We talk to Bungie community director Brian Jarrard and campaign designer Niles Sankey.

Long-time-Halo fans will have no problem getting to grips with Halo: Reach. But how accessible have you made the game for newcomers?

Jarrard: Well it was really important for us to make a game that would be enjoyable and accessible to anyone. One of the great parts of making a prequel versus making a true Halo 4 is that it has a self contained story that you can jump right into and it forgoes any presumptions we may have about what players know about the story or maybe what they don’t know.

So anyone that enjoys a great story, some real intense big scale combat and a wealth of features will find that they have a lot to like about Reach.

You had a beta a while back which was very successful. How valuable was the feedback from this beta and from your fan community?

Jarrard: Absolutely valuable. We had 1.7 million unique people playing the beta in just a few weeks, so we actually almost had too much feedback to process. But on the networking side, one of our goals was to get a lot of automated feedback to ensure we were doing the right things in terms of matching people together for skill, matching people together based on connections, making sure people weren’t waiting too long in matchmaking.

So we had many intricate networking systems on our side and that was super, super valuable to us and put the beta through a larger stress-test and certainly make the final game a lot smoother because of it.

What sort of things did you learn from the beta besides technical data?

Jarrard: On the design side, we had all sorts of feedback and made a lot of improvements from simple things like, you know, ‘I’m playing one-flag capture the flag on this map but the flag room isn’t working out so well, because it’s too hard to get it out of there.’

So we would look at that and I think actually, the biggest fundamental design change was that so many fans gave us feedback saying that the game felt so radically different from Halo 3, specifically that the players in Reach moved a little too slow, or weren’t jumping as high as Master Chief did.

And this feedback changed all of that?

Jarrard: Well initially that was a design intent for Reach as these new characters aren’t as powerful as the Spartan II was. But solely based on the amount of feedback we had, the team went back and increased the run speed a little bit and upped the pace of the game.

It’s still not up to the pace of Halo 3 because we wanted it to be different, but it is certainly faster than it was in the beta. But that was certainly a change that wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t got all of the feedback we received.

How closely will the events in the Halo: Reach campaign echo what transpired in the Fall of Reach novel and how often did you go back to the book to ensure continuity?

Jarrard: There was a book!? (laughs)

… continued