Pete_LeGrant June 29, 2009 Entertainment, Xbox 360 57 views Comments Print This Post  Email This Post

Brier Dudley of The Seattle Times talked to some key people at Bungie about Halo: ODST, namely Harold Ryan (Bungie’s president) and Joseph Staten (writer and creative director).

The structure of the game is… different for “Halo.” Instead of trudging along a fairly set path, “ODST” begins in a dark and mostly empty city that players can freely explore, an “open world” model popularized by the “Grand Theft Auto” games.

Players who prefer traditional “Halo” can head directly to sites in the city that trigger “flashbacks,” putting them into classic “Halo”-style missions fighting aliens and blowing things up. Clues to the mystery come from playing through these missions.

“We’re doing a lot of pretty neat things in terms of mixing it up, introducing some non-linearity, some free exploration,” Staten said. “This is also a mystery story so there’s a lot more clue-finding and mystery-solving than you would normally find in a game of this kind — nothing that strays too far from the fun ‘Halo’ experience, but we definitely decided to take a little bit of risk and have some fun with this one.”

A new multiplayer mode will also be in ODST:

The game also adds a new multiplayer option called Firefight that’s designed to be quick and easy for small groups of friends to play on the same console or online. Groups of four cooperatively work through sessions that may last about 30 minutes.

It’s an alternative to the more intense, competitive multiplayer sessions that draw about 1 million players per night to the Xbox Live online-game network.

Check out the rest of the article here: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2009395945_brier29.html

See also:

• Halo ODST Name Change Trailer