Kiki Wolfkill talks about Halo's Pillars

Kiki Wolfkill talks about Halo's Pillars

Gameplanet has had a fairly long yarn with Kiki Wolfkill whom Halo fans will know as Frankie's right hand lady - i.e. one of the producers of Halo 4. 

Gameplanet: You mentioned core pillars – what are these, and how do they influence the way 343 put together the game?

Kiki Wolfkill: You can look across any number of games and they'll have similar pillars, but for us, when we sat down and started thinking about what Halo 4 needed to be, we looked at the whole breadth of things coming out over the next three years, we looked at player behaviour over the next three years, we looked broadly at how entertainment is evolving, and tried to think about those. So I think where we landed was that we needed to understand what is the key strength of Halo, and what are the key things that differentiate us.

So rather than chasing other things, let's make sure we're really doubling down on things that are strengths and differentiators of Halo. And I think epic Sci-Fi is one of those, and a lot of people on the team – including myself – can clearly articulate how they felt the first time they played Halo 1. The first time they landed on that Halo ring. That became something that really resonated with the team in terms of how do we get back to that feeling?  

For people who have played Halo before, but also for people who haven't played it before, because there are people who were five years old when the first Halo came out. So how do we get that moment of wonder and awe and amazement that the player has been transported to this place that they want to explore. So that kind of gets back to that first pillar – we wanted to deliver this epic Sci-Fi adventure, and closely tied to that is the return of Master Chief. We wanted to make sure that felt meaningful.

The second pillar was really around delivering a very powerful and visceral campaign and gameplay experience. Our Halo sandbox is a really powerful and unique characteristic of Halo, so it's about how we build on that and add whole new experiences that can be gained by adding new tools to the sandbox. That's where the new enemy class came from, and all the things they bring with them. The other part of it is how do we ensure a good first-person experience? 

A 900 pound Spartan named John 

You're a 900-pound Spartan, you're heavy and powerful, but you're also very nimble and light – how do we make sure the player feels that a little bit more in the style of their movement, and the audio that they're hearing in their heads-up display? I think those became focal points around that pillar.

Then the third is that we have to deliver on innovation in multiplayer. For us that manifested itself in Spartan Ops, exploring this whole new delivery method and a whole new co-operative mode, and also the changes we made to the competitive multiplayer. Having this infinity multiplayer overlay, this idea that there is a narrative that connects you to the campaign experience, and this idea that the campaign and multiplayer aren't these completely disconnected game experiences. We want all of it to feel like it's part of a whole, and in multiplayer when you build your Spartan force, you have a sense of place and understanding as being part of that universe.

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I think this shows that Kiki should clone herself and she should work on every game!

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.

Halo 4 designers talk Halo 4

Here's a sweet video from Game Informer which is an interview with 343 Industries' studio creative director Josh Holmes and Halo 4 executive producer Kiki Wolfkill as they share a few internally approved thoughts on the development of the new Halo trilogy and what may be on the gaming horizon.

It's a 20 odd minute interview - here's a couple of notes from it:

A new trilogy means there can be new freedoms in Halo 4's plot but it has to be grounded in the original trilogy's plot foundations.

Music- there will be new themes (and I guess motifs) to represent the new journey. I'm sure there will be the odd nod to the O'Donnell riffs but it sounds like it's gonna be all new.

Regarding the story of the Master Chief - Halo 4 is a deliberate attempt to show a more of the man - The issue the game designers face is to make it so the player always feel like they are playing the Chief they always know and not to detract from the prior experience (and I presume for first timers as well) of the Halo games. The solution is to give 'Le Chief 117' some extremely tough choices to make and the solutions will not be obvious. No indication of course if the actual player makes the choices for the Chief or if it's simply plot driven.

The Halo 4 game engine - is a different engine from Halo: Anniversary (like dur!) but is based on past halo tech that's been optimised into something new and thus is effectively completely internal tech.

The interviewer did his best to get some real details from Wolfkill and Holmes but they were both up to the task and indeed expressed their frustration that they could not share any real new Halo 4 news.

The gray scale framed pictures in the back ground look interesting..... did NE 1 glean any details?

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".