Halo 3: ODST

Format Xbox 360

Developer Bungie

Publisher Microsoft

Genre Action

23 Comments

Bungie's new offices are rubbish. Aside from a makeshift motion capture studio they exist solely to handle the massive amounts of admin Bungie now generate as an independent developer and are as terminally beige as offices tend to be. Only the stack of Peter Jackson's Halo props and a makeshift motion-capture room remind you there's a game studio just a quarter-mile down the road, but if the offices are a disappointment, ODST is anything but.

More than any other revelation it's the sheer bloody size of ODST which should take you by surprise. For a year Bungie have touted it as an expansion - a little extra dose of Halo for the fans - but ODST is as big as Halo 3, as epic as Halo 3, and even better than the very best of Halo 3.

"The scope of the game did grow some," says Halo 3: ODST's brilliantly-named Lead Producer Curtis Creamer when asked about the size of the game. "We found a lot of ways to get a lot more out of it than we expected, especially since we didn't originally understand what it would mean to have an open-ended world like New Mombasa. You could spend days just wandering around the city."

"In the beginning we did a lot of conceptual 'mass-outs' using primitive shapes to try to get an understanding of exactly how big the city needed to be," says Curtis. "I don't know a good way to measure it, but it's super-big; there's New Mombasa at night which is the main hub, but then the flashback sequences are playing out in real space around the city." The city of New Mombasa is bigger than any game space Bungie have ever built and each of its ten flashback missions clock in at around 20 to 30 minutes apiece.

Four flashbacks and a lot of night-time wandering takes close to three hours to plough through on Heroic - the 'right' setting by Bungie's reckoning. It puts the game on track for a seven or eight hour campaign, all of which can be modified with Halo 3's skulls right from the start if regular Halo isn't vicious enough for you. It's neither an expansion nor a mission pack; ODST is a huge game. "It's big," says Curtis. "This is a full-size campaign; certainly nothing less than what we've done in the past."

Chief Concerns
You know the story by now. With Master Chief off in space Chiefing it up and shooting the face off legions of Covenant, the assault on New Mombasa is left to a new crew - a six-man Orbital Drop Shock Trooper team dumped into the city at the exact moment the Prophet of Regret zaps out in Halo 2's second level. Of the six characters, The Rookie is the last to regain consciousness and after manually blowing the bolts on his drop pod, sets about reassembling his team, all of whom have spent the day hard at work on the streets of New Mombasa. As The Rookie finds evidence of each squad member's whereabouts a flashback plays out, each a perfectly-made classic Halo experience.

"One of the things (Writer) Joe Staten talked about early on with ODST was thinking about it as a mystery," says Curtis. "You see a lot of crime dramas where detectives have this crazy ability to travel to the scene of the crime and sort of 'imagine' how the crime took place. The Rookie has that ability, so when he finds one of these clue objects you get to 'recreate' what happened to that character."

The ten flashbacks each tell a story from earlier that same day, beginning with squad leader Buck and the presumed death of special agent Dare. As the missions progress Buck begins reassembling the squad, and as the amount of firepower the ODSTs direct at the Covenant increases so does the amount they fire back. By the time all four original members of the squad are back together they're forced to face an airborne onslaught atop the New Mombasa Police Department's rooftop headquarters to rival the most dangerous moments from Halo 3.

Each flashback is a carefully edited Halo highlight. Dutch's first flashback in Tayari Plaza is a chunk torn straight from Halo 3's Tsavo Highway - a Warthog race through tanks, turrets, and legions of Covenant; Buck's first jaunt is a classic Halo shootout at street level, ripped straight from the Mombasa stages of Halo 2.

"There are times when you'll see the same places at different times and from different perspectives and times when you'll be in locations you can't even reach at night," Curtis explains. Romeo's first flashback plays out high above the city, while Buck's follows a path which The Rookie walks after dark. They're each the very best of Halo, but played by more vulnerable characters who are forced to move from cover to cover before making insane dashes to seize tactically advantageous positions.

"We wanted to make the experience of playing as an ODST feel different," says Curtis, "so you're definitely weaker and more vulnerable, but that means you have to change up the tactics you're used to using." Spartans are walking tanks but ODSTs have only a miniscule regenerating shield that will soak up three Carbine hits before the damage begins cutting into non-regenerating health. They're smaller, slower, and don't see nearly so well in the dark, but Bungie are throwing as many Hunters, Brutes, and Grunts at ODSTs as they'd normally throw at the Master Chief. "Why wouldn't we?" asks Curtis. "It's very easy as the Master Chief to run right into the middle of a big encounter but in ODST it's more tactical and you really have to plan your attacks; whether to engage enemies or to take a different path altogether."

