Halo: Reach

• 1. Introduction

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  Halo: Reach, a video game from the studio Bungie, took in US$200 million on its first day on sale. That set a record for the Halo franchise. Yet the game asked players to defend a planet that the series' own fiction had already declared lost. Reach came out for the Xbox 360 in September 2010, and it closed Bungie's run with the series. Why would a studio end a decade of work by returning to a story whose outcome everyone knew? How did its artists, composers and designers rebuild their craft around that choice? And how did players and critics respond to a heroic story built on certain defeat?

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• 2. A Planet Doomed to Fall

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  In 2007 Bungie finished Halo 3, and then it divided its staff into teams. One team started on Halo Chronicles, Peter Jackson's planned Halo game, which was eventually canceled. That group moved on to a standalone expansion that became Halo 3: ODST. A second team, led by creative director Marcus Lehto and design lead Christian Allen, began work on what would become Reach.

  The second team weighed many concepts, and one of the rejected ideas was a straight sequel to Halo 3. Brainstorming sessions led them to a prequel to the first Halo game, set on the planet Reach at a pivotal point in the war. Lehto explained the appeal this way: "Reach, as a fictional planet, was just a great candidate to play around with. It's such a rich world, with such a great fiction surrounding it."

  A prequel freed Bungie from carrying forward the story threads of the Halo trilogy. The studio could introduce new characters and settings instead. Because the planet is destroyed by the end, the designers worried that players might feel they had lost. Lehto put the problem plainly: "It is a challenge overall to ensure the player feels they're doing the right thing all the way to the end."

  Characters were a second challenge. Lehto recalled that players needed to learn about the Spartans over the course of the campaign, while those soldiers still had to behave intelligently. Halo protagonists had always stayed silent during gameplay. Community manager Brian Jarrard pushed to let players choose a female Noble Six, with cinematics and dialogue changing to match.

  The sequence after the credits caused the fiercest argument, and some people at Bungie wanted it cut. Executive producer Joe Tung defended where it ended up: "the 'survive' component... felt great to us." He called the final result "a really well-paced, significant and emotionally impactful ending."

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• 3. Noble Team

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  The year is 2552, and Reach is an Earth-like colony in the Epsilon Eridani system. It serves as the main military hub of the United Nations Space Command, or UNSC, and more than 700 million civilians live there alongside the troops. Almost all of humanity's other interstellar colonies have already fallen to the Covenant, an alien theocracy that seeks to exterminate humankind.

  The story follows Noble Team, a UNSC special operations unit made up of Spartans, who are elite supersoldiers. Carter-A259 leads the team and is described as a no-nonsense soldier. His second-in-command is Catherine-B320, called Kat by her teammates, who has a bionic arm. Jorge-052 is the heavy weapons specialist and a surviving Spartan-II, Emile-A239 is the assault specialist, and Jun-A266 is the marksman. The player joins as a newcomer with the call sign Noble Six.

  The campaign opens with an investigation into a communications relay that has gone silent. The team finds a Covenant invasion underway and falls back to defend Sword Base, an installation run by the Office of Naval Intelligence. There they meet Catherine Halsey, the scientist behind the Spartan program and the MJOLNIR powered armor. She suspects the Covenant wanted classified intelligence data from the relay.

  The losses begin when a cloaked Covenant supercarrier appears. With no ordinary weapon able to destroy it, Jorge and Six smuggle a slipspace engine aboard a Covenant corvette. The timer is damaged, so Jorge drops Six out of the hangar and stays behind to detonate the engine by hand. Later, a Covenant sniper kills Kat.

  Halsey then sends the team underground to an ancient alien artifact that she believes could win the war. Noble Team must carry the artificial intelligence Cortana, and her data on the artifact, to the UNSC ship Pillar of Autumn. Jun leaves to escort Halsey to safety. Carter is wounded on the way and sacrifices himself so that Six and Emile can reach the shipyard.

  At the shipyard, Emile uses a mass driver emplacement to protect the Autumn while Six hands Cortana to the ship's captain, Jacob Keyes. When Emile is killed, Six stays at the gun to cover the escape. Cortana uses the artifact data to guide the Autumn to a Halo ringworld, which leads into the events of Halo: Combat Evolved.

  A scene after the credits shows Six making a last stand against overwhelming Covenant forces. A final shot jumps to 2589, where Six's helmet rests on the grassy plains of a restored Reach. Halsey narrates a eulogy for Noble Team, crediting them with enabling humanity's victory. The game does largely ignore the canon of the novel Halo: The Fall of Reach, which created several plot inconsistencies across the franchise.

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• 4. Rebuilt From Scratch

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  Scott Shepherd, a Bungie 3D artist, described how the plan to update Halo 3 assets fell apart. "The more we started looking into this, the more we found that realistically we could rebuild each asset from scratch with a huge increase in quality without significantly investing more time," he said. Halo 3 had forced Bungie to shrink parts of its world to fit the engine. Reach did not face the same squeeze.

