To us, the campaign playlists in The Master Chief Collection really hammer home the diversity of play styles contained in Halo. What, to you, is the essence of the series?

It’s hard to say, as I have two levels of engagement. One is to step back and look at our audience and not get monomaniacal about one aspect. There’s this huge community of different players, and part of my job is to stand on top of this building, looking down on our whole audience and not get focused on one thing. Luckily, I like the variety of Halo. When I was playing FPS games when I was younger, it was Doom, Quake – simple, baseline arena play, really straight-up shooting. The way Halo introduced vehicles and all the play mechanics we take for granted now is massive to me. But the thing that is really the seed of Halo for me is the ability to explore these worlds. I can see the story, I can see the gameplay mechanics and I can go explore – and it gives me tools to explore. Sometimes the tools are literal – the vehicles – and sometimes it’s just well thought-out gameplay mechanics.

Then how do you grow a universe without losing sight of the core idea?

We definitely think of Halo as… I don’t want to use the word ‘fake’, but we definitely think of it as an invented history. In gameplay terms, it’s kind of like World War II. Wars are bad and complicated, but World War II is this conflict that you say, “Yeah, there really were good guys and bad guys in that war,” and you can’t say that about a lot of conflicts. As a child, I would build aircraft and battleships, and I would look at the silhouettes and say, “This is the Axis and this is the Allies.”

Halo is similar in terms of how the history’s constructed. Really recognisable silhouettes, colours and palettes for the Covenant and the UNSC. It’s in some ways anachronistic, you know? 26th-century soldiers, running around with machine-guns and driving vehicles that sound like they have gas in the engines. All that’s done on the surface to make it familiar and approachable, but then we give you the ability to go explore in this big universe and these strange, mysterious places. It’s built like that on purpose.

Do you worry that the ‘narrative’ universe may grow so big as to make it difficult to find an entry point?

That’s a great question and it’s a practical issue we have to deal with: how big is the universe? How is its continuity? To go back to the World War II comparison, there’s no barrier to entry to someone watching Saving Private Ryan or watching a spy drama like Valkyrie. It’s a big conflict that has recognisable import and meaning, and real stakes. Hell in the Pacific is a great example – it’s a movie about two soldiers from opposing sides trapped on a desert island. It’s a reverse Robinson Crusoe, but it’s a WWII story and that’s what’s important – you understand the personal stakes in these stories. You also understand, in our case, the galactic stakes. There’s no barrier to entry for well-told stories. We have to get better at it – videogames are getting better and better at storytelling – but it’s not just universe-building, it’s technique. Gaming is in the early stages of cinema; I think we’re moving into the ‘talkies’ phase and we have to get to the colour phase, but that’s happening already. I played the new Konami Silent Hills demo and I was literally too scared to continue. That’s important, and I think we’re going to see more and more of those moments.

Where does Master Chief fit into this? We invest a lot in this character, but he’s almost beyond the conflict.

Chief is complicated because in some ways he’s this literal vehicle for you to inhabit and go explore this adventure. I go in, as Frank, and I’m running around in this galaxy full of terror and madness. People like literally filling those shoes, but over the years the stuff that has happened to him has become more meaningful and people keep asking us about him. The simplest version of the question I get is, ‘What does he look like?’ There’s this weird tension that players have between ‘I want to know more about him’ and ‘I don’t want him to stop being me’.

You know what? I’m okay with that. I don’t think there’s any pressing need for us to do a biopic about the Chief and show his face on the cover. I think it’s okay for people to still have him ‘be’ them. And it might get a little more complicated in the future. Already, in Halo 4, things got more complicated for Master Chief, for the universe – and it definitely humanised him, but I don’t think we took it too far. I think we’ll see how it plays out. He’s a real guy; we’ve described him physically in the books – there’s no real mystery there if you go explore the canon, but forcing it down people’s throats might be a mistake right now. But we’ll see how people feel about him in the future.

Agent Locke is so prominent in the teaser art – to me, it feels like he’s being set up as this equal part to Master Chief. Any truth in that?

I would say definitely not – that it goes back to your last question about how you humanise the Chief. We don’t want to do that; we want the Chief to be in some ways above the fray – he’s literally a legend in the universe he inhabits. Locke lets us humanise the boots on the ground without messing with the Chief – the irony is that Locke is going to do some of the heavy lifting for people’s need for better storytelling and characterisation without altering the Chief. The Chief is the core hero in the story, without a doubt. Forget how long you play as each character or whatever – it’s really about contextualising the Chief. As much as Locke’s an important character in the universe himself, he’s also going to be a useful cipher for you to explore Master Chief’s character from an outside perspective.

Do you see Locke as a replacement for Cortana?

Locke is going to help contextualise the universe in a way that Cortana necessarily couldn’t. She was so close to the Chief and had the big picture historically, but she didn’t necessarily have the big picture of what was going on elsewhere in Earth’s conflict. Locke is going to help solidify and contextualise the stakes, as well as the legend of the Master Chief.

Is there an element of Halo 4 you’re particularly proud of and would like to see developed further in Halo 5?

It was our first Halo game as a team and so there were a lot of things that we did that we’re just nakedly proud of: the technology, the way the team came together. But there are a lot of things we want to do better. Even though we had this long legacy of Halo games before, we had to find our feet and find out where our audience want to go. That’s the main reason for doing a beta for Halo 5 – we’re the first to say that we should have done a better job of multiplayer.

