Are we ever going to see a live-action Halo movie?

Are we ever going to see a live-action Halo film?

That was the question put to Frank O’Conner by IGN.

In short, Halo fans are going to have to keep watching District 9 reruns for a long time.

Frankie: "It's important to say that the partners that we were connected with before were great – they were awesome to work with; I talk to those guys almost daily – and you can go read the details about studios grappling with each other," said O'Connor. "I do work every week connected to when a movie, or if a movie, is eventually made, are we ready to go? And the answer is very much so, yes. But we can afford to bide our time and wait for the exact perfect time and the exact perfect partner."

Exact perfect partner? They had him! His name was Peter ‘Look at all my Oscars and we made those films in New Zealand!’ Jackson.

"One of the most depressing things as a fanboy is the example of Dune. Peter Berg was going to remake that film. I love the original, so I'll just keep consuming it, but I thought, 'Okay, maybe Berg could do this.' So either he pulls out or they don't accept his script or they don't like the direction.

Whatever. I don't know.

I'm not a Hollywood gossip. And then it goes away. All big films do this. Look at Avatar. It's heading for the biggest grossing film of all time and it was mired in production hell. Ours was heavens compared to what they've gone through. You have a guy like James Cameron who just sits there, tenaciously saying, 'I'm going to make this and I'm going to make it right,' or he moves on to the next one.

Avatar.

It.

Was

Awesome.

But if they made Halo like that, fanboys would have a big bonfire outside Bill Gates house, setting red bricked 360’s alight with copies of Combat Evolved.

At least Frankie recognised this:

"And we're Microsoft," said O'Connor. "We're muscular. We can afford, much like James Cameron, to sit here and wait for the best opportunity…And by the way, can you print, right after I said that, I do not think that Halo is going to be the next Avatar? Cuz I will be dragged through the streets, bleeding, unless I caveat that!"

Check out this post I wrote a while back about why the Halo movie didn’t get made.

Jason Jones sensationally quits Bungie.

In a move that will wreak havoc at Bungie, founder Jason Jones has announced he has quit Bungie and will no longer be working on any projects, including the forth coming Destiny, a game he has been credited as being the creative force behind.

Jones said in a very terse press statement:

"My time with Bungie has come to an end. As I look back on my career, I've made some good games but at this stage of my life I've had a gutsful of being the chief Overlord at Bungie, and I need to find some new air to breathe. Farewell, and see you beyond the stars"

The internet has been rife with skuttlebut this morning with some Bungie forums suggesting Jones had cracked under the pressure of making Destiny, a game which possibly had the highest expectations for any game in recent history.

Some telling details have emerged on twitter about this issue. Marty O'Donnell, a long time Bungie stalwart tweeted "Sorry I stole your lunch Jason" while Frank O'Connor from rival studio, 343 Industries tweeted, "good luck with your re-invention of Tetris"

No other Bungie employees have made any public comment at this stage.

Destiny is expected to be released on 1 April 2014.

For clarity, this was an April Fool's joke. Joe Staten leaving was not.

Will we see the Master Chief's face in Halo 4?

Update: Forget all that rubbish below. 

Turns out in Halo 4 you see the Master Cheif's face, not once but twice! The first is in the introduction cinematic featuring Dr Catherine Halsey where she explains how the Master Chief was abducted from his home and made part of the Spartan Programme. The Chief as a child is featured at this point:

Halo players who beat the Legendary are given this teaser as to what the Chief truly looks like:

It's only a teaser shot of his eyes, but it does reveal a middle aged man.....

Original post below:

Frank O'Connor has confirmed what everyone pretty much takes for granted, that nobody will see the Master Chief's face in Halo 4.

The closest one can get is this description which Frankie refers to from the Halo: The Fall of Reach novel...

"If you went down into that line and found a nerd with a deep canon Halo t-shirt and said describe the Master Chief to this police sketch artist, that police sketch artist would then produce a perfectly accurate rendering of an older man, almost painfully pale, almost albino white, with pale blue eyes, reddish hair, close cropped to a skin head, and maybe the last remnants of freckles he had when he was a kid.”

