Developing the Game: Visualizing the Story

Visualizing the Story is a documentary film on the story and characters in the Halo 2 campaign, released by Bungie on the Halo 2 Limited Collector's Edition bonus disc under its Developing the Game section. The video was later uploaded to Bungie's YouTube channel on April 16, 2010.

Transcript

• CJ Cowan: The story of Halo 2 is... it's the story of Halo 1 told from the Covenant perspective.

• Joseph Staten: The Halo story is one about salvation. It's a story of warriors with not a lot of options, who have their backs up against the wall.

• Joseph Staten: In Halo 1, we focused on the humans' perspective, their fate at the hands of the Covenant, but we never really got too much into the Covenant side of the story itself.

• Jason Jones: Arbiter is a real challenge to the story, because he's—he's not the Chief; he's not human.

• Joseph Staten: As the player, at the start of the game, you don't realize that you're actually going to play this Elite general who's been disgraced, but you get this quick glimpse at—"Ah, that's the flip side of what happened to the Covenant at the end of the first game."

• Joseph Staten: A couple levels into the game, you realize, "Oh my God, I get to play this guy."

• Jason Jones: People identify with humans; people care about humans more. So we really have to put the Arbiter in a position in the story where he matters and where the player cares about him.

• Shi Kai Wang: You want to look at this guy and you want to see, "Wow, he's just as cool as the Master Chief."

• CJ Cowan: This time around, it's essentially we're telling two stories simultaneously. We're going back and forth from level to level.

• Jason Jones: Way over 90% of the time, there's going to be the player who's not paying any attention to the story. He's writing his own story; he's going to do—it's basically just an action movie. That's really a challenge in a game: when you stop the game and give the player your dose of the story. And you've succeeded when he's not thinking of those two things as different anymore.

• Marcus Lehto: What we are doing now in Halo 2 is so much more in-depth. We're bringing so much more character to each one of the entities.

• Shi Kai Wang: This new character here is the Prophet. They wanted some guy who is omnipotent-looking and, you know, really powerful—looks like—but really old and fragile.

• Jason Jones: Prophets are the ultimate bad guys.

• Marcus Lehto: In Halo 2, we are really making a bigger effort to give each one of those characters their more animalistic behavior, something that's more true to the actual character themselves.

• Nathan Walpole: He's just this big, brutish guy who is just—you can probably equate him to, you know, a really badass biker you met in the bar and crossed the wrong way.

• Shi Kai Wang: A Brute is more of a combination of a gorilla-type face, and he's got a skin of a pachyderm. The mohawk—we were trying to think of a way to distinguish Tartarus from the rest of the pack. And the main bad guy in Gremlins 2 had a giant white mohawk, and that worked extremely well. Everybody realized, you know, who is the boss. I like him. I like him a lot. I think he's a cool character.

• Joseph Staten: I think Tartarus is someone who you really will, at the beginning, trust a little bit, but then end up loathing. And I think putting a bullet in his head is going to be extremely satisfying for people.

• Joseph Staten: The Chief was extremely robotic in Halo 1. I've made him a much more—not a sappy emotional character, but show some cracks in his armor. Explain a little bit more about his relationship with Cortana.

• Joseph Staten: And his relationship with another character, Miranda, who we're introducing—the daughter of Captain Keyes from the first game. This is a much more human story.

• Eddie Smith: Master Chief is pretty much the consummate professional. Does his job, walks off, doesn't even get the girl. He's that cool; he doesn't need her.

• Michael Wu: This game is about making a hero of everybody who picks it up.

• Joseph Staten: I'm really excited about the moment where the player puts down the controller and says, "Oh man, that was so awesome. I just beat the crap out of him."

• Bill O'Brien: And it's just fun. It's a great universe. I mean, I don't know if I'd want to live there, but it's fun to visit.