14 DAY TRIAL // Bungie might have made a name for itself with nothing but the Master Chief, and even if it has another installment in the series coming up, the developer doesn't believe that the title should receive a number and join the rest of its productions. The reason is that Bungie doesn't see Reach as part of the Master Chief chronicles, but as a standalone title. "It's not a continuation of the Master Chief story, nor is it the start of a new trilogy. For us, it's a completely standalone game," Joseph Tung, the game's executive producer, said when speaking to Edge Magazine.
Marcus Lehto, the creative director of Reach, further supported this idea and said that, "We desired to make a standalone title, something that is the culmination of a decade of our efforts building Halo titles." And the title does have another trick up its sleeve to not be called the "new Halo game," even if it's just meddling with semantics, since Reach is the beginning, not the end of the battle. But just because it takes place previous to the adventures of Master Chief, this doesn't mean that the technology used is also coming from the past.
"We are definitely bending the Xbox as far as it'll bend," Chris Opdahl, the campaign lead, added. Among the new things that the new backward-bending Xbox 360 will offer is a new Elite, rebuilt from "the skeleton up," but it will also provide us with the first Halo to feature motion-capture acting. All we got in previous Halo games were armored soldiers, with a solid, bulky helmet on, so facial features and animations for them weren't really something Bungie had to bother with, but in Reach the gloves come off, so to speak.
Another big thing Tung teased us with was that Halo would have a powerful element that would secure a second playthrough. "Without giving anything away, there's certainly some cool stuff we're doing in Reach that will encourage people to replay the campaign. There are going to be some big surprises in the campaign," he said. Maybe this Halo will have a more interactive single-player campaign, with gamers being able to influence the story through the choices they make. Let's just pray we won't end up saving Reach.