It’s a great multiplayer experience, but a lot of things maybe went too far and a lot of things didn’t go far enough, so the beta is going to help us tune it. It’s not a focus test, but we’ll look at all the data and the anecdotes, and make a better multiplayer game as a result. But the thing I’m most proud of in Halo 5 is that the things we’re doing with the technology are designed to speak to the things that appeal to me about Halo in the first place – which are scale, epicness and the world-building that the original Halo: Combat Evolved did on the Xbox. We also want to go back to that space of innovation with features and non-game interactions with things like Forge and save films – we want to make as big an impact on Xbox One as the game series has on Xbox 360 and the original Xbox.

Honestly speaking, this are some pretty interesting hints. I'm glad that Locke won't be replacing MC, but I'm also glad that they basically told us that Jameson will be doing some heavy lifting in terms of crafting the narrative.

Seems to me that they are taking cation in terms of how they develop Cheif's character. Sure, Halo 4 did develop him in a fantastic way, but they were pretty cautious about it, and much like O'conner says, cramming such a change down our throats is a bad move, so I'm glad that it'll be a gradual process. A personal theory of mine is that when we play a Locke, we'll be seeing Chief as a living Legend, however, once the player takes control of MC we'll get to see a more human side of him.(hopefully).

They are also hinting at the possibly of huge sandbox areas that will provide a lot of opportunities for exploration, much like in CE and all the other Halos.

Thoughts?

I don't know. I just want Master Chief to be a dude in a cool suit who fights aliens. There really doesn't need to be much more than that.

@baka_shinji17: You got that for the first three games. There has to be some character development now.

Agreed. Besides, they basically flat out say that they aren't sacrificing MC's awesomeness.

I like what they started. I like the sound of where they're going.

Give me this fucking game already!

No smoky jazz? :(

Wut?

That is good to hear.

Locke is pretty terrible

How come? Any reason for hating him?

"‘I want to know more about him’ and ‘I don’t want him to stop being me’." I don't think getting to know the character more takes me out of it at all. That said, I liked this bit "I would say definitely not – that it goes back to your last question about how you humanise the Chief. We don’t want to do that; we want the Chief to be in some ways above the fray – he’s literally a legend in the universe he inhabits." As it should be. To me, from the look of it, he seems to be hinting the Master Chief is still an important role, perhaps the most important in Halo 5's story, but he might get less play time, as what matters, is it's about Chief regardless.

@ntm: Like the guy said in the interview it depends on how much they reveal about the character. If they reveal too much, the Chief becomes his own thing that can end up conflicting with whatever players have projected onto the character about themselves.

I'm interested in how the game will turn out. Even though I hated all of the Arbiter missions in Halo 2 I'm still excited that there's more of a possibility of there being Locke missions in the game to play on top of whatever you do as the Chief.

from the 2 episodes of that live action thiny i watched (was pretty terrible) he seems like the most uninteresting character ever, your typical by the book boring dude. Also his VO is pretty terrible, I mean if your going to make someone a main character of your billion dollar franchise at least hire someone with experience (this is his first VO role). Next to Keith David he sounds horrible, well everyone pale in comparison to Keith David but still. Spoilers of course.

Though Nightfall was pretty forgettable and mediocre, Locke was actually one of the few characters I liked. There's not much known about him aside from the fact that he was an assassin/tracker before ONI approached him. I'm sure we'll see his personality get more closer in Halo 5.

The problem with side content stuff like Escalation and Nightfall is that they are pretty much restricted in what they can't or cannot do. If they do something drastic, someone who simply plays the Halo games may not be able to follow the story.

I've seen both the Prologue and Epilogue of Halo 2 Remastered, and honestly I have no qualms with Locke's voice actor. Sure, he's no Keith David, but he's definitely good IMO. Besides, what can derive from a few lines of dialogue.

I'm kind of glad they're out there saying you'll play some missions as Locke. In Halo 2, the shock and disappointment of switching to someone else made me irrationally hate the Arbiter.

I just replayed Anniversary, and knowing that it's coming made me more receptive to the character. 2's campaign is still disappointing (and very vital to developing the Covenant), but the character switching did allow for some interesting storytelling and changes in design. I'm curious if Locke will get anything special like Arby had with his cloak. Maybe he'll have the pathos special ability.

I'm curious to see how they handle Chief without Cortana. Things got kind of weird in 4, but he's always had a companion. Even in ODST and Reach, you had squadmates talking to you. If that initial teaser is anything to go by, there may be points where MC is completely alone, and all the facial capture technology in the world won't do much good if we're trying to read his emotions.

Bumps while a thread is on the first page? Takes me back to Gamefaqs.

Well, if escalation gives us any hints, Blue Team is basically accompanying Chief on his so called "quest", which is sort of interesting since Locke is accompanied by 3 other Spartans as well. And judging from the article, Chief will develop as a character,but if anything it'll be gradual. (basically they won't cram it down our throats)

Also, in my own defense, topics easily get forgotten and quickly die :P

Yeah, seems like it. Wonder how we'll they actually execute it in the story itself. We know we'll be able to play as Chief, but his missions might not be as abundant as Locke's, and all the while O'conner hints that regardless of who you play as, Chief is still, in the end, the main protagonist.