Halo 2: Killtacular

This article is about the ViDoc produced for Halo 2. For other uses of the term, see Killtacular (disambiguation).

The documentary on YouTube.

Halo 2: Killtacular is a video documentary contained on the disc for the Halo 2 Multiplayer Map Pack. It is an 18-minute video produced by Bungie, with the developers going over the maps available in the Bonus, Killtacular and Maptacular map packs, and their designs. The documentary also covers the making of the Another Day at the Beach cutscene also included on the disc.

Transcript

Opening

• Curtis Creamer: "At the end of Halo 2, we thought it would be a really cool idea if we got a lot of people involved with making small multiplayer maps."

• Aaron Lieberman: "Most people spend their time on multiplayer maps, not in the single player ones."

• Adrian Perez: "The importance of all the different things you can do is wildly changing."

• Michael Wu: "It's easy to get the concept; 'I am here to defend this space.'"

• Max Hoberman: "So we split into four groups."

• Curtis Creamer: "Fresh ideas."

• Paul Russel: "Non-stop action."

• Michael Wu: "Bang, bang, bang."

• Steve Cotton: "Frantic game of whack-a-mole."

• Curtis Creamer: "A lot of new eyes."

• Chris Carney: "Definitely see stuff that you're like, 'How the hell did they do that?'"

• Mike Zak: "Think you're exaggerating."

• Adrian Perez: "Swing!"

• Curtis Creamer: "Just like everybody else, we were getting a little bit tired of playing some of the same maps over and over, so it was a great opportunity to get more maps out there."

Containment

CONTAINMENT
_{STEVE COTTON,
// Designer
MICHAEL WU,
// Environmental Artist
PAUL RUSSEL,
// Environmental Artist}

• Michael Wu: "Containment is a big map."

• Steve Cotton: "It's definitely the biggest map in the downloadable content."

• Michael Wu: "Two-team, Capture the Flag, eight-on-eight."

• Paul Russel: "This map is so big, the Xbox can't even hold it."

• Michael Wu: "We are visiting the quarantine zone. These zones were created by the sentinels in order to prevent the Flood from escaping further and infecting even more of the Halo structure."

• Michael Wu: "It was supposed to be just a straight-up conversion of Timberland from Halo PC."

• Steve Cotton: "The bases are more intricate."

• Michael Wu: "...'cause they're basically the Sidewinder bases."

• Steve Cotton: "Make it more interesting."

• Michael Wu: "Change it even further."

• Steve Cotton: "More dynamic."

• Michael Wu: "Just change it altogether."

• Steve Cotton: "Two rocket launchers, but there's also two sniper rifles."

• Michael Wu: "Two Warthogs."

• Steve Cotton: "A Banshee, and outside of your wall is a tank."

• Steve Cotton: "We tried to do some things the other big maps didn't: incorporate the tank, hopefully effectively this time."

• Curtis Creamer: "They sort of flesh out their ideas with Max riding shotgun overall, making sure that they're not getting too crazy."

• Michael Wu: "We were going to have what we call 'boo bags'. They would just be these clusters of these boogers all over the level that would explode and harm you. Max decided that they bounced too much, so he made them pretty static."

• Max Hoberman: "If they're gonna make a change for artistic reasons, it's really helpful when they also can think how this will affect gameplay."

• Michael Wu: "Whenever you ask Cotton or Paul about it, they get pretty upset, because they liked them the way they worked."

• Steve Cotton: "You wonder why this map took three months to make."

• Paul Russel: "There wasn't really any precedent for bouncing testicles of death. I hate video games."

• Paul Russel: "What?!"

Backwash

BACKWASH
_{ROB STOKES,
// Designer
EAMON MCKENZIE,
// Engineer
JUSTIN HAYWARD,
// Environmental Artist}

• Justin Hayward: "Backwash is a humid environment. In all our other multiplayer maps, you can see another player from a quarter mile away. Here, you can't."

• Rob Stokes: "We knew we had to make this small, like, four-player Slayer style map; the idea came up to use the Halo 1 swamp as this foggy arena."

• Justin Hayward: "Old and crusty Forerunner."

• Eamon McKenzie: "We're saying this is on the Delta Halo, and it's actually an area very similar to the place on the Alpha Halo, where the Chief met Guilty Spark. In fact, we actually have the monitor of the Delta Halo. He's flying around the environment."

• Rob Stokes: "We definitely were looking to encourage the short game, so you'd be more inclined to use weapons like shotguns and the sword."

• Rob Stokes: "It's very easy to spawn and instantly see where everybody is fighting, because you see plasma bolts in the fog and you know exactly where everybody is, so you just go charging over there."

• Rob Stokes: "...and Nathan's favorite tactic is to get up here on this little metal protrusion that he's just lobbing grenades down at people.

• Nathan Walpole: "I'm kind of the resident griefer. I kill everybody on my team, laughing the top of my lungs."

• Eamon McKenzie: "Nathan's griefing is well balanced by his lack of skill."

• Justin Hayward: "Yeah, no one likes Nathan."

• Eamon McKenzie: "You know this map will be a success if people love this place. Slayer is Halo at its simplest form. It should be one of the places where it's just fun to find the high spots and gain elevation through jumping... and when you do that, you pull it off, um... I don't know, I feel like a Halo god."

• Justin Hayward: "And we got glow bugs. It doesn't get any better than that."

Terminal

TERMINAL
_{CHRIS CARNEY,
// Designer
MIKE ZAK,
// Environmental Artist}

• Chris Carney: "Terminal. It's a train terminal. Exists in New Mombasa."

