{"id":20189,"date":"2015-03-08T03:23:57","date_gmt":"2015-03-08T08:23:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/halofanforlife.com\/?p=20189"},"modified":"2015-03-08T03:23:57","modified_gmt":"2015-03-08T08:23:57","slug":"frank-oconner-interview-with-gamesradar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/halofanforlife.com\/?p=20189","title":{"rendered":"Frank O’Conner interview with gamesradar+"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is a reblog of the published interview of Frank O’Conner with gamesradar+<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

As 343 Industries takes stock of Halo with The Master Chief Collection and moves towards the much-anticipated release of Halo 5: Guardians, we\u2019ve got a two-part interview with the Chief\u2019s own guardians. First up, 343 Industries\u2019 Frank O\u2019Connor explains why it\u2019s important to keep the mystique of Master Chief alive\u2026<\/p>\n

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To us, the campaign playlists in The Master Chief Collection really hammer home the diversity of play styles contained in Halo. What, to you, is the essence of the series?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to say, as I have two levels of engagement. One is to step back and look at our audience and not get monomaniacal about one aspect. There\u2019s this huge community of different players, and part of my job is to stand on top of this building, looking down on our whole audience and not get focused on one thing. Luckily, I like the variety of Halo. When I was playing FPS games when I was younger, it was Doom, Quake \u2013 simple, baseline arena play, really straight-up shooting. The way Halo introduced vehicles and all the play mechanics we take for granted now is massive to me. But the thing that is really the seed of Halo for me is the ability to explore these worlds. I can see the story, I can see the gameplay mechanics and I can go explore \u2013 and it gives me tools to explore. Sometimes the tools are literal \u2013 the vehicles \u2013 and sometimes it\u2019s just well thought-out gameplay mechanics.<\/p>\n

Then how do you grow a universe without losing sight of the core idea?<\/strong><\/p>\n

We definitely think of Halo as\u2026 I don\u2019t want to use the word \u2018fake\u2019, but we definitely think of it as an invented history. In gameplay terms, it\u2019s kind of like World War II. Wars are bad and complicated, but World War II is this conflict that you say, \u201cYeah, there really were good guys and bad guys in that war,\u201d and you can\u2019t say that about a lot of conflicts. As a child, I would build aircraft and battleships, and I would look at the silhouettes and say, \u201cThis is the Axis and this is the Allies.\u201d<\/p>\n

Halo is similar in terms of how the history\u2019s constructed. Really recognisable silhouettes, colours and palettes for the Covenant and the UNSC. It\u2019s in some ways anachronistic, you know? 26th-century soldiers, running around with machine-guns and driving vehicles that sound like they have gas in the engines. All that\u2019s done on the surface to make it familiar and approachable, but then we give you the ability to go explore in this big universe and these strange, mysterious places. It\u2019s built like that on purpose.<\/p>\n

Do you worry that the \u2018narrative\u2019 universe may grow so big as to make\u00a0it difficult to find an entry point?<\/strong><\/p>\n

That\u2019s a great question and it\u2019s a practical issue we have to deal with: how big is the universe? How is its continuity? To go back to the World War II comparison, there\u2019s no barrier to entry to someone watching Saving Private Ryan or watching a spy drama like Valkyrie. It\u2019s a big conflict that has recognisable import and meaning, and real stakes. Hell in the Pacific is a great example \u2013 it\u2019s a movie about two soldiers from opposing sides trapped on a desert island. It\u2019s a reverse Robinson Crusoe, but it\u2019s a WWII story and that\u2019s what\u2019s important \u2013 you understand the personal stakes in these stories. You also understand, in our case, the galactic stakes. There\u2019s no barrier to entry for well-told stories. We have to get better at it \u2013 videogames are getting better and better at storytelling \u2013 but it\u2019s not just universe-building, it\u2019s technique. Gaming is in the early stages of cinema; I think we\u2019re moving into the \u2018talkies\u2019 phase and we have to get to the colour phase, but that\u2019s happening already. I played the new Konami Silent Hills demo and I was literally too scared to continue. That\u2019s important, and I think we\u2019re going to see more and more of those moments.<\/p>\n

