30 Minutes of Halo Development Facts You Didn't Know

if you're a fan of the Halo franchise you might enjoy listening to the history and the making of one of your favorite video game series but even if you are incredibly knowledgeable on a lot of the things that are out there about the development of the Halo games it's still very likely there are a lot of things that you had no idea about so let's take a look at some rare and unusual development facts that not too many people actually know about [Music] one thing that we've always found interesting when it comes to the Halo franchise specifically Halo Combat Evolved is that during the development stages of what would become this brand new intellectual property a lot of things that are now Staples of the series were very much so subject to change during the development time as maybe Bungie didn't realize the impact of what Halo would become for instance many fans already know that when Halo Combat Evolved was in development a lot of inspiration was drawn from the aliens franchise specifically the design that would go into what the elites or the sanghilli would look like what's really cool though is that the design had been overhauled multiple times but in some promotional footage for the more modern version of Halo Comet evolved you can see that the elites actually wouldn't have that split jaw design that they are now known for and is kind of a staple feature of this species in the Halo Universe they actually have these regular mouths and Jaws that just kind of moved up and down and Looking Back Now are kind of goofy looking but still kind of one of my favorite little obscure details from back in the earlier days of Halo now look at this blinking you miss it moment but the early version of the Forward Unto Dawn is going to pass by on the screen let me know in the comments if you can spot it yes that giant fud is the placeholder that they use for Forward Unto Dawn in Halo 4 the opening level actually went through multiple changes throughout the development and a lot of the various versions of this first level are accessible through the leaked Alpha and beta builds of the game that showed up in developer kits that leaked online over time one of the really interesting things is that in the final cut scene of the first level where all the stuff is happening around the Dawn and you can only imagine how much work went into designing this level and having geometry pieces work in tandem with a moving camera so I think it's awesome whenever you look back at some of the earlier footage and this is something we've talked about before when the Forward Unto Dawn just crashes in but they hadn't signed the Forward Unto Dawn just yet so they made a placeholder that's just f-u-d for forward onto Dawn and it just slams through and I think it's hilarious to look at I love it when like these very unfinished and unpolished versions of Halo levels make their way online just to see the progress that's made over time and making these things possible the Halo Combat Evolved level the library always gets a lot of hate for how repetitive the level overall is but one thing is interesting this level actually went through a ton of overhaul from what was originally planned for the level and it actually was originally incredibly ambitious now the biggest and easiest source to hear about what this level originally would have been like is actually when some of the Bungie employees who worked on Halo Combat Evolved back in the day got together to do an IGN reacts to Halo Comet evolved speedrunning and during that commentary if you've watched all the way through to the library section there's a little bit of insight as to what the original idea of this level was and it's really cool listen to this clip it was a giant ball with this like cool corkscrewings like staircase that went all the way down and the whole time you could see this giant pulsating index in the center and then at the last minute they just couldn't pull it off for perf so they just had to wall off the whole stairwell so you can't see the big chamber you can't see the big index I have no idea where you are but like originally playing it was really cool because guys would be jumping from different levels and you're constantly working your way down you can see that your objective the whole time it was really awesome also on the topic of cut content from Halo Combat Evolved or original ideas there was allegedly supposed to be a level that took place between the silent cartographer and assault on the control room though when Combat Evolved was in development this in between level was scrapped and instead we just kind of have the Pelican just coming up out from here and dropping Master Chief off and we were in the snowy biome all of a sudden and you know what it kind of worked out in the end but still it'd be really interesting if we knew more about this cut level also original Halo 3 ODST almost didn't happen there was some early contracts that were designed between Bungie and Microsoft and Marty O'Donnell actually commented on a YouTube video elaborating a little bit on this whole thing essentially Bungie had signed on for two games there was like this Peter Jackson tie-in type game and a fourth main Halo game which I think would end up being Halo Reach now when the Peter Jackson Movie game fell through Halo Reach was still on Target and Bungie assumed they only had to make Halo Reach but Microsoft still had the expectation that they would make a replacement game so after some talks Bungie agreed to make a Halo 3 DLC and then Microsoft made