Those with long memories may recall this face from the Halo 3 game however...

The supposed face of the Chief from the H3 beta build....

Update: Just like the first Halo ended with a tease of the Master Chief without his helmet, so does Halo 4. 

JJ Reviews: FUD Part II

Frankie as "Beamish"

Forward Unto Dawn Review Part II

What can I say? Nothing much happens in this second part of the FUD series. Again, it's a cliche mix of growing pains, military complex and no Master Chief.

I guess, the only really interesting thing about the part was a blink and you'll miss it cameo by 343 Industries' Frank O'Conner as "Beamish" - you might know him as director of the Halo franchise. He looked kind of evil, as if he was just aching to give the lil punk soliders the bash.

Read my less than thrilled review of part one over here.

How does the A.I. intelligence work for Halo 4?

Pwned Brute

Fans of the Halo series may remember how the Brutes suddenly got really smart in Halo 3 as a result of a wonderfully improved AI software coding deploy - what does Halo 4's enemies have to offer in the way of artificial intelligence?

Digital Spy did an interview with Frankie from the 343 Studio which canvases the issue. Frankie must have done a million interviews for Halo by now and he's seriously a measured pro at talking to the press. 

Question: How did you approach enemy intelligence? Because obviously Halo is known for these different enemies and you've got these whole new different sort of threat.

The Crawler

"There's a lot of similarities, but I think the biggest philosophical difference is that the Covenant - if you look at it from 10,000 feet - are very tactical and very aggressive, they will attack you. They do clever things and they'll flank you, and their levels of aggression change depending on the scenario, but we wanted to make this villain, the Prometheans, feel smarter and feel clever and feel more sophisticated even than you as a player.

"You [are] going into this with some sensibility and a going on of how the games universe works, but we wanted to make them feel clever and... like they could outsmart and overwhelm you. So they're very strategic and in some ways they're quite defensive; if you go to the level you're playing, there's some spots where you can go and stand and watch them fighting the Covenant. Because you're watching them do that in third person mode, you can see how careful and diligent the various components that Promethean battles are.

"So you'll, for example, see a Knight open his carapus and spawn a Watcher, and the Watcher will fly up and basically summons our crawlers to fight these Elites, and the Crawlers will try and overwhelm the Elites, and if the Elites have some success the Watchers will start shielding the Crawlers. While the Watchers are shielding the Crawlers and the Elites are being distracted by that, the Knights are flanking them."

"So you can actually watch the combat play out in a completely unscripted, organic and emergent way and constantly be surprised by it. Of course, sometimes that is happening to you, you can't always sit back and observe and it's only really on [the third mission] where you get that opportunity to watch how they fight, otherwise you're fighting them and this whole thing changes.

"When I play it, I'm never quite sure how I should be approaching these encounters. Should I take out the Watchers first so they're not continuously shielding the Crawlers? Or should I try and get the Crawlers first because they're harrowing me while I'm trying to concentrate on taking out some target?

"So they just feel smart and they feel sophisticated, rather than sort of ruthlessly aggressive all the time... and of course they team up against you - the Covenant and the Prometheans will actually finally team up against you - and that creates another complicated matrix of behaviours and systems.

"Once you get the muscle memory down, these encounters become second nature, but Halo doesn't…it's not one of those games that tries to fight you, or you get stuck in a corridor with a thousand bad guys coming at you. It wants you to succeed, but it wants you to be clever about how you do it.

"That's the pacing and that's how the AI kind of lures you in a combat situation that you will eventually excel on, but you should be challenged first instance."

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Sounds like Frankie and the crew have put some real thought into the interactions players can have with the Prometheans, which is fabulous news. 

Return of the Forerunners Vidoc for Halo 4

Return of the Forerunners Vidoc for Halo 4



Here's a 10 minute vidoc from 343 Industries that delves a little bit deeper into the Foreunner mythology  and class of Foreunner known as the Prometheans that will be the antagonists of the Halo 4 game.