  The results show up in the numbers. Texture resolution and polygon counts rose, and the Reach assault rifle is built from more polygons than an entire Marine character in Halo 3. The prequel setting also let artists redesign key enemies and weapons. Concept art for the original Halo: Combat Evolved served as inspiration, and the new Covenant Grunts took their shape from a sketch Shi Kai Wang had drawn ten years earlier.

  Bungie also redesigned the game engine, the software that handles rendering and much of the gameplay. The studio hired a motion capture expert and built a capture studio in-house. Data from a shoot could be applied to game models the same day. On the enemy side, developers chose an open sandbox approach to battles instead of scripting each encounter, hoping to give players reasons to replay.

  Martin O'Donnell scored Reach, with additional music by Michael Salvatori. He began composing in August 2009, even though ODST, which he also scored, was still in production. The first music he wrote was played at the game's world premiere, and he built further themes from it. He aimed for music that was "somber, more visceral," because the story was character-driven and played out on a planet already known to be doomed.

  O'Donnell worked differently with his collaborators this time. Salvatori, C. Paul Johnson and Stan LePard helped him, but he did not split their duties strictly. "I decided this time to come up with some themes, tempos, keys, and other basic starting points for musical ideas," he explained. Each composer could run with that material, and O'Donnell either retouched the results or sent them back to be finished. Neither Reach nor ODST uses the Gregorian chant of earlier games.

  The interactive audio grew far more complex. Where Combat Evolved could combine two layers of instrumentation as the action changed, Reach could combine up to seven. Sound effects were expanded too, so every interacting object produces its own sound. A Warthog vehicle striking an armored Covenant soldier, for example, yields a crunch of colliding metal. O'Donnell called the test environment for this system "the stripey room," after the alternating color bands on its objects.

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• 5. Playing Reach

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  Armor abilities are the biggest change to how a Spartan fights. Halo 3 gave players single-use equipment power-ups. Reach swaps them for reusable abilities that stay with a character until another one replaces them. Sprint speeds up movement for several seconds, and a jetpack allows limited flight. Active camouflage hides a player more effectively the less they move, and a hologram sends a decoy running toward a chosen point.

  Two defensive abilities work differently. A drop shield makes a bubble that heals those inside and absorbs a limited amount of damage. Armor lock freezes the player in place but grants brief invincibility. When the player leaves armor lock, a close-range EMP breaks the shields of nearby players and shoves loose objects away. A vehicle that rams a player in armor lock takes heavy damage. Players who take the role of Covenant Elites also get an evade ability that dashes in any direction.

  The campaign can be played alone or cooperatively. The Covenant arrive in eight varieties, each with ranks and classes. Elites lead groups, while Grunts are less intelligent and dangerous mainly in large numbers. Players carry a recharging energy shield, and health packs scattered around levels restore health once the shield is gone. Dogfight sequences set in space are new to the series.

  Multiplayer offers split-screen play, System Link over local networks and the Xbox Live service, which shut its servers in January 2022. Alongside Slayer and Capture The Flag are modes new to the franchise. In Headhunter, dying players drop skulls that others deposit at special zones for points. Stockpile has teams collecting neutral flags and holding them at capture points every minute.

  Generator Defense pits three Spartans against three Elites, who try to destroy three generators. After each round the players swap roles. Invasion is a six-versus-six mode with squads of two. The Elites compete for territory to disable a shield around a navigation core, then carry the core to a dropship. Spartans try to stop them, and new vehicles and map areas open as the match advances. Elites are larger and faster than Spartans and can fully regenerate their health.

  Firefight sends players against ever harder waves of enemies and lets them customize the number and types of foes. A versus variant lets a team of player-controlled Elites try to stop Spartans from scoring. Reach also ships with Forge, a level editor, and its largest arena is Forge World, designed and built by art lead Steve Cotton. It is the largest map ever created in the series. A theater feature replays saved games, and a file share lets players upload screenshots, films, custom maps and gametypes.

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• 6. The Public Beta

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  On the 3rd of May 2010, Bungie opened a Reach multiplayer beta to people who had bought ODST. That game had sold more than three million copies by November 2009. Bungie estimated that two to three million players would join, compared with 800,000 who took part in the trial for Halo 3. The beta ran until the 20th of May and drew more than 2.7 million players.

  The build that went out was already behind the studio's work. Development schedules forced Bungie to release a version six weeks old, full of bugs that newer builds had fixed. Jarrard said the team worried this would tarnish the game's image. They had little choice, so they shipped it and kept telling players about the fixes.

  The rollout began with an internal group of Bungie and Microsoft employees, and then a few thousand players. When the beta went public, more than a million people played on the first day. Back-end servers struggled. The engineers had overestimated the server load, but bugs in server clusters backed up game uploads and slowed matchmaking until the underlying faults were repaired. Jarrard said the 16 million total hours of play time were vital for seeing how Reach would perform.

  Collecting feedback was its own task. The game automatically recorded statistics such as upload and matchmaking speeds and players' game preferences. Sorting through what Jarrard called "the more subjective anecdotal feedback" from emails, notes and forums was harder. The beta produced over 360,000 posts on Bungie's community forums, so the studio opened official threads for groups of issues. "It was definitely a lot to assess and digest," Jarrard said.