the push to release ODST as a standalone type game rather than a DLC and that is how ODST ended up actually becoming a game and one of my favorite games in the Halo franchise a couple of years ago we covered this Easter egg that was hidden away in the Halo Combat Evolved Alpha that went to be one of the longest standing Halo Mysteries as this picture would remain on bitmaps in the game files and finally years later modders discovered the secret room on the level boarding action we did a video covering this story which was pretty cool but one thing that's really interesting is allegedly the contracted developer that hid this Easter egg in the game commented on our video and said that this mystery girl is now his wife kind of a wholesome Story another interesting thing we did this huge video on the level Skyline from Halo 4 and it said that this takes place on the 512th level we did trigonometry to figure out the distance of objects and figuring out angles to calculate how high up off the ground we were and we were nowhere near 512 floors some people suggested that there could be underground levels but that doesn't make sense because they'd be called like sub levels or basement levels or something like that and we even figured out that the sky box out there was like an area in France we sent Tepig to go and investigate and there was no 512 floor building over there there was an interesting building that we did calculate was likely the building where the picture that was used for the backdrop was taken from but we finally got an answer to this mysterious 500 and 12th floor but a employee at certain Affinity actually commented in our video saying that the 512 floor thing is likely a reference to certain Affinity offices located in Austin Texas that has the area code of 512. in February of 2021 I guess on Twitter I thought it'd be funny to post Halo facts you clearly didn't know I mean this series was gold look at this tweet here but for one of the Halo facts you clearly didn't know I tweeted out that all the Marines and Chiefs Escape pod probably died because Master Chief didn't buckle up his seats and bounced around like a ping pong ball inside of the crash pod causing all the Marines to die then Jamie griesemer himself replied to my tweet saying Unfortunately they all died because exit animations were going to take too long so have you ever wondered why these marines are dead uh looks like they died because they needed to kind of move on to other parts of the game to work on then Duquesne into the LIE they couldn't just be standing outside after Master Chief woke up and Jaime responded saying that they tried that but they would slip and fall off that waterfall bridge halfway through the bridge and it didn't fit the mood that they're trying to set which is a very fair answer I then asked if Master Chief being a deadly ping pong ball could still be in my headcanon and he clarified a little bit of lore for the Halo Universe saying that no harness designed for a human would have been able to restrain him better than his iron grip but I always assumed that those guys died when the Pod was exposed to vacuum it clearly wasn't designed for landing on an object with no gravity well but sure if you prefer that visual heck yeah this is now officially Canon kind of another interesting thing that was kind of posted on social media was from Max hoberman who was really integral in the work for Halo 2 and Halo 3's matchmaking systems and also is the head of certain Affinity he founded it but he actually tweeted out a while back a lot of really interesting details to some of the ux overviews for Halo three and talked a bit about the matchmaking systems that Microsoft employed with the true skill system essentially the same system that Microsoft still uses today they use true skill too and Max homerman had never really been a fan of that and has gone into detail on different occasions why trueskill wasn't really a good fit for a matchmaking game like Halo and I'm gonna have Luke kind of highlight some of the interesting lines here uh so Luke you're taking on the role of Max hoberman here you are the voice of him for the next minute of the video go ahead Luke tell us what Max said I had to use true skill in Halo 3 but I didn't want to it wasn't aligned with my philosophy in order to make it work I had to alter the fundamentals of how true skill work at its core what you are all calling the level 50 system was about grinding to acquire an accurate level over time not about getting you there as quickly as possible I didn't believe that perfectly balanced games were always the most fun in fact I felt they were often most stressful this is the fundamental flaw in true skill in the Halo Reach beta the D and ammo capacity of 12 by 48 with 12 bullets in the magazine and 48 reserved ammo by the change to 15 by 60. what's interesting though is when you start on the mission tip of the spear you actually still have that original 12 by 48 since it wasn't updated for that specific level over in the game files for Halo 4 Spartan Ops which was built off a firefight actually had these interesting drop pod animations bound to the files that are interesting because it could have been how you would have entered in some of the battles in that game mode and who knows maybe this concept will be brought back if there ever actually is a Halo Battle Royale released one day into the future also throughout the development of multiple Halo titles there's this really interesting Coliseum type building that's appeared in the development stages for Halo 3 Halo Reach and