Featuring usual suspects like Kiki Wolfkill, Josh Holmes, Brian Reed and of course Frankie, the vidoc explains about Foreunner design considerations and the challenge of making the presence of Forerunners fit as being active participators in a Halo campaign.

The vidoc also shows some of the flash new Forerunner weapons in action - the bolt pistol looks pretty cool!

As I hadn't noticed it before (despite the above picture!) the vidoc points out how the Prometheans have parts that appear to be floating, rather than attached to their giant frames.

This video leaves me in no doubt that Halo 4 is going to be the best game of the series. Some of the game play and vistas shown is totally amazing. The campaign has a high quality look about it.

I wonder if there will be a 'Bob' class of Forerunner and if so what should his name be? I propose Jack.

Video of Halo fiction panel from Comic Con

Here's the full (official)  recording of the Halo Fiction panel from the SD Comic Con. it's an epic 52 minutes in length...

As Frankie notes as he introduces the panel, it's 117 days until the release of Halo 4. 

To Infinity and Beyond the H4 Campaign

To Infinity and Beyond the Halo 4 Campaign 

Here's something I had not realised - the Infinity crashes into Requiem but Spartan Ops is set actually 6 months after the Campaign - with the Infinity happily floating in space.

Frankie explains to Venture Beat

Will the Halo 4 campaign be a complete story unto itself? One of the first things we see in the campaign is the USNC Infinity crashing into the planet Requiem. But six months later, when the fiction for [co-op multiplayer mode] Spartan Ops takes place, it’s back up in the sky. And isn’t that a little spoilery?

Frank O’Connor: That is a little spoilery, and it’s a necessary spoiler. But the game will end with the universe having changed pretty dramatically. It’ll be a satisfying ending, and you’ll have achieved a lot, but you’ll lose stuff, too. We’re trying to tell a much more emotionally resonant story this time.

Halo: The Thursday War novel announced

Tor Books has just announced the title and release date for the second novel in the Karen Traviss’s “Kilo-Five Trilogy” of Halo books, the follow-up to last October’s Halo: Glasslands. Halo: The Thursday War will release on October 2, 2012.

Halo: The Thursday War picks up immediately where Halo: Glasslands left off, with forces on Earth and among the Covenant threatening a peace that is precarious at best. With a splinter group among the Sangheili pushing for war, some human colonies rebel against earth authority; and as ONI policy continues to shift with the volatile situation in space, the discovery of a trove of Forerunner technology on Onyx provokes leaders on Earth to seek uses for it in the conflict. For the fight is far from over….

“I wanted to focus on what it feels like to operate in a fragile ceasefire that’s turning into a mass of small, unpredictable wars where the enemy is much harder to spot and define,” says author Karen Traviss. “It’s not about big set piece space battles, superheroes, and hardware; this is a messy conflict seen at close quarters by real people with their own problems, whether those people are human, alien, or artificial intelligences.”

Traviss, whose first foray into the Halo Universe came with the short story “Human Weakness” in fall 2009’s New York Times bestselling “Halo: Evolutions” anthology, launched her new trilogy last fall with the acclaimed bestseller Halo: Glasslands. A veteran author who has penned number one bestselling novels in the Star Wars universe, bestselling novels for the Gears of War franchise (she most recently served as lead game writer for Gears of War 3), as well as her own science fiction series “The Wess’Har Wars.”

“From the very first page, The Thursday War propels you into a universe on the brink of chaos,” says Frank O’Connor, Franchise Development Director, 343 Industries. “It will immerse you immediately and enthrallingly into the events and circumstances that will come to define the state of the Halo universe in Halo 4. I can’t wait for fans and newcomers alike to experience the sequel to Glasslands.”

Terminals DO NOT change location in Halo

There had been some whispers that the location on the Terminals in the Halo Anniversary edition of the game would move dependant on the degree of difficulty the game was set at.

