenty of varied and unique gameplay moments in Reach, that was absolutely one of our pillars from the beginning, to inject a bunch of completely unexpected moments into the core gameplay and we think we have done that well.

GF: How important was the community aspect portion to the game?

JT: We take our community very seriously, we have many members of the team devoted to paying attention to what is going on in the community and something like Forge is very largely driven by the community. We looked at how people were using Forge in Halo 3 and that became a step forward in Reach. Just in regards to the online experience of the game Halo 3 was the gold standard and we wanted to blow the doors off that.

GF: So when you make a game like Reach is it in fact more like making two games; the single player campaign mode and the online experience?

JT: It’s actually more like making four games, it really is. I think you would be hard pressed to find another game that has as much breadth as Reach. You are absolutely right, there are very parallel efforts between campaign and multi-player, and we have Firefight and Forge. Of which Forge is a huge investment.

GF: What was your biggest challenge behind the game?

JT: As Executive Producer my job is to work really closely with Marcus Lehto, the Creative Director and his job is to come up with the crazy ideas and mine is to say what is achievable, so the hardest part is being in the position in Bungie to say no when someone has a great idea because you have to ship on a particular date. Bungie is all about people who are super passionate so if they have to come in every day including Xmas day then they will do that, so it’s really hard for me being the guy who says ‘Don’t come in over the Xmas break’…but they do it anyway. There are always features that don’t make it at the end of the day, that’s just the reality of development.

GF: How big was the team that worked on the game?

JT: Yeah we sort of maxed out at about 150, but I think if you factor in everyone who contributed to the game it is well past 300 – a big team.

GF: What are you most proud of in the game?

JT: That’s like asking which one of your children is your favourite. I am extremely proud of Reach, and the team is really proud of Reach, I really couldn’t pick. I think the campaign is epic, the multiplayer experience is spot on, the stuff in Forge is crazy – I just couldn’t pick one.

GF: The input from the fans must have been immense, how much of that was taken into consideration in the design of the game?

JT: Not so much in the design of the game, but here is a really good example of how we listen to our fans input. The Beta shipped and 2.7 million people played it, there’s absolutely a lot of feedback and we are also mining the data behind the scenes, network data, so we know for example that everyone was dying at a certain spot on a particular map, or that this weapon dominates. So we use the user feedback to validate the actual data we are collecting and make tweaks on that. Lots of tweaks are made like player movement, player jump height, lots of weapons and armour got tweaked, across the board based on user feedback there were big changes.