Halo 4. it never appeared as something playable for players but it has existed as a testing ground throughout multiple titles and that's really interesting okay some people might know this next one but it's still really interesting and sort of noting here there were a lot of things that were cut out during Halo 2's development like a first person scene when Master Chief flies onto Delta Halo in the drop pod Engineers parts of Mombasa being flooded it and what is really cool is that a lot of those ideas did eventually make their way in the form of Halo 3 ODST where we have the first person drop pod sequence engineers and a little bit of flooding section during Halo 4's development 343 Industries posted a frequently asked questions section and discussed the possibility of Halo 4 getting a multiplayer beta mind you it didn't get a multiplayer beta but their explanation as to why it didn't get it is kind of interesting to look at all these years later on the page they explicitly said while we are testing Halo 4 code gameplay and systems at significant scale to get excellent data input and feedback we are focused on polishing and shipping our experience for the duration of the year and splitting resources to manage and build a beta is not on our schedule when it comes to Halo infinite there's always this big contentious issue that was talked about heavily during the pre-production days where there was an article that released early on by game rant suggesting that Halo infinite was working on a half a billion million dollar budget and to this day people still quote this article when talking about Halo infinite saying hey this is a half a billion dollar game 500 million dollars and there's not enough content or whatever people want to criticize about Halo infinite but then there's a lot of people being like hold on hold on video games don't cost 500 million dollars and didn't really go into detail onto how they came up with that number other than just like leaks or whatever that they like compiled into information but there was never like an exact breakdown of numbers now apparently this Source started from a podcast from an industry analyst who did work on other games not related to Halo and he heard this as a rumor during a game developer conference from back in 2019 and he reported that the game cost 500 million in 2019 without marketing so far which is interesting because there was another source released around the same time suggesting that Red Dead Redemption 2 another massive AAA game that was in development during some of the same time as Halo's infinite now this suggesting Red Dead Redemption 2 may have cost 600 million dollars is interesting but once again there's a lot of people out there who just disagree with that number when it comes to how much Microsoft would have spent on Halo infinite so you know the boys at Rocket sloth decided hey let's try to run our own numbers and just see what we come up with now this is obviously subject to be way on or way off but let's just think about this logically for a second first of all we have to realize Halo infinite had a very long long development process for AAA studio and in general overhead costs the longer something takes will continue to grow over time Now sources claim that 343 Industries prior to the recent layoffs had originally up to 750 employees by 2021. now not saying every employee at 343 Industries makes 100 000 a year so we're gonna base this off of like a slightly above average salary for an average amount of positions that are in a game Studio especially because of the cost of living in the Seattle area being extremely high chances are salaries are going to kind of match higher than like a game studio in say Texas for example and there's definitely employees at 343 Industries who are making Way Beyond 100 000 like senior Engineers or something like that they're just averaging that if we took 750 employees and multiply that by one hundred thousand dollars each a year that would mean active development on a Halo infinite would take about 75 million dollars a year this doesn't sound far off from probably what the industry standard is for a lot of big massive AAA games the big thing that kind of inflates the number for the overall budget of Halo infinite is the amount of time the game took to actually release since the game was in development since late 2015 and carried over all the way into 2021 and of course ignoring all of the extra work that was done by 343 like for Halo Wars 2 and the Master Chief Collection just keeping 343 Industries open from the time from Halo 5's release to the release of Halo infinite would cost approximately 450 million dollars just to keep the employees on board this isn't accounting for like property like facilities or anything else like that so just that alone really does paint the picture that 500 million dollars for a budget is not at all out of the realm of possibility and is likely not only an accurate prediction but probably really underestimating how much went into Halo infinite because we also know if you watch the 25 minute long credits in Halo infinite there were a ton of other Studios that were paid contracts to work as support Studios for Halo infinite Beyond just 343 Industries a lot of them and those Studios take a contract and have to pay their employees to work on the game as well mind you we haven't accounted for marketing which was a really big push that Microsoft did with Halo infinite and a ton of other factors as well if we take it a step further all of the reports of contract employees that were being cycled