G4TV Interviews Brian Jarrard, Talk About Reach.
Patrick Klepek of G4tv.com got a chance to interview Bungie’s Brian Jarrard, in which they briefly talk about Halo: Reach.
G4: It seems like, at least with the art you’ve shown for Reach and the approach you’ve taken with the new side characters in ODST, you seem to be purposely doing Halo but not doing Master Chief. Is there an intentional getting away from that a little bit?
Jarrard: Yeah. I mean, I know when the guys sat down and started this project, the first question that they did ask was “alright, is this game going to be about Master Chief or not?” Just fictionally, timelines wise, it just really didn’t work out and it just also wasn’t very interesting for them because people had just come off playing Halo 3 and I think the character as ODST is something the fans have always been super…there’s always been a lot of love for these guys. In the lore, they fight alongside Master Chief, they’re these mysterious, shadowy spec ops guys.
G4: ODST has a lot of buzz, it looks like it’s poised to do really well, especially with the fans, does that give you guys confidence to do stuff like that again? Can you see this third team doing more iterative stuff, shorter projects?
Jarrard: It’s possible, it’s hard to say right now. Reach is going to be a tough project for us to wrap just because the scope is really big — it’s up there. It’ll probably be our biggest game ever just in terms of the amount of people working on it and the expectations for it. I mean, it’s a big deal for us. But our other team is already hard at work at a much different direction and hopefully that’s going to keep progressing and moving forward and that might become our thing that follows Halo: Reach.
G4: So it’s back to two teams again?
Jarrard: Right now, yes, technically speaking, the ODST team has, for the most part, rolled back into Reach and we still have another team that’s working pretty hard on secret, future stuff.
G4: Is that a technical term?
Jarrard: Yes. [smiles] We’ve trademarked Secret, Future Stuff.
G4: So it sounds the secret stuff in the background’s going to be after Reach.
Jarrard: Yeah.
G4: Is it possible we’ll hear about it before then?
Jarrard: Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t really know where that’s stuff’s going to land, there’s a lot of pieces moving right now. On one hand, we’re very eager [since] we know we have a big fan audience that would love to know something that’s not Halo that Bungie’s working on. On the other hand, a lot of people are upset to think that we might not make more Halo. We also don’t want to get people excited about Reach and then at the same time try and talk about something that’s further down.
G4: It’s a lot to juggle.
Jarrard: It is, but it’s a good problem to have. Yeah, I don’t know. I can’t tell when we’ll say more about that. I know just for at least the next year our hardcore focus is going to be on getting Reach done and awesome and hopefully getting people excited about it.
Read the full interview over at G4tv.com
Writer for various websites, including Game-Spectrum and 360Evolved(both of which are down). Also possibly writing for the upcoming website DamnStraight.net. I have a blog which is updated on a fairly regular basis.
