One of the new features in Halo 3 is the ability for four players to play on the same screen at one time.

Microsoft Corp. launches what is perhaps the most eagerly awaited video game of the year, Halo 3, on Sept. 23 for the Xbox 360. The first two Halo games were largely responsible for the success of the first Xbox, and Microsoft is hoping the third instalment will help spur sales of its successor console. Mike Zak, environment art lead for game developer Bungie Studios, gave CBCNews.ca a preview of what to expect in the third game.

What's new and different this time around?

There's a lot that's different. It's on the Xbox 360 so we have a lot more horsepower to play with. On my end, I'm dealing with the visuals so a lot of my time is spent thinking about how we can cram even more detail and beauty into the game. We have a huge increase in terms of things like blades of grass we can have and the fact that our water has waves and ripples, and our lighting has realistic exposure adjustment. Things like that.

On the gameplay end, we have scores more vehicles and characters on screen at once. Then we've got lots of features, like four-person co-op [which allows four people to play the game on one television], to saved films and Forge.

What exactly is "Forge?"

It's an editor. It's like playing a multi-player game, although rather than just getting into the game and having a timed round and competing, it actually allows players to reconfigure the multi-player map in a number of ways. They can actually place crates and objects and weapons and grenades — they enter a mode where they can edit the objects that are on the map. They can do that together over Xbox Live and have a networked game, where you're editing the map and you can invent new games or make slight tweaks to your favourite games and then play it. It's a fairly new concept. I don't think there's an exact equivalent even in the PC world, which is historically more the home of letting the user edit the content.

What about plot developments — what happens in this one?

Halo 3 pretty much starts right where Halo 2 left off, where the Chief is returning to Earth. As far as plot development, we're not really talking about that beyond letting people know what they can expect the start to be about. The Chief is basically coming back to save the Earth from the Covenant, but we don't want to spoil it for people who really care about what that arc is going to be.

Which mode got more attention during development, the single-player or multi-player?

Both are incredibly important for different reasons. The multi-player component definitely gets more playing time in terms of how much time gamers actually spend on Xbox Live, but the single-player campaign is an incredibly important way of getting people involved. It's pretty uncommon for someone to play multi-player and not have played single-player, whereas there definitely is a large chunk of our audience that will never play multi-player and they really care about the story. You can't really have one without the other.

In terms of development time, it generally takes more art staff and more time to create the single-player campaign because there are all the story components. You're really taking on a big grand adventure, whereas the multi-player game is very focused. We have a dozen, give or take, small arenas and we spend a lot of time making them perfect because you know they're going to get so much replay. In single-player campaigns, you have massive rolling landscapes and you change from environment to environment to be led along through the story, so there's a lot more content involved and to be generated.

When you're developing the multi-player game, do you have to wait for the single-player version to come together first?

It can go both ways depending on the studio. With Halo 3, we worked on both from the start, but it is a sequel so there were certain questions that were already defined for us. We use the term "sandbox" to refer to any part of the game that defines the toys we get to play with, so that means the characters, the weapons, the vehicles and the way they interact, and the relative strengths and weaknesses of all those to each other — that balance has to work for both single-player and multi-player. There's a little bit of give and take. Some times we'll test a weapon that's really easy to exploit in single-player because you're fighting against the computer, but when you come up against the real world in multi-player it has a different effect. So there's a little back and forth as the process goes along to make sure it's balanced for both.

A lot of games these days give the single-player game short shrift in favour of a richer multi-player experience. How long would it take somebody to get through the single-player game in Halo 3?

The thing about our single-player campaign is you can rush through it if you want, but it's kind of impossible to give an actual time estimate because it's so dependent on skill. We offer a lot of things in our single-player that incentivize you to actually play it in different ways. We have four difficulty levels and they're very distinct, the experience is distinct. We don't just tweak a variable and make enemies have 20 per cent more health per difficulty level. It's a lot more involved than that. If you're a really good player and you play on "easy," you could probably run through the game and not fire a shot, but it's not going to be a very fulfilling experience. Likewise, if you've played the game a number of times and you feel like you've really got the skills, then I challenge people to play it on "legendary" with all the "skulls" activated. We have this system we call "skulls" which, in addition to the difficulty level, modify a number of things in the game. There are missions where even some of the players in the studio will take 10 hours to get through. It's more about how you want to play and what kind of experience you want to have. I don't think Halo is done when you've finished the campaign; I think it's something you're going to want to go back and replay on different settings.

