If there’s anyone who knows Master Chief, it’s Frank O’Connor. The former Bungie employer has been with the acclaimed Halo series since its inception and now serves as its franchise director. With two new projects; Halo Anniversary and the highly anticipated Halo 4, O’Conner opened up to Time Magazine about chief, and the long running series.
O’Connor opened up about the evolution of Master Chief, and how he’s gone from your typical Space Marine to almost a cultural institution.
“The Chief is a strange cat because people graft their own impressions of what he’s about onto him, and he’s become kind of an avatar for people’s heroic experience,” O’Connor said. “I often have conversations with people about the Chief, and all of the things they are saying are true, but they’re not written down anywhere, they’re not actually recorded anywhere in the games.”
Even though the studio plans to grow Master Chief throughout the next few games, O’Connor stresses that the upcoming Halo Anniversary, which is a suped-up HD version of the original Halo game is as close to the original as you can get; in fact — it uses the same code.
“What you’re seeing is mostly the original Halo code running under a second engine, which is a graphics layer we worked with our partner Saber Interactive on. There’s a lot of technology under the hood to enable things like switching, and to enable the simultaneous blending of that. We knew going into this project we absolutely couldn’t touch the basic gameplay.”
“People want to know if they can still do Warthog jumps. Yes, you can. People wanted to know if they could still do grenade tricks. Yes, you can. All of the gameplay is going to be identical. There might be tiny little changes that we just haven’t tested through yet, but you shouldn’t really encounter any major differences with this game and the original.”
So the elephant in the room, Halo 4. When can we expect further details on the hotly anticipated shooter? According to O’Connor; it’s coming, but don’t hold your breath.
“We’re not going to talk about that for a little while. We are going to have some people from 343 Industries at Halo Fest at PAX this year, and we’ll start talking a little bit more, but don’t expect a huge flow of info out on Halo 4. But will talk a little about it, and probably have some of technology guys there as well.”
Read the entire interview here
Hell yeah cant wait for Halo anniversary and then Halo 4!!!!!!!!!!, who would have thought 3 months ago i would be talking about Halo 4, the King is back Halo all the way!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!