Interview: Gearbox on Halo!

Remember how we marvelled over Halo when Bungie first announced its futuristic first-person shooter for PC? Anticipation was, for want of a better phrase, sky-high. And then Microsoft, with Xbox looming, opened its bottomless wallet and snapped up developer Bungie and Halo, turning the FPS into an incredible launch title for its console.

And PC gamers around the globe let out an exasperated "thrrpppp" of breath, like many sad, deflating balloons.

The wait for Halo on PC has been considerable. It's a wait that's left many gagging for the game when it was first announced frustrated and annoyed, some even going so far as to say it's now simply too little, too late. But we're not so sure...

While the single-player campaign Halo PC is pretty much identical to that appearing in the original Xbox outing, where the former outdoes its cousin is with the enticing addition of online multiplayer. Sure, online action doesn't float everyone's boat, but those who have dabbled extensively with Halo PC multiplayer have come away highly impressed.

Halo on PC is now expected around October, suffering a slight slip, but the extra time gives Gearbox the opportunity to get things fully ship-shape for release.

We recently had the chance to sit down with Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford, at his Dallas HQ, to discover how the developer has handled such a high profile project.

Interview conducted by Jamie Sefton

How did you feel when you knew you were going to be working on PC Halo?

Pitchford: It's really interesting, because we were talking with Microsoft about a few different things, and they said: "Hey, by the way, we're trying to do Halo on PC but we're having trouble finding the right people."

My first reaction was: "Are you kidding? Isn't that already being done? What's going on here, because I love Halo and I've been waiting for the PC version forever!" And my second reaction was: "That'd be awesome. It's a brilliant game."

I've been working on first-person shooters since the beginning and it was really surprising and refreshing to have a solid game come out of Bungie. The combat feedback loop is perfect, they got that down - that's something that's hard to do and it's getting people to understand that, but Bungie nailed it. Halo is really fun and offered something you didn't have before with the vehicles and the physics. So it was a no-brainer - once they let us know that there was an opportunity, we we're like, let's work on this immediately!

How closely did you work with Bungie for this?

Pitchford: The Bungie producer practically moved into Gearbox! In the initial phases we met together to talk about their ideas and our ideas to develop a core philosophy about spending all our creative efforts on the multiplayer side of things, and preserving what was so great about the single-player game.

There's a huge amount of influence from Bungie, and rightly so - it created this franchise. We've worked with a lot of people's intellectual property, such as Half-Life, Tony Hawk and James Bond, and what we've always done consistently is defer to the wishes of the people who created those properties.

In most of those cases when you're dealing with gamers, it works out really well - as with Bungie. Those guys are gamers and so it worked out really well. It's a little bit trickier when you're working with a movie property - those guys make great movies, but it's much harder with the Bond games. With Halo, it's just been awesome. We're already trying to work out a way to keep working with them after this!

So, do you have any secret plans with them to do Halo 2?

Pitchford: No, no. Halo 2 is all Xbox. It's hardcore. If you haven't got an Xbox and LIVE yet, you will do by the time Halo 2 comes out. I mean, I can't wait for it. I've seen a little bit of what those guys are doing and it's awesome.

Did you come up with the new weapons or were they things Bungie had wanted to use, but didn't have the time to implement?

Pitchford: It depends really. The flamethrower was something Bungie wanted to do - in fact the model was originally built by Bungie artists and we rebuilt it with the theme it created there and got it working. It's a fantasy to have a flamethrower, right? It's a cool weapon. There a some games that have attempted it and where those games have succeeded visually, they haven't succeeded with the power of it, because they felt like they had to balance it down.

We wanted the flamethrower to look badass and be badass. With the fuel rod gun, that was something we wanted to do, because there's actually an alien in the game that uses something familiar - this idea of a plasma mortar shell - but there's nothing that the Master Chief can actually use. Having an indirect fire mortar weapon added to the sense of combined arms tactics, with the vehicles and so on in the team games - we were really excited to push that forward.

