14 DAY TRIAL // One of the leading developers working on Halo: Reach at Bungie has said that, early in the development of the multiplayer side of the first person shooter, the team was working on creating a player versus players version of the space battle game seen in the mission “Long Night of Solace,” which comes about half way during the single player campaign.
Marcus Lehto, who was the creative director working on Halo: Reach, said in the latest issue of the magazine Game Informer that, “We joked about it from time to time and even had a rough version of it working very early on in development. But the mechanics of it were pretty silly and we very quickly realised that the resulting gameplay experience wouldn't hit the bar we were aiming for, nor justify the amount of work required.”
He added, “With so many features and so much content already committed, Reach was an incredibly ambitious project on an already aggressive schedule.”
The single player mission offers players a chance to take a break from the familiar mechanics of Halo: Reach by flying around space and taking down Covenant ships as the team hatches a plan to bring down an enemy Supercarrier.
It's a symptom of how traditional developers who are working on blockbusters need to be, that Bungie did not actually take the time to move the mechanics to multiplayer and allow gamers to chase each other around in Covenant and human ships, with a few unlockables added in for good measure in order to entice fans to try it out.
Bungie was sure it was working on its last game in the Halo universe and adding the space battle section would have been a nice way to go out.
At the moment, the developer is working with Activision Blizzard for the next ten years on an undisclosed new intellectual property.