Entrevues du 4 Mai 2001
Entrevue avec Matt Soell (weekly updates) par CoreMagazine.

CoreMagazine.com: What role have you played in Halo's development? Explain your day job to us.

Matt: I am but a humble Community Guy. I talk about Halo with the public and talk about the public with the Halo team. I'm not so much a member of the development team as I am a vector for information - an important consideration when you have developers like those at Bungie, whose social niceties went out the window shortly after they were hired.

CoreMagazine.com: Bungie has been working on PC titles for years now. How has working for Xbox been different than developing for the PC? What are the main differences and similarities between the development process for the two platforms (PC and Xbox)?

Matt: Actually it's not that different. The big plus of developing for a console is the etched-in-stone nature of the hardware; you don't have to worry about people with weird cards or old drivers. But much of the Xbox hardware has been under construction while we've been here, so there's still a little of that uncertainty. Developing for any console has its challenges, and it's not something we've done before so we're learning a lot. But the development process itself hasn't changed all that dramatically.

CoreMagazine.com: Are there features you couldn't implement for the Xbox version of Halo that were present in the PC version? If so, give us an example of a few things that didn't make it in.

Matt: There are always a bunch of ideas we have at the beginning of the development process that don't make it into the finished game for one reason or another: not enough time, not enough people, too hard to implement, too buggy, etc. We usually don't talk about them because we might want to try them again later. [smiles..] The cuts we've made so far were all made for time or gameplay reasons, not because the Xbox couldn't handle it. Weapons or vehicles that disturbed the balance of the game, mission ideas that didn't make sense in the context of the story, that sort of thing.

CoreMagazine.com: This is always a hard one to estimate, but can you roughly guess what percentage of the Xbox hardware you're tapping into for Halo?

Matt: We're trying to max it out. Since the day we got the game running on the Xbox the goal has been to push the hardware and see what we can do. We've hit a couple limits, but we're still using devkits operating at 50% of planned capacity.

CoreMagazine.com: How will Halo stack up against the likes of Unreal Tournament and Timesplitters?

Matt: Quite well I think, but I'm biased, and there is a key difference between Halo and the other two. Like those games, Halo will be a lot of fun to play against other people - but there's also a very rich single player campaign with a deep storyline. We still like stories in our games.

CoreMagazine.com: How will you map the PC control scheme of Halo to the Xbox controller? What will the control layout be like for the title?

Matt: After much work we've found a couple schemes we think work well, although if there's time we plan to make the controls user-configurable. Consequently, if all goes well, the layout will be whatever the individual player wants it to be.

CoreMagazine.com: Are there new elements that Bungie is implementing for the Xbox version that aren't in the PC or other versions of the game? If so, give us an example of a few of those features/elements.

Matt: If you look at the screenshots or footage from the old builds of Halo as opposed to the newer ones, you'll get a sense of some of the things the Xbox allows us to do graphically. PCs will supersede that eventually, of course, but we completely retooled our engine to take advantage of what the Xbox can do.

CoreMagazine.com: What is the target frame rate for the final version of Halo? What frame rate has the latest beta copies been running at?

Matt: All the builds so far have a frame rate cap at 30 FPS, which as you can imagine is well within the Xbox's capabilities. The final frame rate hasn't really been determined yet; it'll be as high as we can make it (within reason of course).

CoreMagazine.com: One of the reasons that GoldenEye 007 for the Nintendo 64 earned such high praise was its deep multi-player engine that kept gamers playing months after they had beaten its single-player missions. What multi-player features will Halo offer gamers?

Matt: Halo's multiplayer is still under development and a lot can change between now and when we ship, so I can't tell you about what's planned. I can say that our internal document outlining the bare-bones multiplayer options is a lengthy document, and if half of it gets into the game we'll have a great multiplayer title.

CoreMagazine.com: When can gamers expect Halo on store shelves -- can you give us anything more specific other than "fall 2001"?

Matt: Nope. [smiles..]