Halo 4 - Inside the Gaming Studio: Lead Writer Chris Schlerf Talks Master Chief
The Sequel Culture
As far as people being weary of sequels, we have a tendency as a culture to go to the well a little too often. Some stories are simply not built to be ongoing; the ones where the characters are a good fit for continuing adventures are less likely to wear people down than a franchise where theres no rational reason wed continue following the people or events. Plus, it also comes down to quality unless youre constantly bringing your A-game, of course there will be diminishing returns. So I dont know that people are down on sequels so much as bad, unnecessary sequels.The Luxury and Problems of a Trilogy
Problem may be the absolute last word Id use to describe my feelings about writing for a trilogy. I can barely articulate the sheer joy at being able to work on something of that scope; its fantastically exciting to have the opportunity to tell such a sweeping epic over multiple games. That doesnt mean its not a challenge of the most daunting proportions, however. One of the earliest things we talked about with the Reclaimer Trilogy was how self-contained we wanted each individual story to be, and I feel like on the first one, weve found a good balance between resolving the events which the player is concerned with and yet still creating something which operates as the first act of a much larger tale. To accomplish that, naturally you will create elements of your story which you dont resolve right away, but Im of the opinion that people should be able to appreciate the broad strokes of each story individually regardless of whether theyve played the others. Approaching a trilogy as opposed to a single story actually both gives you more and less breathing room at the same time. Obviously, over a longer timeline, you can roll out elements at a very different pace, and explore areas you might not be able to in a more condensed and economical format. But also, the individual stories need to hold their own weight, which means you have the burden of establishing a new setup (even if its a continuation of the previous) each time and ensuring that youve got the requisite beats to draw things to a conclusion of some sort by the end. Trilogies can borrow elements and techniques from serialized storytelling, but at the end of the day, you still have 3 distinct and separate boxes and if you want your overarching story to be effective, that means structuring it in such a way that you are reinforcing whats truly important for players to remember from the first part to the last.Like Troisi would say, Halo 4 isn't a revolution of a working system but instead an evolution, which seems to be a recurring word at 343 industries. They have shown that the Halo franchise has found a very safe home who have a world class approach to their games. This hopefully won't be the last time I get the chance to speak with Armando and Chris, as I would love to talk about specific elements of the story but lets give you guys some time to play through it and the guys a chance to knock it out the park with Halo 5. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Inside the Gaming Studio is a new series of articles from Patrick Dane that tries to explore to talk to some of the most interesting, promising and established game developers. With an ultimate goal to teach and allow games to think more critically about the choices made by developers. Asking questions of 'Why?' and 'How?' as opposed to simply 'What?', the series hopes to create a database of knowledge for reader to learn and understand game design.