through while possibly saving money and maybe not having to put them on a hundred thousand dollar salary for example also becomes very costly for companies as if they have to cycle through the Contracting employees you're essentially losing time that the game could have been developed quicker by having to train new employees so the bigger the cost that Halo infinite ended up going into may have actually ended up being a result of some of the shortcuts Microsoft tried to do to cut costs in other ways in my opinion those rumors of the game costing 500 million dollars in 2019 are probably actually under the mark of how much Halo infinite truly cost I would think with that extra delay that they did I wouldn't be surprised if numbers later came out saying the game costed closer to 750 million dollars instead also mind you for every year that 343 Industries is not working on a brand new game and they're just working on Halo infinite like the year following the release get bringing things back up to standard and making content for Halo infinite that was probably supposed to be done before the release could also kind of be accounted for part of Halo infinite's budget because they're not working on a future title so an extra year and an extra 750 or now less employees getting paid a salary does kind of impact things as well I think the ultimate takeaway here is whether you're a fan of Halo infinite or 343 Industries or you are not a fan of them this goes to show that leadership is probably incredibly important and plan is incredibly important because even if Microsoft has bottomless wallets and they can just throw as much money as they want at something it doesn't necessarily make it a complete and good game no matter how much they're willing to spend I think Microsoft has a reputation over the years of kind of fumbling the ball with a lot of their Studios that they have under them I mean sea of Thieves took forever to really get into a healthier State and they still haven't fully fixed hit detection yet all these years later perfect darks going through the same exact thing right now that Halo infinite seemingly went through and there's just always a lot going on during the promotional period for Halo 3 ODST at the very end of the initial reveal trailer there is this screen that pops up alluding to the Side Story that you can find through the audio logs and ODST however you'll notice that the superintendent is searching for a character known as Maddie and in the final release of ODST the character was Sadie however after this trailer release there was some people who were a little bit confused by this ending thinking that this was actually a real world and heavily publicized missing person Madeline McCann in 2007 while Maddie and her family were traveling on vacation in Portugal Maddie at the age of three disappeared from her bed in the middle of the night and sadly Maddie was never found though there had been a ton of Investigations and reports to this day the family is sadly still looking for answers and in 2020 after being missing for 15 years and 10 months authorities have stated that she is presumed Dead In Absentia though many of the Departments investigating this missing person will continue to treat this case as a missing person's case and won't give up until Justice is served but one of the big takeaways about this sad story is a lot of criticisms directed at the press and the massive coverage that this story got as with the heavy coverage with the story the family of Maddie were actually harassed quite a bit and is one of the biggest first instances of mass false information being spread on Twitter and also a lot of conspiracy theories spread by tabloid press so cycling back over to Halo 3 ODST when there was this confusion drawn with Halo 3 odst's reveal trailer being just shortly after this event happened in the real world it's really no massive surprise that by the time the game actually released Bungie and Microsoft decided to change the character's name to Sadie and rework the story Into the game as they didn't want any real world connections to this tragic event being associated with Halo and of course just in the rare case that anyone out there might have any information that could help investigators find Madeline her family hasn't given up yet we'll put a link in the description to their website down below here's another really interesting thing when it comes to development and behind the scenes things related to Halo a lot of the times when a brand new Halo game would release in some ways or another the Halo game would feel completely new and unique when compared to a previous Halo title I mean sure games like Halo 3 ODST it is very clearly a fork from Halo 3 but when you compare things like Halo Combat Evolved to Halo 2 the games do feel very foreign and if you didn't know that they were explicitly all built off of the same engine initially you wouldn't recognize that there were similarities carried over from each Halo game necessarily so when we do find little things that were carried over from previous games that still exist in later titles it can be really interesting to look at one thing that we found really interesting was that after Halo Combat Evolved typically speaking there were unique death animations added in for each Halo game beyond that point for enemies however in Halo 3 ODST if you overload the map by spawning in a bunch of grenades and have a bunch of explosions happen at the same time you can trigger this weird glitch to happen with these Elites and the elites standing and then Free Falling