Frankie (the dude who draws Mister Chief) left a note on the interwebs to clarify:

"This used to be true, but was changed during test. Now they are all found in the same location, regardless of difficulty. In part so that players can switch difficulty in saved games, but there were other, more tedious reasons. The first one is very simple to find. They get progressively harder, however."

So there you have it. 

A collection of Frankie's Mister Chiefs

Mister Chief

If you've heard of Halo in recent times, you may have heard a guy called Frank O'Conner talking - a former Bungie player, he's now the Big Cheese at 343 Industries and he's charged with running the entire Halo franchise. So if he fucks up, Bill Gates can fire him. 

When Frankie (as he's known to fans) has some time to spare he likes to dabble in a bit of art and his muse is the Mister Chief. You'll find all sorts of Mister Chiefs out there - and they've developed an al most cult like status within the Halo community - so much so that Frankie can draw one and auction it off for charity.....

You wan't like me when I'm Angry Chief

Gold Mister Chief (drawn to celebrate Halo Anniversary).

The one when Frankie left Bungie

“Dear Bungie Fans,
It’s not you, it’s me.
In many ways, you’re too good for me. You can find someone better. Maybe a little hairy dude. Maybe a Hungarian Unicyclist. I just know that I don’t deserve you, and that this is just as hard for me as it is for you.
Yours truly,
Frankie.

Ichabod Chief, By Smurf Diggler

Oonsk and Mister Chief

Frankie's latest was an effort for the Haitian Earthquake relief fund which was auctioned off. It featured Mister Chief and Oonsk:

Frankie's cottage industry in churning out Mister Chiefs has created a little bit of fan love - here's some efforts by Halo community members who have shared their own bit of Mister Chief love.

Halo Anniversary has gone gold.

Halo Anniversary has gone gold. That means the game is finished and ready for production so us gamers can get our Halo loving hands on it in November. To celebrate Frankie drew up a golden Master Chief or I think is more often referred to as Mister Chief. Thanks Dude!

343 worried that people will hold them to a high standard. So what!

The peeps at 343 have been chatting with OXM and one of them appears to be a little scared of a little scrutiny. I think he forgot one thing - Bungie had an established track record of producing quality games - and this was before Combat Evolved changed the world forever - 343 Industries so far has not released a second of game to the retail market. Not a second. Hence you HAVE to expect their will be scrutiny.

Here's some lines from an OXM article with Kik Wolfkill (that is an awesome name!) and Frankie on whose shoulders the entire franchise is resting on.

 "Our goal is an amazing Halo game," creative director Kiki Wolfkill told OXM during an interview you'll read in our Halo Limited Edition Special, on sale now. "People looking back will probably be able to say: 'this is the flavour that 343 added' in relation to the games that came before."

"We'll come under a lot more scrutiny than Bungie did, even though their teams shift monumentally between games," O'Connor added. "There's definitely core people still there, but other than that vastly different people worked on each game. There'll be differences in style that will be attributed to 343 that wouldn't have been examined under the same microscope if it had been another Bungie team doing it.

Others said:

"You get that between levels in a game - level 2 in Halo 3 is different to level 3 because slightly different pockets of the team are working on it. There's little subtle things that we'll be held to an exacting standard for, that would have happened anyway. But there will be 343 elements and there will be core Halo principles."

"For the team, I think finding that balance has been one of our biggest challenges: how do we push new ideas, whilst continuing to respect the legacy. In terms of specifics, we're still pretty tight-lipped about what we're doing."

"There's a lot of things Call of Duty does beautifully that we should do better," O'Connor told OXM last month.

Frankie O'Connor has also revealed that the Halo 4 team isn't afraid to tamper with Halo's fiction, asserting that "the game is the king". Master Chief has changed a little in the time since Halo 3, with modified armour and new "behaviours".

Cortana's advancing age will play a key role in the new Reclaimer trilogy - according to series lore, older AIs experience a condition known as Rampancy, short-handed by O'Connor as "thinking itself to death".

