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Two choice pieces, I'd bold but then the entire thing would be bolded:
Two choice pieces, I'd bold but then the entire thing would be bolded:
The way Halo 4 was made was unnatural, says Wolfkill. 343 started at around a dozen people, ballooning to about 200. With contractors, the number of people who put their hands on the game amounted to 350. That growth, and all of the problems that came with it, took place while developing the game.
"There were a lot of mistakes we made along the way in which we knew weren't necesarily the right way to do things," says Wolfkill of the steep learning curve. "But given what we had to deliver and our timeframe, we accepted that these are necessary mistakes, and we acknowledged and cataloged them.
"We started off with a number of people who had a ton of industry experience, and thought, 'We're going to do everything right! We've seen all these mistakes in the past, we'll avoid those, because we're smarter and we have the experience!' The reality is, circumstance forces you down a path, and your ambitions collide, and there will always be catch-up that you're doing. That's where most mistakes are made.
"There were production realities that made us build things inefficiently," she continues. "I think there was also the learning curve of understanding how to work together."
There was inefficient prototyping -- the team didn't clearly define and communicate the parameters of successful prototypes early enough in development, which slowed the process. The team also started to realize that Halo 4's narrative, rooted in volumes of sci-fi lore, was at times too inside baseball, and wasn't self-contained enough. It was an accessibility issue that needed to be addressed.
Sub-teams would get too close to a singular component of a game, such as a new enemy design, and not think of the design in the larger context of the games mechanics, lore and narrative, leading to inefficiencies in the overall development process.
343 also struggled with balancing familiarity with reinvention, as the studio wanted to please a large fanbase, but at the same time bring something new to the series. While the game received high scores, some critics pointed out a feeling of sameness.
Speaking to Holmes, O'Connor, and Wolfkill, there's a common theme, or tone in their voices, that recurred over and over again. For all the opportunity and potential they saw in this project, there was some mind-numbing dread of screwing up. Not just screwing up the game, but screwing up your team, your studio, your career, the franchise itself.
Wolfkill laughed, correcting me, saying it wasn't exactly "mind-numbing dread," but merely "mind-numbing fear." Luckily for 343, the studio happened to be working on one of the most recognizable brands in video games, and was backed by the substantial resources of Microsoft.
"Having the Halo franchise was burdensome in a lot of ways -- meeting expectations, for example -- but it was great for hiring," O'Connor admits. Many of 343's problems were big, practical, logistical conundrums having to do with growth and recruitment. The studio needed to attract top triple-A talent -- talent that was in high-demand, and probably already employed at other triple-A studios. All of 343's staff came from triple-A; the studio's staff now represents over 25 triple-A studios.
343 actually couldn't tell interviewees that the studio was specifically working on Halo 4, just that the studio was working on something involving Halo.
"We had people who we hired who hated Halo because of 'X,'" says O'Connor. "But what that really meant was, 'I feel like this game could be awesome because of 'Y input' that I'm going to bring into it. I want to prove it, and I'm passionate about proving it.' So we ended up with a bunch of people who were genuinely passionate about the product. That is a huge advantage, and that helped in hiring and forming our team."
The growing pains threaded throughout the development of Halo 4, as the studio came to terms with firing up an motor while trying to build up the rest of the car around it. For Holmes, the growing pains were familiar, and ones that he encountered when he co-founded Propaganda.
"As a leadership team, we'd go from being able to have everyone sit in an area or a room and organically talk about the experience we're building, because we were small enough to do that," says Holmes. "When you've got multiple missions, five missions in flight, and all of those teams are trying to rapidly turn things around, there's a point at which all of the feedback and interaction starts to bottleneck, and you're not able to move quickly enough."
In February 2012, just nine months before Halo 4's ship date, the studio had to address this bottleneck that was brought on by the rapid growth. Project directors found themselves handling too many line-level decisions, which was causing "inefficiency and frustration" within the team, says Holmes.
"To address this, we introduced a new production process and restructured the team around feature teams, which focused on creation of vertical game experiences, and foundational teams, which focused on game elements and experiences that support multiple features or vertical experiences.
"For example, the campaign was a feature team and the audio was a foundational team. These teams worked toward monthly goals as established by the project directors, but were empowered to make day-to-day decisions and adapt production processes to suit their individual team needs. The project directors checked in with the teams on a weekly basis and provided daily feedback on builds, but we tried to drive as much decision-making as possible down to the teams. This gave the feature and foundational teams a high degree of autonomy in pursuing their project goals, which was important in allowing our large team to remain agile, preventing the directors from becoming a bottleneck to decisions on the floor."