collapsing is the Halo engine skipping the typical death animation you would see reverting back to the death mechanics that were in Halo Combat Evolved all the way back in 2001. so special actually interesting to see some elements of Combat Evolved still baked in there all the way later in Halo 3 ODST and when Halo infinite was in development and there was a bunch of trouble with development and all of these interesting news outlets were reporting on it it seems like there are still some tools that are kind of baked into that blam engine that sometimes cause trouble even nowadays because Halos had a consistent engine for the last 20 years but still it makes little nuanced things like this really interesting Halo 3 definitely feels very detached from Halo 2 engine wise since the graphics had a huge overhaul all of the weapons and animations were updated however an interesting thing that recently happened was a leak of an earlier alpha build of Halo 3 leaked online known as The Pimps at Sea build the name there has a whole nother long story behind it but one thing that's really interesting is that if you play on it and you'll take a look at the Elites at this point in the build the elites were still using the original Halo 2 version of these guys before the updated design that would be later introduced for Halo 3. I don't know as a younger fan Halo 2 and 3 always felt so distant to each other in some way as far as like how the games felt so seeing these little Bridge connections are really cool during Halo reaches development if you look back at like behind the scenes footage for the development of Halo Reach a lot of times you can see Halo 3 assets being used in the earliest stages of reach and these games had very drastically different art styles and just general feel to the game Halo 4 was built off of Halo reach's engine by 343 Industries and this one's a little bit more clear as there's a lot more similarities and leftover assets from reach found in Halo 4. right away one of the biggest and easiest ways to tell is if you look at Halo 4's Forge Mode scroll through the menus a lot of the items and categories are placed in the exact same order and a lot of the little Forge mechanics kind of work in the same way that they did in reach with some different changes this is also the case in Halo 2 Anniversary where the menu system once again for Forge Mode is almost identical to that of Halo Reach just kind of meaning that They carried on a lot of the core base for Forge throughout these three titles in various parts of Halo for you can actually see some reflection textures and if you take a closer look at them you can actually see it's a sky view of the Halo 3 level Savo Highway meaning this is probably an asset that's just been carried over all the way since the Halo 3 days now Halo infinite has a lot of similarities to certain things that are found in Halo 5. but one thing I thought was really interesting early on all the way back in the beta phase where we all got to play the multiplayer test thing that they did the flight that's what they called it every once in a while it seems like if a death animation got skipped for some reason it would revert back to a death animation that was used all the way back in the Halo Reach days but it's still cool to see that somewhere in there reach still lives on as like a core Foundation block for where Halo has been built off of For Better or Worse now if in general the way that Halo engines have worked over the years now one title would be carried over or brought back later on in some way or another interest to you there was a really cool a halopedia document following all of the Halo engine and forks that it has gone through over the years it's incredibly impressive and you can actually learn a lot just from looking at this diagram about how Halo has evolved and what aspects have been brought back in one way or another like one thing I always found interesting which we've talked about before in a video is that at Halo 3 Bungie split off the engine into three different distinct Orcs one fork would go on to become Halo 3 ODST and that specific Fork would then again be brought back way later on to be the basis for Halo online that canceled Russia only free to play Halo game since ODST still had those older Halo 3 era Graphics but a better lighting system in it it's likely why they chose to use that since the game was supposed to be accessible for not so great hardware and it's also probably why 343 can't just snap a finger and easily backport things from Halo online back into Halo 3 and MCC just because this was technically a fork from ODST and probably takes a little bit of work to actually update the systems so that that they could be compatible that's why we've only seen a handful of maps brought over so far the other two forks that we've known about are the Halo Reach Fork obviously which would then go on to be the main Fork 343 would use for the future of Halo where Halo 4 would be built Halo 5 and Halo infinite but also for a little while after Halo Reach his release Bungie used this reach fork for prototyping while they finished up on that third Fork we mentioned a minute ago which would become Destiny 1 and would continue to be upgraded over the years and is the main engine that is used over at Bungie for Destiny 2. we did a whole entire video breaking down this lost Destiny build that was built in Halo Reach and also talked a little bit about the connections to Halo 3 so if you're ever been interested in how that worked and what raids built in Halo would have looked like it's a