Frankie talks about Cortana in Halo 4

Frankie recently had a chat with OXM and they let slip a little bit of what he said about our favourite purple AI, Cortana.

Said Microsoft's Gatekeeper of all things Halo:

"I can tell you Cortana's going to be a focal point of Halo 4, for sure."

"I think a lot of people are speculating on Cortana's age and the effects of age on an AI, there's this thing called Rampancy which is really just any AI thinking itself to death and Cortana's been around for a while and most AIs have a lifespan of seven years.

"Cortana's a little bit different in that she's been exposed to a lot more technology and information than other AIs via the Forerunner lore and mythos. But her state of mind, her relationship with the Chief, they're all going to be core elements of the story and the 'human drama' as it were in Halo."

So basically Frankie's telling us nothing and everything at the same time? What do you think Cortana's role would be? Will she stay with the Chief and act as his guide or will she disappear off into whatever that ship or planet is at the end of the Halo 4 Trailer?

Terminal Teaser: This ring is not just a weapon

Anya Stroud cosplay form Comic Con

A little teaser about the Terminals that will be found in Halo: Aniversary which was captured by an Panel audience member.

Are you ready RECLAIMER?




Extra for Experts: I mightily endorse this call for the Halo movie to be finally made!

Frankie says to open your kimono?

Now that the Halo fires have been ignited at 343i, Frankie is back leading the podcast charge - here's a link to discussion of Halo Anniversary and Halo 4 - good stuff and if I listened properly - those that bought Halo Reach will be able to get access to the 7 new multiplayer maps that will be available with Halo anniversary.

Nice work there Frank and company - this halo podcast sounz so much better than those from Bungie with that annoying smart alec that Urk replaced.

Extra for Experts - Frankie's Inaugural 343 Bulletin

What's 343 up to ?

The Angel and The Frankie

BS Angel pointed out on the Halo Waypoint that Wired Magazine has a small piece featuring 343's Frankie O'Conner as he chats about what a new Halo game might look like post Bungie handing over the tiller.

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O’Connor said he’s worked on such projects for years. “That part’s really easy,” he said. “The hard part is these nuts and bolts of making games,” adding that improving upon the Halo experience is “no small task, nor is it one any staff member takes lightly, or with hubris.”

To re-create a Bungie-like developer inside the walls of Microsoft, 343 — named after a snarky, backstabbing robot in the games — is staffing up heavily.

“You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to look at our hiring page and figure out roughly what we’re going to do,” said O’Connor.

Microsoft is attracting some of the game industry’s best and brightest: There’s Ryan Payton, a producer of the Metal Gear Solid games, and award-winning programmer and former rocket scientist Corrinne Yu.

“Every single person we’ve hired has joined the team because of a passion for the Halo universe,” O’Connor said.


Two of the Defiant maps, which were created in partnership with Dallas developer Certain Affinity, are straightforward, competitive battlefields drawn from places referenced elsewhere in Halo lore.

But 343’s O’Connor suggests that, if you really want to glimpse the future of Halo gameplay, you look at “Unearthed.” Rather than a traditional multiplayer battlefield, Unearthed is part of the game’s Firefight mode, which pits a team of players against a brief, computer-controlled alien invasion.

This segment of Defiant offers some clues as to how 343 might tackle a single-player Halo.

“It’s [single-player] campaign gameplay in a way, captured as these little digestible chunks,” said O’Connor. “You’re definitely seeing how 343 and Certain Affinity treat the AI and scripting in campaign mode…. Gameplay that’s emergent in a multiplayer space is different than gameplay in a sandbox with AI.”

As 343 moves forward with the franchise, fan-watcher Errera said he hopes the team captures the je ne sais quoi of Halo’s groundbreaking gameplay.

“The things that make Halo Halo are often little — the feedback you get when you fire a gun and see your shells flying out of the chamber,” he said. It’s slower-paced than other first-person shooters, and the resulting gameplay can prove more satisfying than in competing games.

