NEWS - Thursday, June 21, 2001
Halo Developer Diary pt.II
Bungie level designer Jaime Griesemer takes the controls in the second installment of the Halo Developer Diary hosted over at PlanetXbox. Jaime delves into the important aspect of developing new skills to play a game, such as Halo well. He describes results from playtesting as well as where Bungie is headed with tutorials for the upcoming Xbox title.
"Another thing we learned from the playtest was that players need to be encouraged to use tactics in combat. We had always thought that if we created an AI that didn’t cheat and could be tricked into following the player into an ambush, people would naturally discover that tactic. Unfortunately, players simply assumed that sophisticated strategies like sneaking past sentries to get the drop on a large group of enemies or withdrawing from a conflict in order to circle around and attack from behind wouldn’t work, so they never tried them, they just walked straight up to the first enemies they saw and attacked. Since these tactics are difficult to teach explicitly, we have tried to create many situations in the tutorial that make tactics easier to discover. For instance, at one point you engage some Covenant from down a hallway and the only good cover is a side passage that leads around behind the Covenant, encouraging the Player to come out behind them and see them slowly sneaking up on where they last saw him. One of the other ways we encourage the player to make more tactical decisions is by making the standard ’run in and start shooting’ strategy extremely ineffective. Halo’s AI is pretty vicious and it teaches you the importance of staying in cover very quickly."Sounds sweet to me! Click here to read the rest of the diary. Lots of good stuff.
Source: http://www.xboxaddict.com/