Can you give a brief rundown of some of the new weapons and vehicles?

One of the new vehicles that's pretty popular so far is the Mongoose, which is like an ATV, four-wheeled, speedy little vehicle that carries two guys. It can be really fun in multi-player in capture-the-flag games, to zip in really fast. It has no offensive capability, unlike the Warthog or the Scorpion or the Wraith.

Can the person sitting on the back fire?

Yeah, but it's rare you'll see him being very effective. They're much more of a target than a threat. Your only advantage is speed and agility.

We've also expanded the Covenant fleet. The Brute characters play a much more prominent role, so we've given them some vehicles that embody their personalities better. What we used to call the Brute chopper, which is now called something else, is basically a big, really mean big wheel. It's got a huge front wheel and is like a massive motorcycle that hovers. There's also a new human flying vehicle called the Hornet.

Weapon-wise, there is a new class of items that we call equipment — the bubble shield and turret weapons — and the more and more we play with them, the more we realize they're not just an extra gimmick to add complexity. They really become critical in different game types and can be pretty significant modifiers to the battlefield.

Much of the Xbox's success is due to Halo's success. Do you guys feel any pressure for what is essentially a big part of Microsoft's non-software ventures?

The biggest pressure we put on ourselves is internal as a studio. We're certainly aware of the larger context to some extent, of what it means to the Xbox division, but really, we're a games studio. We all sit in one big room together and are really focused on making the best game we possibly can. If there was another Halo out there that was carrying the console, that's not really what drives us. We'd be working on Halo 3 regardless of the larger impact.

Do you get any sort of direction from Microsoft, or anyone looking over your shoulder during development?

They definitely have interest, but I've never in my job had anyone outside of Bungie come talk to me directly. I don't know how much of a heat shield our studio head provides, whether it's a huge amount or a little. The end result for me is I just get to focus on what my job is. In general, I think the relationship with Microsoft has been really healthy. From what I hear, and I have to believe it because I don't feel any pressure, is that they trust us to make good decisions and make a good product. They give us that freedom because they know we're grown-up enough to handle it.

What is it about Halo that has made it so popular?

The thing about Halo that surprised so many people is there were a lot of entry points for different types of gamers. It was a pioneer for FPS [first-person shooters] on a console, it introduced a genre of gamers to a system and to a way of playing that they didn't really expect could work, myself included. I was definitely a PC-based FPS player and they came up with simple mechanics that made it really fun and intuitive, but it also went beyond being a straightforward shooter and innovated in that way. It also offered a rich and detailed backstory, which you could uncover if you were interested. For people that want an adventure and fiction, they can read novels about the Halo universe. For people that are really meticulous, technical, competitive FPS players, they can get into death matches and play that really specific type of game if they want. It offers a really broad range for gamers that FPS didn't offer at the time. We've tried to continue that with Halo 3 by providing ways of interacting in our universe that were previously unavailable, like the Forge, like saved films — the ability to play back your whole experience and watch it from different camera angles and share them with your friends over Xbox Live.

Is it easier to make a sequel than an original?

I don't know what's easier. It depends on the scope of the product. A sequel can be really hard when you try to balance staying true to the original tone or vision that people found appealing, but you don't want to just remake the same game. You want to offer something new. There's always that balance. I wasn't around for the making of Halo 1 … but it was probably a little harder to come up with the original, I would think. Sequels certainly don't make themselves though.

This isn't going to be the last Halo game, is it?

It's the last in the trilogy, but there are other Halo universe games coming out. You have a real-time strategy coming out from Ensemble Studios (Halo Wars) that's looking really cool. We have a project where we're collaborating with Peter Jackson of Lord of the Rings fame, and with Weta [Jackson's development studio] down in New Zealand, that will be set in the Halo universe. The story arc that was begun with Halo: Combat Evolved is definitely reaching a conclusion with Halo 3.

[an error occurred while processing this directive]