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Those were some of the most fun times I had working on maps, with Chris and Max during that phase. Steve: I remember my first week realizing exactly what we had to do, and how quickly we were going to have to do it. But to make it better, we have six weeks.
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And it was mostly made in just a few weeks. If it feels packed and unusually dense for a Halo map, that's because it was designed to showcase every fancy new feature Halo 2 had to offer. Snipers can duke it out laterally across the map, while the open spaces showed off the rocket launcher's ability to track vehicles. A giant wheel in the center anchors the map, giving attackers a sneaky route to the base's top floor and a hidden energy sword. The defense's base has a gate that can be opened to let in an attacking Warthog. Perhaps the definitive attack/defend objective map in Halo history, Zanzibar is packed with cool features. Image via Halopedia (Image credit: Bungie) You didn't have a choice: You just had to sit there and keep building, keep designing. Steve: You just can't make stuff as fast as we were making it back then, because of everything that has to go into it.Ĭhris: That was some of the most fun work I've ever done on a game. you want to get the gameplay stuff done six months before the thing is due because then the artists need to get on it and get it to the bar that games are at these days. We could constantly be dialing in even little nuanced parts of the gameplay just to make it feel right. Because it was just us, and we were both environment artists, we could still be changing things all the way. For everybody else's part, they'd chip in and we'd get support when we needed it to get it out the door.Ĭhris: I agree absolutely. I don't know what I would've changed about it. We could've thrown more bodies at it, but in some ways that just makes them more complicated and expensive and harder to manipulate. We didn't have as much time and manpower to do that side of it, but what that allowed us to do was spend more time making all those levels as fun as we needed them to be. Steve: A lot of the manpower spent making videogames in general is on the polish and the art and the extra layers that make it gorgeous and beautiful. If you haven't picked up on it yet, Carney is jokingly self-deprecating. That was the bar we were shooting for: Not looking terrible. We were just trying to get our stuff done so it didn't look terrible. I don't think we ever thought about it in terms of 'This might be really loved by a lot of people.' I think we just didn't want to let the team down. We never had a shortage of people who wanted to help us test. And everyone was helping us play multiplayer. We wanted that story of the Chief to be awesome, we wanted those worlds to be awesome, so it made sense that that whole emotional environment experience needed to be amazing. To Carney, it made sense that the focus was on the campaign.Ĭhris: Bungie was always, and still is, driven by the good singleplayer narrative. The majority of Bungie's staff were dedicated to the campaign, but other artists would jump in to help finish maps when they really needed it. Considering the multiplayer's impact and longevity, it was a surprisingly small team. In their roles as artists and designers, Carney and Cotton created the bulk of Halo 2's 12 launch multiplayer maps. When Steve arrived there was a golden light around him as he walked in… Max Hoberman, the design lead, was doing spawns and weapons and all the UI and Xbox Live integration which was brand new for us. I was the only one really working on maps formally. And we had to make the rest of the Halo 2 maps from March to August, maybe? It was very quick.Ĭhris: We knew everything we wanted to make, we had a bunch of grey boxes, but they were not even remotely close to done, or arted up or anything. So it sounds like I came on pretty late because Halo 2 was a three-year project, but if you know anything about the way we made Halo… it was pretty late, but there were only 2-3 maps done at that point. Steve Cotton: I actually came on March 1, the year Halo 2 shipped. It also allowed us to really determine whether or not a map was good. As we had that matrix of categories, all these maps we wanted to build, each one we then assigned a primary and secondary gametype, and that gave us a rough framework to design within. You can still play Territories on it, but it won't be an ideal Territories map. For Halo 2 we said we'll build a map and it'll primarily be a Slayer map, and you can also play CTF on it, and we'll really try to design towards both of those goals. With Halo 1, we're like "Every map works for everything" which means nothing really works that well. The other thing we tried to do, unlike Halo 1, with each map we wanted to aim at a primary game type and a secondary game type.