Q&As// Halo 3 Hands On And Q&A

SPOnG: What’s new in Halo 3 – it’s the last in the trilogy, so does that mean there will be no more Halos?

Phil Spencer: It does not mean there will be no more Halos – there are tons more stories to tell in the Halo universe. But if you played Halo and Halo 2, you saw the beginning of a story, and I think it’s important to finish off that dramatic arc. We want to bring the untold stories together. One of the things I’ve always liked about Halo is that people think it’s about the story of Master Chief, and in a way it is – but I really think Halo is about the person who plays. It’s your story. When I think about playing Halo, I don’t really think about Master Chief against the Covenant, but I think about the fun I had playing it.

Then the features such as the video play-back come into play because then it becomes my story – this is the video of me playing the game and accomplishing something. And I think that’s an area that other first-person shooters, even today, haven’t focused on: letting you remember your story.

SPOnG: That video playback is very Web 2.0/YouTube. Can that Web 2.0 influence be taken any further?

Phil Spencer: Absolutely. If you look at Halo 1, it was about me carrying my big Xbox over to my friend’s house, and plugging the Xboxes into each other and playing together. Halo 2 was about hooking up online in Deathmatches and playing together. In Halo 3, there were a couple of things we wanted to nail. One is playing together, and the four-player co-op over Xbox Live is going to be a killer feature.

It’s a natural evolution of what we’ve done in the multiplayer. But then the ability to capture movies… If you look at the things we’ve done in the Halo community, with things like Red Vs Blue and all the postings on YouTube already, and then if you look at the capture feature, with the flying around – it’s not a video, but it’s actually gameplay footage from any perspective you want. It’s a conservative focus on our part, because we understand our customers, and they’ve told us what they want us to do.

SPOnG: Sony has also spoken about borrowing from Web 2.0 ideas – is this a new industry trend?

Phil Spencer: I think when you have a property like Halo, which draws millions of fans to it, you don’t have to stand up and say: “Hey, look at me”. The fans come, and those are the properties that will allow that kind of next-gen community. You don’t build something and say: “This is a community”; communities create themselves. The Halo community wasn’t created by us – it was created by you, and the people who play it. And we’re just trying to facilitate that – we listened to what people wanted to do, we watched what they were doing and we asked ourselves how we could make that easier for people.