Halo2 -- Entrevista --

http://interviews.teamxbox.com/xbox/908/Halo-2-Interview-Frank-OConnor/p1/

Obviously it is a daunting task to live up to expectations for bringing Halo 2 online. Give us an overview of some of the key features for Halo 2's online multiplayer offerings.

Frank O'Connor: The fundamental thing is that we want to give gamers the best of both worlds. First and foremost you can create any game type you want, on any map you want, with any rules you want; simple as that. You're going to do that in Arranged Games along with people on your Friends list, invite new friends, etc.

The Party System is the next big thing. The Party System basically recreates the social feel of a System Link game where this cohesive group travels around together. All you do is invite people to join your party. You can spam everyone on your Friends list and ask them to come join your party with one button press, which is really cool. You can also send voice messages as invites. Once gamers have joined a party, that group sticks together. Now, if the party leader leaves, it doesn't matter because someone else within the party will take over leader duties. That way you can bounce around on Xbox Live with your friends all night as a team. That is the exact System Link experience we are trying to recreate.


How many people in total can be in a party?

Frank O'Connor: Sixteen total, but in most situations you won't want to have that many people in your party for Live games because you're going to be playing against each other. It's cool to take eight people and go play against another eight strangers to see how you do. And you can do that in ranked games which are the games you find in OptiMatch and Quick Match. Ranked games track your stats and are uploaded instantly to Bungie.net. So if you link your Gamertag and then sign into Bungie.net using your Passport, you can get really detailed stats on your current and all past performances. You can also look up people by Gamertag to see how they've done, and you can see what the rankings are in the various Matchmaking Playlists and see who the best is in Small Teams, for example. As soon as you finish the game your stats are uploaded, so it is basically instantaneous.

Does that keep track of clan stats as well or just individual stats?

Frank O'Connor: Clans will be supported on Bungie.net in a detailed and comprehensive fashion, but we haven't shown or talked about anything on that yet.


What can you tell us about the lobby system? Will there be separate team lobbies, like Black Arrow is currently using to allow teams to discuss strategies beforehand?

Frank O'Connor: Well, you can do that anyway from the Xbox Live lobby of course, and you can also do that once you've established a party before you go somewhere. So yes, in short. However, we are not doing anything special as far as a pre-game "meet-up" other than what is already built into the game.

During our time with the game we noticed 32 different emblems when creating our customized character. Is that the final number or will we see additional ones or an emblem-creation tool of some kind (like in MotoGP 2)?

Frank O'Connor: Well the number of 32 is not set, but that's probably pretty close. You can customize each of those emblems in pretty vast ways. By just changing the colors and making to layers black of course makes them invisible so you can create new things. We made a conscious decision, for a variety of reasons, to not let players create just anything they want. Some folks would abuse it and make offensive or stupid things, so we decided to give everyone a set along with customization tools so they can make something cool.



There are currently four layers of customizations for a player. Is that pretty much how it will be in the final game?

Frank O'Connor: Yeah, those are the basic levels of customization for a player model. You can do that for both Elites and Spartans, of course. You can customize your emblem, primary and secondary colors of your suit, etc. Now, when you go in a Red vs. Blue game, obviously the customized colors won't apply.

Now there is absolutely no difference in the performance of the two character types, correct?

Frank O'Connor: That is correct. They are slightly different sizes, but they run at the same speed, they jump the same height, etc. Being it is a videogame, you know that there will be some people that swear there is a difference.


What's happening with online co-op campaign? Is this still planned? What details can you provide?

Frank O'Connor: We're simply not discussing campaign at this time, but more information will be released soon.


Talk a bit about the game variants. What types are final at this point and what else can we expect?

Frank O'Connor: The only ones we're discussing right now are the ones you've played, such as Capture the Flag, Slayer, and Assault is a new one. Obviously the game types aren't set and they will even change after the game has shipped, but there are plenty of new ones along with all of the classic modes that fans love. There are entire game modes that are not features in the Beta, so the game will be much different when it goes final.