14 DAY TRIAL // The biggest release of the fall yet has been Halo 3: ODST from Bungie and Microsoft, which has just arrived on store shelves. With its uncertain status as a full retail package that offers a short story mode set as a prequel to Halo 3 just in the Earth city of New Mombasa, a lot of players wondered about how the Bungie developers thought this unorthodox game.
Curtis Creamer, who is the executive producer on Halo 3: ODST, disclosed that, “For the previous Halo games, we're talking about three-year development cycles. In ODST, we were shooting for about a year of development time. The challenges for us were having an understanding of just how much of a game we could make in a year, and also knowing the aspirations we were going to have, and how we were going to pull those off with all of the limitations we had as a studio.”
The team was helped by the fact that the engine needed little modification and that all the time could be invested in putting together the story of the game and creating the map of New Mombasa. The various statements, which, at one time, pointed to ODST being just a downloadable add-on, and, at another time, suggested that it would retail for just 40 dollars, that came out of the team were truthful, but, as the circumstances changed, the people at Bungie saw that they could do more with less. Thus, we've ended up with the current incarnation of Halo 3: ODST, which includes both a new multiplayer mode, in Firefight, and a single-player campaign, all for the full release price of 60 dollars.
Even with the limited resources that they faced, the development team even managed to introduce some features new to Halo, like the side story concerning a young girl and her father in the aftermath of the Covenant invasion, which might influence how stories were told in future titles in the series.