• Mike Zak: "It's supposed to be Zanzibar-plus."

• Chris Carney: "What if we took Zanzibar to the next level? What would that map be?"

• Chris Carney: "It's completely asymmetrical. There are two bases, but it's not a mirrored environment, or an environment that is rotated so it's identical on both sides. The nature of it is it's imbalanced, so the attackers have a starting location and the defenders have a base, but they're not equal in like which one is easier to defend or easier to attack."

• Mike Zak: "The only real dynamic element is the train."

• Chris Carney: "If you play too close to the tracks, you'll die."

• Chris Carney: "Most of our Halo 2 maps, playing single flag CTF, the vehicles are fun, but they're not a key component of how you win or lose. We wanted to make a vehicle encounter significant; you cannot ignore the Wraith. The Wraith is a big deal. You need to take out the Wraith if you're an attacker. If you're a defender, you want to preserve the Wraith."

• Max Hoberman: "Everything that we're thinking about is balance. We put a lot of thought into making sure that a guy on foot can destroy that vehicle."

• Mike Zak: "No rocket launcher."

• Chris Carney: "No rocket launcher."

• Mike Zak: "No rocket launcher."

• Chris Carney: "It's a big design issue."

• Max Hoberman: "I think they've actually softened on that position a little bit. There's now a rocket on Terminal."

• Chris Carney: "Okay, people who are good with the Wraith: we've added the rocket launcher back in Terminal, which we didn't want to do in the first place. We tried to specifically designed this map, so we didn't have to use the rocket launcher, but now, because people have gotten so good with the Wraith, the rocket launcher's back in there."

• Mike Zak: "It's pretty rare that you'll get people just sitting in a spot and being cowardly. I hate cowards."

Elongation

ELONGATION
_{TYSON GREEN,
// Designer
DAVE DUNN,
// Environmental Artist
ADRIAN PEREZ,
// Engineer
AARON LIEBERMAN,
// Engineer}

• Tyson Green: "This is a remake of Longest, one of the maps in Halo 1. It's supposed to be this dirty cargo freighter. Two parallel hallways with bases at either corridor."

• Dave Dunn: "You can see Earth. You can see the moon. I thought about it: what I really hated about Longest that I wanted to fix. The ladders really destroy the realism."

• Adrian Perez: "I've never seen a ladder I liked."

• Dave Dunn: "You have this vertical motion, but you don't see your hands doing that. We got rid of all the ladders. Everybody hated ladders."

• Adrian Perez: "It's a really nice thing about this map is that there's total mobility."

• Tyson Green: "It's a fairly simple map, so that it's easy to navigate, easy to understand."

• Adrian Perez: "One of the ways that you can get to the second floor from the ground floor is to take advantage of these boxes that are moving around."

• Max Hoberman: "Gameplay-wise, the crates are a huge change, because they create this jumping path that you can get between the two levels on the map from any point."

• Adrian Perez: "One of the interesting things that just kind of fell out of this design and this is not intentional... if you are on the conveyor belt, even though you're moving faster than the motion sensor, if you're standing still, you don't show up. It has like this one thing that we've never had before, which is you can hide and actually end up with a different spot than you were... and the whole time you won't be on the motion sensor."

• Tyson Green: "I wanted to put the ladders back in, but make them slanted, so that you didn't have the same horrible problems that you did."

• Dave Dunn: "You never expressed that though."

• Tyson Green: "I never expressed that."

• Dave Dunn: "He would have been shot down."

• Adrian Perez: "It would have been a problem."

Relic

RELIC
_{ROB STOKES,
// Designer
EAMON McKENZIE,
// Engineer
CHRIS BARRETT,
// Environmental Artist}

• Rob Stokes: "Relic. Big island."

• Chris Barrett: "The original idea came from the very first Halo multiplayer map back on the PC. Four-on-four; that's kind of the sweet spot for that map. The more people, it gets a little more chaotic."

• Rob Stokes: "We were looking for an asymmetric one-flag CTF map that played differently than any of the others."

• Chris Barrett: "It's designed specifically to have a unique experience for Capture the Flag."

• Rob Stokes: "It's set up to have a side that is protecting the flag."

• Chris Barrett: "So there's always an attacker and defender keeping the entire map in play at all times."

• Rob Stokes: "It totally changes the way the two sides behave; one of the smart routes to go is down here by the beach, because that's where the rocket launcher is."

• Chris Barrett: "Both sides try to fight to get that as quickly as possible."

• Max Hoberman: "Do you take the quick route and run out into the open to get to the base, or do you take the longer but safer route? I mean there's a trade-off; we intentionally make it so that the fastest route is the straight line that's running the gauntlet, so it's risk versus reward."

• Chris Barrett: "Scoping out over the entire island is really cool, because you can see people coming up through the rocks."

• Eamon McKenzie: "There's a contest to go and get the rocket launcher, much like there's a contest to get the sniper rifle. You have to make real conscious decisions about what's important to you to win this map."

Gemini

GEMINI
_{TYSON GREEN,
// Designer
TOM DOYLE,
// Environmental Artist}

• Tom Doyle: "It's Gemini. Its origin is in Marathon."

• Tyson Green: "In Marathon Infinity, there is a map called Duality; that's the fundamental structure that we took."

• Tyson Green: "It's not really a symmetrical or asymmetrical map. It's an arena free-for-all map."

• Tom Doyle: "We wanted it to feel holy, otherworldly. This isn't something for the rest of the