14 DAY TRIAL // A senior developer working at Bungie, which will move on from the Halo series to work with Activision Blizzard, has stated that the success of their first person shooter series is linked to how the stories were created starting with characters that can make an impact, like Master Chief and his companion Cortana.
Joe Staten, who is the creative director working at Bungie, has said creating interesting ideas, character and places was more important to the team creating the Halo video games that creating a storyline that spanned the entire series or a coherent universe.
He said, “It would have been madness for us to write a script up front... and in fact, the scripts we tried to write got blown apart,” and added, “we focused on building blocks, on interesting places, interesting characters. We tried to construct this context for all the stories we could tell.”
He also expressed regret that some of the best work coming from Bungie was not appreciated, saying “Halo 2 had one of the best final acts I've ever written that nobody ever saw. And that's painful... but if you have the most beautiful thing in the world and it doesn't end up getting made, who cares.”
Staten says that missions scripts and the high quality cinematic sequences were some of the things that were created by Bungie late in the development process.
The impact that Master Chief had on gamers is not linked to his complex personality, something that developers strive for, but to his status as a “perfect reflection of power projection.”
Halo is now in the hands of Microsoft and the newly formed 343 Industries, with signs pointing that the new entity will need at least a couple of years to create new games set in the universe.
Meanwhile Staten also suggested that the Halo universe would benefit from the creation of a more persistent universe.