really fascinating video so make sure you check that out too but yeah uh what else is on this list oh yeah the original Halo 2 was forked for Halo to Vista which was ported by Hired Gun which is interesting because Halo 2 Vista Miss missed out on some of the specific things that are exclusive to the Xbox release and then Halo 2 Vista would be the version that was used in Master Chief Collection later on and then later on after that 343 would make an effort to restore the differences in MCC from that version to the original Xbox version so in a way the MCC version of Halo 2 is essentially a big mod to make Halo 2 play and feel like the original Halo 2. see sword flying for a specific example where they weren't able to recreate the glitch specifically so they had to write a new system in place so that the glitch could work as a feature so technically it was no longer a glitch by MCC times oh yeah and then the anniversary Graphics was a separate engine on top of Halo 2 which would render the graphics in the newer way and then on top of that there were the animated cutscenes which ran separately on top of that and you can even with some modding remove the animated cutscenes and see the anniversary cut scenes running there so there's like three layers stacked up that make up Halo 2 Anniversary there's a couple other notable things you can see on here such as some canceled titles or a prototype from the game a Shadowrun which was built using the blame engine that was combat evolves for Stubbs the Zombie I think is the only other title besides Halo or destiny to be used from this engine as well for a full release so yeah I totally love looking into the engine I'd love to even know if there are direct connections between Combat Evolved and some of Bungie's older titles there's speculation that that's the case but we don't really know if there was ever just like a fresh start when combat evolve development began if any super amazing Halo researcher knows the answer though please do let us know in the comments here's another really interesting thing especially if you're a Halo Wars fan Ensemble Studios the developer of Halo Wars actually worked on a new engine specifically for the RTS that would become Halo Wars though at the time they were trying to make their own game altogether and after the development and shipping of Age of Empire 3 which utilized a engine known as the bang engine work on it the Phoenix Engine would begin which did retain some aspects of the bang engine but this engine would end up being used for Halo Wars which would release in 2009 but then it gets weirder right before the release of Halo Wars Microsoft decided to go ahead and shut down Ensemble Studios who of course were known for making the Age of Empire games and now Halo Wars and instead a new company was formed by several former Ensemble employees who were familiar with Taylor Wars and including the former CEO but this time around the staff was only around 45 members and they were put in charge of maintaining Halo Wars and making the DLC for it later on this is what I think is really interesting though is that Halo Wars 2 didn't really enter development until 2015 and was led by creative assembly who definitely had experience in the RTS category of games however despite Halo Wars is One releasing all the way back in 2009 creative assembly ended up using that same Phoenix Engine for Halo Wars 2. of course upgrading it for the release this is based on the speculation of course that the engine itself has a lot of similarities as far as how internal files are structured and the naming mechanisms that are used and we know there were probably upgrades made to the Halo Wars engine originally because of the remaster that came out so it makes sense but I never realized that Halo Wars 2 while being a more modern game was still just based off of a game all the way from 2009. that was definitely a lot to unpack huge thank you to our patrons for supporting our Channel financially this is super super helpful on bigger projects like this we have to take a little bit of extra time to edit it and figure out everything we want to talk about it's really nice to kind of have the little bit of a financial cushion so if we have to really dive into something we can you guys have been super supportive to us since we launched this thing we cannot thank you enough if anyone else out there has a couple bucks you want to throw away and support us it goes a very long way more than you actually think because a couple people throwing three dollars eventually ends up being ten dollars and then that's like monthly and then it's like hey after five months it's like 50 bucks right there and that can help us you know hire someone to help us edit a part of a video or something like that so thanks again so much that's it for today if you want to support us in a different way make sure you guys stock up on your gamer Subs I've been drinking a lot of guacamole gamerfar and titty milk so when you're stocking up just use code rocket sloth we get a little cut there and you get a discount as well so that's kind of a win-win all right guys thanks so much for watching we'll see you next time with a brand new video

Channel: Rocket Sloth

Views: 88,858

Keywords: halo, halo infinite, halo 1, halo ce, halo 2, halo 3, halo reach, halo 4, halo development, halo development history, halo 2 development, halo facts, halo facts you didn't know, useless halo facts, master chief, halo infinite development

Id: rGNZyKZf3Hg

Length: 30min 41sec (1841 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 19 2023