343 INDUSTRIES’ DAN AYOUB, EXECUTIVE PRODUCER ON THE MASTER CHIEF COLLECTION, TALKS BRINGING CHIEF TO XBOX ONEWhy the decision to revisit Halo 1-4?
With the first Halo: Anniversary, we wanted to do something special for the ten-year anniversary. But the landscape has changed a little bit; when we started development on Halo 2: Anniversary, we knew we wanted to do a similar treatment to the first one. The fans really liked that feature set and all of that goodness. As we started development it occurred to us that we’ve got a platform transition and we’ve got more power to play with. So we started thinking that we wanted to take advantage of that power, and with Halo 2: Anniversary it’s like the ability to transition the music with the graphics and all of that good stuff. And we started thinking, well, with Halo 5 coming, it's a new generation, how do we bring all of these games and the next one ? As we started looking at it, we think we can pull this off.
One of the big differences in the jump to next-gen is animation…
I’m glad you noticed that. We knew how 1 and 2 would look, because they are getting the Anniversary treatment. But when it came to 3 and 4, what we didn't want was to just port it so that it ran on Xbox One, because that would kind a be a bit of a downer. Especially as Halo 4 was a bit more recent, we were like, okay, how do we take these and make them feel like next-gen titles?
It was really quite fascinating when we first saw it, because we knew the approach we wanted to take: ‘Okay, we are going to make these run at 60 fps, make them run at 1080p.’ We had this strategy to improve the lighting systems and the shaders, and we were really impressed with how fantastic those games looked just going through that.
I remember we gathered everyone around my desk when I got it, and they were just like, ‘Oh my god, this looks amazing’. What was interesting, in particular with Halo 4, was how so much detail that was already in the game starts to come across. It’s a testament to just how much work went into Halo 4 and how great the team did. Details on the weapons were coming across that weren't necessarily in there [on the Xbox 360] and the lighting looked so much better and more vibrant.
Alot has changed in a decade. With so much competition, and the rise of eSports, do you think Halo can challenge Call Of Duty, Battlefield and Titanfall for a piece of that market? Or perhaps even take it over…
What Halo is very much about is fairness and skill.I think that is something that lends itself extremely well to eSports, and perhaps even bring in an additional audience of people that might not have been in here before. ButI think that it lends itself to that extremely well.