Bungie Q&A

It's always interesting to see how developers react spontaneously when probed by the public. Of course, email exchanges and press releases are one thing, but a sure-fire way of extracting information in this day and age is to collar someone on the development team and get them talking. John Howard and Matt Soell, Halo's Lead game designer and Bungie's Community Lead respectively joined fans for an IGN chat yesterday and Xbox Faction were good enough to log the event and post it to their website. Obvious questions about whether or not Halo will be ported to other platforms than Xbox, PC and Mac came up and were batted down again, but other, more interesting answers were also forthcoming. When asked whether or not Microsoft's "Gamestock" event would be repeated with Halo on show, Matt confirmed that there will be another Gamestock, but Bungie's role in it is uncertain at the moment, although it would make a great podium upon which to present new Halo materials to the public. Similarly, they can't confirm what presence they will have at events like the GDC, CES and E3, but that they hope to be there. One question that came up was why Bungie had chosen to redesign the Halo game engine so soon after E3 this year, and another how Halo would be controlled if the rumours about the Xbox having no keyboard and mouse were true. John fielded both, responding first to the query about the engine with confirmation that it was because of the need to redesign to fit in with the Xbox' hardware, and with regard to the control issue that it is one of the team's primary concerns. "This is our #1 design issue: Make FPS control RULE on the XBox. Without getting into details we're devoting a lot of time to this right now..." Moving away from Halo briefly, Matt teased the audience with news that the Xbox a possibility for the next Myth game, if it is indeed to be made. You can read the rest of it here.