Halo's multiplayer designer, Lars Bakken talks exclusively to NowGamer…

How important was it for you to change up the Halo formula for ODST?
I think it’s absolutely important, that was one of the things we set about when making ODST. We wanted to tell a new type of story, a different kind of story, a more character-driven piece where you actually get to know these people. You’re not just playing as a faceless guy, you’re actually playing as a human being, they have relationships, conversations, they take their helmets off and you can see their faces. All those things were really important when we started working on the game. We don’t have the Master Chief but that was a cool challenge. We wanted to try to tell a different story.

Film Noir, that style of storytelling, and even down to the fact when you’re in the city at night it’s very dark and there are a lot of shadows. You can’t see everything, which is why we give you the visor mode but it’s also a mystery story. You’re going through this big expansive city at night trying to run down these clues and figure out what happened to the rest of your squad.

The last month of post-production was really, pretty gruelling. When we decided to make New Mombasa, it’s the biggest single level we’ve ever made in a Halo game, and that proved to be extremely challenging in a lot of practical ways. Had we known how difficult it was going to be we may not have made it as expansive as we did but it was probably the biggest challenge we had. All the system that you had in Halo 3, you’ll have in ODST. Firefight is the only really new thing that we’ve added but in terms of underlying systems it’s still the same engine.

Have you made any actual changes to the Halo 3 engine?
We’ve actually made a lot of little improvements all over the place, I can’t really go into detail about everything but we’ve touched the AI, we touched the graphics processing, we touched on the lighting, the effects. Part of the reason the game looks better in my opinion than Halo 3 visually, is because we started work on it when the engine was completely finished in terms of the tools pipeline and everything. The artists had a year to work on just pure content, they didn’t have to worry about dealing with tools breaking or certain things coming online like HDR with Halo 3. All the features were there from the beginning and we could just improve.

Was it difficult designing the ODSTs to be different from the Spartans?
Not really. We knew going in that the ODSTs were going to play a little bit differently than the Spartans, like not having their health come back and all those different factors coming in allowed us to… well we knew what we wanted to do with the AI and we were able to execute on that.

Do you think some players will have difficulty adjusting to playing as an ODST?
They absolutely may have that problem and then they’ll have to come to grips with the fact that they’re not a Spartan and they’ll have to tone it back a bit and in the case of Firefight, for example, you’re going to have two ODSTs working together to take down a Hunter, whereas in the past as a Spartan you’re taking those things down by yourself. But I think people will come to grips with that and they’ll learn to appreciate it.

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