Free from narrative

Sep 25, 2009 19:21 GMT  ·  By

With Halo 3: ODST released and players currently exploring both the New Mombasa-based, single-player title and the new Firefight cooperative-multiplayer experience, the only Halo-themed video game that is announced and set to arrive in the coming years is Halo: Reach, the project on which Bungie is working and that will serve as a prequel to the whole trilogy, while also telling the story of how the planet Reach initially fell to the Covenant onslaught.

Halo 3: ODST and Reach are at different ends of the timeline of the franchise, but one thing that might unite them is how Bungie aims to tell stories in both of them. ODST has featured a side narrative, told through audio logs, called Sadie's Story, which is not connected to the usual blood-and-guts tales of warrior bravado and loss that Halo deals with. Some players might not even get the whole picture unless they explore the city in the game pretty thoroughly.

Curtis Creamer, who is an executive producer on Halo 3: ODST at Bungie, told Gamasutra when talking about narrative that, “Since we were on a really tight development schedule, we knew that we would need some help in telling a really interesting story. We had the idea that we wanted to try to do something like the 'i [sic] love bees' type of story, but instead of making it a real-world sort of thing, we wanted to try and create that experience within the game itself.”

He refused to confirm that something similar would be included in Reach, as Bungie was not releasing any details about that project at the moment. But, with Reach appearing to be the last game that the developer will create in the franchise, it would make sense for it to depart a little from the formula that it has used for the last four Halo titles and try something new and different.