ODST draws from the best of Halo and, at night, the best of the Tom Clancy games. You'll empty your SMG and pistol quickly enough to need to move onto the Covenant weapons, but even with Plasma Rifles and Spikers blazing in the night it's a cross between Halo and Ghost Recon.

(Ghost) Recon
The world in which you'll spend most of the story is almost pitch-black. A light rain leaves the city shrouded by fine mist, and streets are illuminated only by roadsigns and the barely functioning streetlamps. It's a city where you're forever low on ammunition and have to scavenge for every last clip and grenade, but a city you can navigate in shadow, staying stealthy and using the darkness against the Covenant.

"We tried really hard to think about what defines film noir. I think Marty (O'Donnell, Halo's Audio Director) did a fantastic job with completely new music which really nails that rainy, night-time, lonely vibe," says Curtis of the first Halo soundtrack to feature sleazy sax in place of chanting monks. "Marty's music has always played a huge part in the experience of a Halo game but I feel especially lucky to be the Lead Producer on this one because he really knocked it out of the park this time, with a completely different style of music. It was a ton of work on a really short timeline."

"We asked how we'd light scenes and areas and how we'd build the environments. We wanted to create something different to the dramatic action sequences with the Master Chief charging in like a superhero. We wanted something set more at night, with a very different mood."

It takes The Rookie's enhanced reality VISR system to draw everything into sharper contrast and make enemies more clearly visible in the murky city. The most conspicuously Clancy-esque gadget in ODST, the VISR, incorporates a Head-Up compass, map, waypoint system, and enhanced reality nightvision mode which accents friendlies in green, useful items in yellow, and enemies in bold red.

Alone in the city you'll face major set-pieces near every piece of evidence and dozens more Grunt and Brute patrols throughout the massive open world. "Typically, in a Halo game we know where you're coming from so we can set up an encounter and designate good fallback points for the AI, but in ODST we had to make sure we had groups of Covenant patrolling the city who could react from wherever you attack from and look intelligent doing it." Just as the game's engine was modified to cope with an open world, so the AI was modified to handle a trooper who can attack from any side and by any means. It looks and feels like Halo, but it's Halo with a brain - less Star Wars and more Blade Runner; less X-Men and more Dark Knight.

When the game is over, it's really only just beginning; on your second run every door is unlocked and the entire city is wide open. Each flashback can be selected and played in isolation, or tackled as part of the open world in any order you please. The city becomes a true sandbox with secret terminals to find and extra missions to tackle, and even some Mongooses to ride and new characters to unlock for the ten Firefight maps.

Papa Don't Reach
And that's your lot. Once Bungie are done with ODST they're done with Halo 3. Halo's final three multiplayer maps are bundled on ODST's second disc and no more are planned to follow. "We had to make some significant changes to the Halo engine to support the different kinds of stuff we were doing with ODST, so the Halo 3 multiplayer experience had to live on its own disc with its own engine as its own executable," explains Curtis. "I don't believe there are any hooks to make Firefight expandable, either. I guess we could do an auto-update to put those hooks in but right now it's not something we're planning on, especially with Reach out next year. We have lots to work on."

It's from the first ODST disc you'll access both Firefight and ODST's final bonus - Halo: Reach's beta test, available early in 2010. Bungie will keep dishing up playlist updates for at least another year, but the future of Halo multiplayer is in Reach, and the future of Bungie looks set with Xbox.

"We've been big fans of the Xbox and the 360; it's something we're super comfortable working on and the support we get for working on it is top notch. I think we're always able to come up with ways to get more out of it. We're certainly interested in the things we could do with Project Natal; it's such a fantastic new interface. Reach is definitely some way into production so it's difficult to say how much we could or couldn't try to include that into the experience."

Halo 3: ODST really is everything Bungie initially claimed that it wouldn't be. It's part Halo, part Far Cry 2, part Ghost Recon; over twice the size of the game they initially announced at TGS 2009, and stealthy right up to the point you actually pull the trigger. Bungie's Halo expansion has become the most ambitious and creative Halo title since Combat Evolved - always unique and original in the big city, always intense and exciting in the flashbacks, and always the very best of two very different worlds.

Michael Gapper