Where does Master Chief fit into this? We invest a lot in this character, but he\u2019s almost beyond the conflict.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Chief is complicated because in some ways he\u2019s this literal vehicle for you to inhabit and go explore this adventure. I go in, as Frank, and I\u2019m running around in this galaxy full of terror and madness. People like literally filling those shoes, but over the years the stuff that has happened to him has become more meaningful and people keep asking us about him. The simplest version of the question I get is, \u2018What does he look like?\u2019 There\u2019s this weird tension that players have between \u2018I want to know more about him\u2019 and \u2018I don\u2019t want him to stop being me\u2019.<\/p>\n

You know what? I\u2019m okay with that. I don\u2019t think there\u2019s any pressing need for us to do a biopic about the Chief and show his face on the cover. I\u00a0think it\u2019s okay for people to still have him \u2018be\u2019 them. And it might get a little more complicated in the future. Already, in Halo 4, things got more complicated for Master Chief, for the universe \u2013 and it definitely humanised him, but I don\u2019t think we took it too far. I think we\u2019ll see how it plays out. He\u2019s a real guy; we\u2019ve described him physically in the books \u2013 there\u2019s no real mystery there if you go explore the canon, but forcing it down people\u2019s throats might be a mistake right now. But we\u2019ll see how people feel about him in the future.<\/p>\n

Agent Locke is so prominent in the teaser art \u2013 to me, it feels like he\u2019s being set up as this equal part to Master Chief. Any truth in that?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I would say definitely not \u2013 that it goes back to your last question about how you humanise the Chief. We don\u2019t want to do that; we want the Chief to be in some ways above the fray \u2013 he\u2019s literally a legend in the universe he inhabits. Locke lets us humanise the boots on the ground without messing with the Chief \u2013 the irony is that Locke is going to do some of the heavy lifting for people\u2019s need for better storytelling and characterisation without altering the Chief. The Chief is the core hero in the story, without a doubt. Forget how long you play as each character or whatever \u2013 it\u2019s really about contextualising the Chief. As much as Locke\u2019s an important character in the universe himself, he\u2019s also going to be a useful cipher for you to explore Master Chief\u2019s character from an outside perspective.<\/p>\n

Do you see Locke as a replacement\u00a0for Cortana?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Locke is going to help contextualise the universe in a way that Cortana necessarily couldn\u2019t. She was so close to the Chief and had the big picture historically, but she didn\u2019t necessarily have the big picture of what was going on elsewhere in Earth\u2019s conflict. Locke is going to help solidify and contextualise the stakes, as well as the legend of the Master Chief.<\/p>\n

Is there an element of Halo 4 you\u2019re particularly proud of and would like to see developed further in Halo 5?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It was our first Halo game as a team and so there were a lot of things that we did that we\u2019re just nakedly proud of: the technology, the way the team came together. But there are a lot of things we want to do better. Even though we had this long legacy of Halo games before, we had to find our feet and find out where our audience want to go. That\u2019s the main reason for doing a beta for Halo 5 \u2013 we\u2019re the first to say that we should have done a better job of multiplayer.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a great multiplayer experience, but a lot of things maybe went too far and a lot of things didn\u2019t go far enough, so the beta is going to help us tune it. It\u2019s not a focus test, but we\u2019ll look at all the data and the anecdotes, and make a better multiplayer game as a result. But the thing I\u2019m most proud of in Halo 5 is that the things we\u2019re doing with the technology are designed to speak to the things that appeal to me about Halo in the first place \u2013 which are scale, epicness and the world-building that the original Halo: Combat Evolved did on the Xbox. We also want to go back to that space of innovation with features and non-game interactions with things like Forge and save films \u2013 we want to make as big an impact on Xbox One as the game series has on Xbox 360 and the original Xbox.<\/p>\n

Source Link<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is a reblog of the published interview of Frank O’Conner with gamesradar+ As 343 Industries takes stock of Halo with The Master Chief Collection and moves towards the much-anticipated release of Halo 5: Guardians, we\u2019ve got a two-part interview … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/halofanforlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/halofanforlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/halofanforlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/halofanforlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/halofanforlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20189"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/halofanforlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20189\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20192,"href":"https:\/\/halofanforlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20189\/revisions\/20192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/halofanforlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/halofanforlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/halofanforlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}