The Halo You Never Knew

They Burned Down the Guardian Forest

“Halo 2 was pretty bad for the team,” Murray acknowledged. “They worked really hard and did a lot of amazing work, and at the end, a lot of their work had to get cut, and it was a big morale hit for the team. We didn’t want that to happen with Halo 3.” So, Bungie builds detailed schedules — not to “shame or coerce” people, said Murray, but to give the entire team data they can use to prepare for the task at hand. When the team sat down more than a year before Halo 3 shipped to look at the levels, they realized they were overbooked — the team simply couldn’t complete all the art and lighting assets in time. But the launch date was immovable by that point, and simply adding new team members would create its own training problems. The only reasonable answer was to “reduce scope.” That means a campaign level named Guardian Forest had to be cut, even though it was well under construction. This also meant losing a new enemy called a Guardian — a floating, conical sentry with a central laser eyeball that the player could tear out and use as a weapon. However, the team felt Guardian Forest’s Hornetflying sequence was too much fun to lose, so they transplanted it to a new section of Citadel. That’s not the only remnant of Guardian Forest to survive: the team eventually carved out a very small segment of the level and turned it into the popular small-scale multiplayer map Guardian.

Other casualties of scheduling included combining two smaller missions into what became the Cortana campaign level, and removing large sections of Tsavo Highway. Murray admitted that these cuts hurt, but they hurt a lot less than they would have had they not been made so early — and they certainly smarted less than similar cuts made to Halo and Halo 2. And the upshot was that the Halo 3 team found itself with a realistic schedule it could believe in, and the transparency of the decision made everyone feel informed and empowered. That’s great for them, but we can’t stop thinking about how cool it would be to rip out a laser eyeball and use it in Team Slayer…

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