The two-and-a-half-meter- alien stalked its prey. Its split mandibles snapping open and shut like a land-dwelling hermit crab. The alien gripped its plasma rifle tightly as it stared into the featureless golden visor of a pearlescent green warrior.
The alien Covenant is back in 343 Industries' Halo 4 and battling against them still feels as good as it did back in 2001. Graphically they look better than ever and from a gameplay standpoint they are more aggressive. But the new enemies in the series, the Prometheans are very different adversaries. In a recent interview with Time Magazine, the game's creative director Josh Holmes explains the game's refined tactics and deadly new enemies.
"We knew players had been fighting the Covenant for a decade - more than a decade by the time the game came out," Holmes said. "With familiarity comes predictability, and we wanted something that would breathe new life into the Halo sandbox and really challenge players in new and exciting ways."
So in order to avoid predictability and stale gameplay, the development team add a new class of antagonists that would collaborate, maneuver and strategize in battles against the player.
"The obvious addition was a new class of enemies," Holmes said. "That really made sense as we were honing in on wanting to explore Forerunner culture and going to a new location that would be the core of much of our story. That led us to explore Forerunner enemies. From the beginning, one of the concepts that resonated with the design team was the idea that the enemies would be collaborative, that they would represent a certain level of challenge individually but when you put them together, they would complement one another on the battlefield."
The team behind Halo 4 began prototyping simple enemy types at first, and later added in enemy-types that complemented each other in battle creating core behavioral components, according to Holmes.
"We started out prototyping simple behaviors, like the Watchers' ability to shield other enemies," Holmes said. "Then we added the Watchers' ability to resurrect the Knight. And we looked at the Knight and the different ways it could move around the battlefield to dramatically shift your focus as a player. We knew we had to get it right, to make them feel very different from the Covenant, yet still feel like they fit in a Halo game."
Visually, 343 Industries strived to create enemies that looked totally different from the villains seen in previous installments of the franchise. According to Holmes, it was a painstaking process and each of the new Prometheans went through many different phases during the design period.
"On the visual side, we explored totally different concepts for the Prometheans," Holmes said. "Again, we knew we had to get them right, to make sure they could stand up to the Covenant and hopefully become as well-loved an enemy to fight. We went through literally dozens of different concepts. For a while it felt like we really weren't getting anywhere."
Holmes said the Prometheans weren't complete in till there was an amalgamating of visual style, battlefield functionality and the core behaviors of each Promethean.
"It wasn't until we had a bunch of the core behaviors finely honed and polished, and we had this core visual style that was informed by a lot of the work on the Forerunner aesthetic, that it came together and we had animation going on that brought these characters to life," Holmes said. "That's when people started to see the light at the end of the tunnel and realized we had something special. But it was probably one of the most painful aspects of the Halo 4 development process, because of the amount of rework and the high bar we held ourselves to."
Halo 4 is intended to be the first of a new trilogy of Halo series games, named the "Reclaimer Trilogy," and the first to be developed by 343 Industries. Master Chief will return as the main protagonist, and the AI Cortana returns as well. Halo 4 is now available worldwide with the exclusion of Japan where the game will be released on Nov. 8.
The first official Halo 4 launch trailer was produced by "Fight Club" and "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," director David Fincher and was directed by visual effects craftsman Tim Miller. The two-minute trailer debuted "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon." You can check out the 'Scanned' trailer below...