You know every spawn point, every exploit, and the location of every Terminal...but do you know all the making-of info from the House of Halo? We got some Bungie folks to spill a few behind-the-scenes secrets for hardcore Halo otaku:

BUNGIE DIDN’T QUITE KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH THE 360 CONTROLLER.

“The Xbox controller is, by far, the best console controller for a first-person shooter,” maintains Sandbox Design Lead Jaime Griesemer, who’s in charge of tweaking all the player interactions with the game world. But with the 360’s new gamepad came choices and changes — “and that’s always risky. We don’t have the black and white buttons anymore; now we have these bumper buttons. Do we just remap, or do we try to take advantage of the new features of the controller? I think we did a pretty good job of threading that needle, where we’re taking advantage of the controller but [the game’s] still going to feel familiar. In the end, this control scheme is a lot better, and I think you’re going to see a lot of first-person shooters adopt this, especially ones with dual wielding.”

YOU SAY YOU WANT 32-PLAYER MATCHES, BUT YOU REALLY DON’T.
Everyone loves Big Team Battle — but not when it’s, you know, too big. While Bungie has considered bumping up the player count beyond 16 in multiplayer maps, doing so introduces a host of problems that the devs haven’t solved — and not all those problems are technical. “When you have more than eight people on your team, you get into situations where you’re just a face in the crowd,” explains Tyson Green, Halo 3’s multiplayer lead designer. “You don’t really have an impact on things. All of a sudden you win or lose the game and you really had nothing to do with it. There is some payoff — no question, it’s cool to see 16 or 30 players working together in concert — but if our maps were set up performance-wise for 32 players, they’d be a lot less detailed and feel a lot emptier. [Having that many players is] cool sometimes, but I think most of the time it’s just a bulletpoint on the box.”

THE WRITERS DON’T GET INSIDE THE CHARACTERS’ HEADS. IT’S THE OTHER WAY AROUND.
“When I write Arbiter dialogue, I literally hear a voice in my head,” reveals Writing Lead Frank O’Connor. “It’s not always the actor’s, but it’s definitely the Arbiter’s tone. It’s a very literal thing — I hear him speaking bombastically and imperiously in my head while I’m writing. For the Chief, it’s a little simpler — he has a formula you just obey. The Chief is not exactly verbose, for one thing, and he doesn’t mince words. He’s definitely a man of action. The actual amount of Chief dialogue in any given Halo script is tiny, so it’s not something you have to do very often. But certainly with the Arbiter, it’s a much more convoluted process. In Halo 3, he’s failed in a mission to defeat the humans in the first place, then he’s failed in his mission to be the Arbiter, which is effectively a suicide mission. And now he’s leading his loyal people into civil war. He’s a complicated character, so you try to remember that, even in things as simple as combat dialogue.”

ANY GAME CAN HAVE HALO’S PARTY SYSTEM. THEY JUST HAVE TO WANT IT.
Why didn’t Gears of War or The Darkness integrate Halo’s smooth and convenient multiplayer party system? It’s probably because…they just didn’t choose to. “If another developer looks at our party system and our user interface (UI), there’s nothing magical going on,” admits Green. “Certainly if a developer came to us and said, ‘Hey, we want your code to do the same party system,’ we’d probably be in a situation where we’d say, ‘Um, are you Microsoft first-party? Can we actually do that?’” Multiplayer designer Lars Bakken notes that it’s more about planning and plugging and playing. “It’s completely woven into the fabric of the game. It’s part of the UI, it’s part of matchmaking — it’s all one big thing. Other developers could look at it and take from it, but I don’t know what happens in their development process, where they decide maybe it’s too big a problem to handle or they don’t necessarily plan from the outset. The party system isn’t something you can throw in at the last minute: The whole game has to be designed around it for it to work properly.”

SMALL MAPS ARE BIG, AND BIG MAPS ARE FOR FEWER PEOPLE THAN YOU THINK.
When it comes to multiplayer spaces, “We design the map, we build the map, and we put the map in engine…and then we stop, go back to the artist, and say ‘Can you shrink that by 20 percent?’” says Green. “It always happens. All of our maps on paper [become] a little bit larger than we want in-game.” Meanwhile, large-scale maps are really designed to accommodate 10 to 14 players. “We don’t explicitly design any maps for 16 players because there’s usually no harm fitting 16 players on a map that’s designed for 12.”

HALO’S BEST MISSION WAS A HAPPY ACCIDENT.
“‘The Silent Cartographer’ was just a test level that we kept polishing and polishing and then eventually built a mission on,” reveals Griesemer. “Mostly it was a test level for our portal technology, and figuring out visibility and seeing what we could build in our engine and how large we could make things, how much detail we could put into the environment. We just wanted a level that was an exterior, had interiors, and had an interesting visibility scheme. The island was good because you could see out from the island, but you could never see back into another part of the island. I actually made that mission, and I had to deal with all these things that, if I’d been able to plan and do things right from the start, I would not have done. But since I had to deal with them anyway, I had to come up with creative ways to work around them.”

You were never intended to play this level.

THERE ARE STILL THINGS YOU CAN’T DO IN HALO 3.
Someone shut down the rumor mill: You can’t fly the Pelican. You can’t switch between Master Chief and the Arbiter at will during the campaign. You can’t play as a Brute in multiplayer. And — sniff — you can’t dual-wield swords. For now, at least, kiss these fanboy dreams goodbye.