Halo 5: Guardians’ executive producer explains Master Chief’s arrival on Xbox One

Above: Master Chief in Halo 5: Guardians

Image Credit: Microsoft

GamesBeat: It seems necessary. Otherwise, it’s risky to get in the Warthog and just make yourself a target. Beyond that, do you want to save up for a big item toward the end, something that can tip the balance of power?

Holmes: What I usually do—I love vehicles. I’m a big vehicle player. I save up all my req energy for later in the game to bring out something big like a Banshee or Wraith or Scorpion. But plenty of players in the studio focus on power weapons instead. They might bring out several smaller, lower-tier weapons and rack up kills throughout the game. It comes down to how each player likes to play the game.

GamesBeat: Coordination seems to matter a lot.

Holmes: It makes a huge difference. We do play tests at the studio that we call our “try hard” tests. Both teams are pushing really hard to win, playing very competitively. The team that wins, invariably, is the one with the best communication and collaboration.

Coordinating between 12 players is really tough. But you can coordinate well between three or four players at a time. That’s more reflective of what I believe we’ll see when the game goes live. Three or four friends will get together and say, “Let’s take out this boss” or “Let’s push on that base.”

GamesBeat: Going back to single-player, I saw that you could take a lot of different paths to get through each level.

Holmes: Absolutely. That’s been one of the design pillars for campaign from the beginning, trying to give players more freedom and flexibility in how they approach the combat encounters and how they navigate the space. All the spaces throughout our campaign have been built around the new suite of Spartan abilities, all the new mobility options. There are plenty of places you can discover and clamber up to or smash through. That adds a lot of replay value. Even for players who only play the campaign once, too, it lets us all have our own story in how we approach each encounter. We can all share those stories with each other, which I think is really powerful.

GamesBeat: Some of the more complex new abilities can be easier to forget. Do you have ways of introducing them so people learn them and use them throughout the campaign?

Holmes: We have tutorial moments early in the campaign at specific points where we teach the new abilities. From there, it’s up to players whether they want to keep using them and which ones they take advantage of. The hope is that knowledge then transfers over to multiplayer and people can put the abilities to use in that space.

GamesBeat: If you invest the time to learn those and get good at them, is that going to separate you from players who don’t?

Holmes: In multiplayer it makes a big difference, mastering the different abilities. They’re designed to work with all of our maps. They can chain together to produce some pretty spectacular results. Just simple things like the thruster ability—I was just playing Quinn. I had him dead to rights, but he managed to jump up and thrust over my head and take me out. You can do some things once you start to master those skills that really set you apart.

Above: Halo 5: Guardians

Image Credit: Microsoft

GamesBeat: That seems to [speak] to why Halo 5 is different. You have at least four major iterations here. People could get tired of it. But there are lots of new things for them to master here. It’s not going to be the same old multiplayer.

Holmes: We definitely have new skills to master. We’ve tried to stay true to the core of what Halo is as an experience, tried to continue to expand the universe and the story. It’s still very much Halo. It’s just evolved. Players have a whole new suite of abilities that they can learn and put to good use.

GamesBeat: What sort of feeling do you hope people will get when they’re done with the campaign?

Holmes: I hope they’ll be surprised. I hope they enjoy the journey we take them on. It’s a different approach to storytelling in Halo, but we’re excited about it. We think it’s fitting for Halo as we move to Xbox One, to make this big leap in the way we tell stories and let people experience the universe. I hope they come away pleasantly surprised.

GamesBeat: Day one is always a nail-biter for the people who run servers and things like that. Is there anything in the design that you thought about and said, “With tens of millions of people playing this, maybe we shouldn’t take the risk of doing this right away?” Just to ensure that the game scales well.

Holmes: Scale is something we think about all the time. We have an in-house services team that’s been focused on Halo 5 for the past three years, building the services at the core of the experience. It’s the same team that built the services for Halo 4. They’re constantly testing for scale and ensuring that all of our services are hardened and ready for the users coming in when we launch.

We’ve also been able to employ – beyond just the beta we did almost a year ago – testing resources around the world, doing closed external beta testing. We’ve put those services under stress and ensured they can stand up to real-world conditions. We’re confident going into launch. But obviously it’s always a big deal launching a game of this size and scale. For us as developers, the joy comes from seeing people have fun with this thing we’ve been working on for years and being able to go online and play alongside them.

Above: Halo 5: Guardians at E3 2015

Image Credit: Microsoft

GamesBeat: Did anything change in your design, though? Are there situations where you don’t want to push a particular idea as far as you could because it won’t work with 10 million people playing at once?

Holmes: We always take that into account in the design process, the technical requirements and scale requirements that go into the experience. We’ve been lucky to partner closely with the platform team, the Xbox team, in building this experience. Being able to take advantage of things like Xbox Live cloud compute—It’s been a real shift for us technologically as we rewrite our engine for Xbox One and move our online experience to dedicated servers and take advantage of cloud compute. That’s taken a lot of investment from us and a lot of work in concert with the Xbox team. But yeah, our designs have all been built with an understanding of what’s possible.

GamesBeat: What are some instances where you can use cloud compute?

Holmes: Warzone is a great example. We have dozens of AI active on the map – simulating, making decisions, reacting to players. AI bosses are coming to the map. We have large environments and large player counts and lots of vehicles. We can do that all at once because we can use cloud compute to simulate things like physics and AI, augmenting the power of the console itself.

GamesBeat: Do you feel like you’ve pushed the console to the edge of its capability yet?

Holmes: I wouldn’t say that. As developers, we’re constantly learning on any platform. We’re still early in the cycle for Xbox One. This is only the first title we’ve built from the ground up for Xbox One. We’re pushing the console pretty hard, but I’m sure that as we continue to develop for the console, we’ll learn more. That’s the way with every console generation.