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AusGamers: Ok guys, we're here with Curtis Creamer, Lead Producer of Halo 3: ODST and Bungie old school. Curtis, we just ran through the demo it looks really, really awesome; standing in front of this awesome machine - Can you tell us... the Halo games have a kind of legacy of playing - I wouldn't say similarly all the time, because they do change - but this is a big change for you guys. A big open-world, then you've got these action sort-of flashback moments. Can you run us through how it all came about?

Curtis Creamer: Well the idea behind the game is that we sort of wanted to create a film noirish kind of detective story. We wanted to get away from the gigantic space opera that the Halo trilogy was. So this is sort of how the whole mechanic of playing as The Rookie at night came about - going back and figuring out what your squad mates were doing and then having that flashback where you get to play through what happened and find out why things transpired the way that they did.



AG: Do you think that the detective element and the character being all alone adds itself to the fact that you're a human now and not necessarily a Spartan - a bit more, I guess... I can't think of the word.

Curtis: Vulnerable!

AG: Exactly the one, that's right. More vulnerable.

Curtis: [Laughs] Absolutely, it sure does. You are more vulnerable as an ODST. You don't have regenerating shields like you did as the Master Chief. You've got stamina and a health mechanic now, so it does make it sort of a more humanistic story now. We really focused the story on the characters in the game. It's about you as The Rookie; it's about the squad mates - the other ODSTs; and being alone in the night, you really have to be a lot more careful in how you approach the Covenant - you can't just run in and jump into the middle of a big group of Covenant and expect to live. So you've got to be a little more tactical about how you take on the encounters.

AG: Now it's obviously a sandbox map that you've created - it lends itself to the sort of hide and seek that we've seen a little bit of - but there's also a lot of debris floating around. Can you blow up cars and use that to kind of ambush Covenant or anything like that? How much of the environment can you actually interact with?

Curtis: There's definitely a lot of things that you can interact with. Throughout the city there're a lot of things you can do to really understand what happened in New Mombasa. That's something that was really important to us, to kind of tell the story of what happened to the people of New Mombasa while The Chief was at the Delta Halo in Halo 2. But you definitely do need to be careful about how you approach the Covenant. I mean we did do a lot of work on the AI to get them to work in this sort of open-world environment. So you may choose to engage them, or maybe not engage them - it really depends. You can definitely interact with a lot of the environment, but that's mainly geared toward finding out what happened in New Mombasa.



AG: One of the questions I asked during E3, but we didn't do an interview then was: it seems like New Mombasa populates itself with enemies periodically based on how you progress and I wondered if it's possible to just hide from one lot, then move over and hide from another lot and just try and populate the entire game (with enemies).

Curtis: [Laughs] You might be able to, I'm not really sure. I don't think it's going to just endlessly fill up with Covenant - that would be pretty funny though. But yeah, the way that it is set up is that there are a lot of random squad patrols that are patrolling New Mombasa. So you can definitely hide from some, but I think you'd actually have a really hard time trying to pull that off because I think you're going to get caught sooner rather than later.

AG: So how difficult was it creating a balanced gameplay mechanic between the sneaking around and the detective side of things versus the kind of high-action typical Halo-like blockbuster sort of moments?

Curtis: Well I don't think it was difficult. One of the things we've sort of always tried to do in the Halo games was have the concept of pacing, where you've got some downtime to get a little bit of story, then you've got some action, then you've got some downtime and a little bit of story, then some more action. But here it's almost as though you can think of a lot of the downtime as taking place at night in New Mombasa and then you go to these high-action scenes. So it wasn't really difficult for us to balance that. The scenes are a little bit shorter than say what a full-length Halo 3 campaign mission might be, but you do spend a lot of time in the hub and there actually is still lots of action going on in the hub too - you can really get yourself into some pretty big fights there.



AG: Is the hub full of awesome secrets? I know the skulls were really hard to find. Are we going to see that sort of stuff coming back in?

Curtis: There are quite a few things that you can find in the city. We didn't hide the skulls in ODST this time, we actually have those available right off the bat so you can turn them on any time you want. We also did that because we integrated the skulls into the Firefight game engine so those will always be getting turned on there automatically anyway.

AG: You just mentioned a time-frame. How long can we expect to be sitting in the singleplayer campaign for this?

Curtis: Probably for a similar amount of time for any other campaign that we've done. In the early days of ODST we weren't really sure how much of a game that we could make in the span of about a year, because we hadn't really done that recently - all of our previous ones had been on a three year cycle. So we were sort of of aiming a little low, not really sure how much gameplay we were going to get, but by the time we'd finished we discovered that we were able to create quite a bit more content than we'd originally thought. So it ended up really being a full-sized game on it's own and so it stands right next to any other Halo game as far as that goes.



AG: Now it's no secret you guys have separated yourselves as an independent developer now, but still developing Halo games for Microsoft. Obviously there's a lot of lore here, you guys have spent a lot of time on it but the Internet was abuzz for quite a while after you had walked away from Microsoft Games Studios saying "oh we're going to see new Bungie IP coming out, coming out, coming out" and it's supposedly coming quite soon now (and I know you probably can't talk about that) but why keep coming back to Halo? Is it because it's your baby and there's just so much story to tell? I would have thought you guys would have wanted to jump off and create something new?

Curtis: Sure. So it's no secret that Bungie has been working on things that are outside of the Halo IP, but we love the Halo IP. Like you said, it's something that we've been working on for a long time and we're super familiar with it - I mean Halo was born at Bungie. So working on a game like ODST or even Halo Reach, those are things that we're super excited about. We've had a pretty good working relationship with Microsoft, even though we decided to spin ourselves out of Microsoft, they're still a great partner for us. We've had a great experience making games for the Xbox and so there's no reason to stop doing that.

AG: Ok, just curious. Thanks very much Curtis. Cheers.

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