“Success is less about memorizing where your enemies are and more about fighting out what sort of combat works for you,” Errera said. “Players often pick a weapon that meshes well with their gaming style, rather than picking up the one go-to weapon that everyone uses. Future Halo games will need to have this sort of flexibility.”

Defiant’s acceptance by the fan community is a weight off 343’s shoulders as the group continues to work toward its true purpose: Creating the next Halo game.

Both O’Connor and Bungie’s Osborne hinted strongly that fans can expect some big surprises timed to Halo’s 10th anniversary this November. This week 343 said it would host a Halo fan festival at Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle. Rumor has it that a high-definition Xbox 360 remake of the first Halo could be announced at E3 next month. 

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A halo announcement from 343 would be awesome as Bungie have said they will not be at E3 in an official capacity.

www.kinecthalo.com registered by Microsoft

So sometimes I’m a lil bit slow – I ony just realised that Microsoft has registered the domain name ‘KinectHalo.com’ This happened half way through 2010.

What’s the big deal you say? Well it potentially suggests that Halo will indeed be developed with the Kinect technology in mind.

That’s a maybe as the who is look up shows that Microsoft has over 482,304 other domains registered and I’ll guarantee most of those are unsued and simply there to protect against cyber squatters using Microsoft’s Intellectual Property such as Halo. As an aside -  imagine the yearly bill for all those domain name renewals!

Microsoft has made no formal announcements about the next Halo game but Frankie from 343 Industries who is in charge of Halo did recently say "I think that there are a lot of questions that fans of the series want answered, and we'll certainly be in the business of answering those questions" which is a good lil bit of double speak if you ask me!

So what do you think? Could Kinect enhance the Halo playing experience?

Want a job making the next Halo game?

It's no secret that Microsoft is making a new Halo adventure for us fan boys to take part it in, but did you know it was being made by 343 Industries? Bungie said goodbye with Halo Reach, and now Frankie and the crew he's been quietly putting together are working on something big that's probably gonna be called Halo 4 (or maybe a Halo: Remake?).

The only way to know for sure is get a job at 343 Industries, wherein after being sworn to secrecy you'll be given the keys to the Halo Castle. So if you're a animator, engineer, designer why don't you check out the jobs going at 343 and get yourself on the inside?

Sequel to Ghosts of Onyx to be written by Karen Traviss

Keen Halo Fans may have heard of science fiction author, Karen Travis - she wrote a piece for the Halo Evolutions short story collection a while back. Now she has been bought in by Micosoft to go the whole hog and write a series of Halo Novels including a follow up to one of the favourite Halo books, Ghosts of Onyx which was written by Eric Nylund,.a long time Halo writer.

As part of the announcement Traviss said:

“When I was invited to write Halo fiction I already knew it’d be right up my street; not just because military fiction is my specialty, but because there’s also huge unexplored depth, grey areas, and really uncomfortable moral dilemmas that underpin the Halo story, and that’s like catnip to a writer like me. I write what’s known as tight third person – that is, I get right inside each character’s head and see the world as they see experience it – and Halo offers some terrific chances to explore some fascinating psyches caught in complex situations.”

Which all sounds nice and promising. And she'd be able to deliver on those promises too (if she made them!) as she has experience writing for other science fiction worlds including Star Wars and The Xbox's own Gears of War.

Everyone's favourite Frankie, Frank O’Connor, know to fans as 343 Industries Director of Franchise Development backed up Travis's statement with:

“Halo fiction fans are incredibly passionate about the fate of the Spartans of Onyx and the state of the Halo universe in the aftermath of the game events. We know that Karen has the talent, skill and passion to not only bring those stories to life, but also bring her experience a fresh new perspective too.”

So, given the books will apparently be set after the events of the classic Halo 3 - will the books tie in with the as yet unannouced Halo project that 343 Industries are not so secretly working on? Bet the farm, and the entire Harvest!