What made Halo such a classic and why is it still such a good game two years after it's original release?

Pitchford: I don't think it's one single thing, it's a complete package. This is surprisingly good sci-fi - from a narrative point of view, Halo is brilliant. From a gameplay point of view, they've nailed the feedback loop, and the combat is spot on.

The feedback I get every time I pull the trigger with every weapon, I get that visceral feeling. The AI is natural and responsive and it feels like it's not just gratuitous or canned; it's dynamic. The multiplayer game is outstanding. I mean, the single-player game is great but the multiplayer game is amazing and people barely got a sense of that when they're playing on LANs - now they get to play it on the Internet on the PC, and it's just going to be huge. All these things combine to make a complete package.

Did you have to keep the single-player game as it is or was it voluntary?

Pitchford: We talked about it. I don't know if you played The Library section in Halo, but it's a pretty hardcore level - you have to improve your skill to complete it and some people criticised it for that. So on one hand there was some discussion about manipulating that and on the other hand we joked: "Let's make it three times as long, just to spite them!" The correct answer is to leave things as they are - it was designed like that for a reason, and it's loved by people who love Halo.

You've basically totally re-written the network code. I heard you mention before that you had half of your dev team working on that for Halo PC?

Pitchford: We have around ten people working on Halo PC at the moment but for most of the project we had six people working on it, with half of those manipulating the network code. That's more than we've ever had, and more than any game I've ever known had on that problem. It was because we weren't iterating and building the entire system from scratch. Quake, Unreal and all of these games have iterated their network code over time, but it's hard to start over. So we wanted to make sure we did that right - it's a vital part of this product. The multiplayer is really fun and can only be done by having a really good network model.

What kind of system would I need to achieve the same graphics quality on the Xbox?

Pitchford: You're looking at a GeForce 4-level card - not the MX, as the MX is a GeForce 2. If you're looking at better, you need a Radeon 9800 or GeForce 56100 FX. For minimum spec, you can go all the way down to a DX7 card, such as the GeForce 2. We're actually testing the game on laptops. It's not going to look as good without pixel shading, but the cool thing is that the fundamental gameplay is there and the performance is really good.

So what new graphics features would you see on the high-performance cards?

Pitchford: It'd be difficult to talk about everything because there are literally hundreds of pixel shaders in the game and we re-wrote every single one of them. But the advantage of working with Microsoft is that they own Direct X, so we've had its guys working with us and we've been working well with ATI and nVidia.

It appears you just play with Master Chief models in multiplayer. Did you plan on using the aliens as multiplayer characters?

Pitchford: We did talk about that, but we only have a certain amount of bandwidth - do we add new vehicles, weapons and maps or make the character look different? That's just a cosmetic change and we wanted to add to the gameplay. We've added content that matters from a gameplay point of view.

Will you include bots?

Pitchford: No. There's a couple of reasons for that. One is that the network architecture was re-written, so if we were to do bots, we'd start it now, which means the product would take even longer. This may still happen - I mean BotMan, the guy who created the foundations for all of the Half-Life and Counter-Strike bots, he works at Gearbox! He sits in that office right over there [points]. We'd like to expose this stuff to mod authors to see what they come up with.

We've designed the network game so you could add bots. The other reason is that people can now play Halo on the Internet now, it's a social thing. You can play Halo on your own already. We want people to play with each other first and build an online community.

And part of building this community is the idea of these modding kits you're going to release?

Pitchford: Oh yeah. After our number one priority of getting rid of any bugs, it's what to do after, about supporting the online community by providing the tools and tutorials. There's going to be several phases and we're going to talk a lot more about what our plans are when we get closer to launch.

Is it going to be a joint Gearbox/Bungie project?

Pitchford: Bungie is supporting it, but we're taking the initiative. Basically Bungie said it was awesome and are comfortable with us releasing the tools. But everybody want Halo 2, so we're not going to distract them from that!

Stuart Bishop