  Sometimes players and numbers disagreed. Chris Carney, the lead designer for multiplayer, remembered loud complaints about the pistol early in the beta. By the end, that weapon was responsible for most of the kills made with the newly included weapons. Bungie ran special test matches to remove lurking variables and balance gameplay before the final version.

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• 7. Marketing and Launch

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  Reach was announced on the 1st of June 2009 at the Microsoft press conference during E3, and the first trailer ran there. Jarrard said the team wanted much more "grandiose" marketing than ODST had received. Microsoft gave Reach its biggest game marketing budget yet, topping the $6.5 million spent on the award-winning campaign for Halo 3. Interpublic Group's AgencyTwoFifteen handled strategy and video, and AKQA built interactive pieces.

  The agencies' brief was short: "Remember Reach. Focus on the heroes, not the victims. Expand our audience beyond Halo fanboys." The campaign began in April 2010 with a live-action short, "Birth of a Spartan." From the 23rd of August, online videos showed a day in the life of ordinary Reach citizens before the invasion. Television spots followed on the 29th of August, and another short, "Deliver Hope," closed the series.

  One promotion let website visitors steer a KUKA industrial robot that plotted pinpricks of light. More than 54,000 points formed a monument to Noble Team that faded unless people kept adding more. The campaign won thirteen medals from the MI6 Game Marketing Conference Awards. Toy lines followed, with five-inch action figures from McFarlane and additional figures from Square Enix's Play Arts label.

  On the 23rd of June 2010, Reach hit the "zero bug release" milestone, which meant the work shifted from making content to troubleshooting. From then on, buggy artificial intelligence or other faulty elements would be removed rather than repaired because of time limits. Bungie finished the game between the end of July and the start of August.

  A leak interrupted the countdown. On the 12th of August 2010, Microsoft listed Reach as an Xbox Live Marketplace download at 99999 Microsoft Points, roughly US$1250. A spokesperson said it was for media review only. Four days later, hackers accessed, downloaded and distributed the game online. Halo 2, Halo 3 and ODST had been leaked ahead of release in the same way.

  Reach finally went on sale on the 14th of September 2010 in 25 countries. Tens of thousands of stores signed up for midnight launch events, with sponsored parties in London, Oslo, Stockholm and New York. The legendary edition included two hours of developer commentary on the cutscenes and a 10 lb statue made by McFarlane Toys. Reach also came in a bundle with a Halo-themed Xbox 360 Slim and two controllers.

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• 8. Sales and Reception

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  In its first sixteen days, Reach sold $350 million worth of merchandise. Analysts took its strong start as a sign that core titles could reverse sluggish video game sales in 2010. The NPD Group estimated 3.3 million units sold in North America during the first month. That made it only the third game of its console generation, after Halo 3 and Modern Warfare 2, to pass three million in that time. It finished as North America's third bestselling game of 2010, behind Call of Duty: Black Ops and Madden NFL 11, and reached 4.7 million units by September 2011.

  Results abroad varied. In the United Kingdom, Reach had the fifth-best launch the territory had seen, beating Halo 3's debut by 20,000 units and ODST's by 200,000. In Japan it debuted at first place with 44,413 units, above ODST's 29,734 but below Halo 3's 61,143. It then fell out of the top 20 entirely in its second week.

  The Noble Map Pack arrived on the 30th of November 2010 with three maps that were not based on campaign levels. Certain Affinity, which had worked on Halo 2 maps, produced the Defiant Map Pack, released on the 15th of March 2011. Bungie put out a demo on the 24th of May 2011. A later title update from 343 Industries changed mechanics such as bullet spread and melee damage.

  Reviewers gave Reach critical acclaim, and it holds an average of 91/100 on the review aggregator Metacritic. Thierry Nguyen of 1UP.com, the staff of Edge and GamePro's Matt Cabral were among those who called it the best Halo yet. IGN's Erik Brudvig wrote that it was not "another rehash," though veterans would feel at home. Tom Hoggins of The Daily Telegraph called it "a blistering, breathless crescendo to a decade's worth of work," but doubted it would win over non-fans.

  Opinion on the story was more divided. Steve Boxer of The Guardian said it made earlier entries feel "amateurish." Wired's Gus Mastrapa compared Noble Team unfavorably to the marines of Aliens and found most of the characters one-dimensional. Nguyen made a similar point about how little time players spend with them: "I almost forgot that Noble Four (Emile) even existed for a big chunk of the campaign, as I rarely saw him."

  Multiplayer and presentation drew warmer words. Ben Kuchera of Ars Technica wrote, "no matter how you play, you will find something to like." Troy Rawhiti-Forbes of The New Zealand Herald said the game "looks just like a big-budget Hollywood project." IGN UK's Martin Robinson praised O'Donnell's moody score and said the new weapons "feel like they're about to tear your hands off."

  Responsibility for Halo then passed to Microsoft subsidiary 343 Industries, later known as Halo Studios. Its first release was Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary in 2011, and buyers of that edition received a voucher for seven multiplayer maps to use in Reach. On the 3rd of December 2019, Reach returned on Windows and Xbox One as part of Halo: The Master Chief Collection.

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