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In making Halo 4 343 Industries has faced a host of daunting challenges, not least creating an all-new enemy – the Prometheans.
“As soon as we started concept work on Halo 4, we started looking at potential big pillar features. One of the things that came up early on was a good way to refresh the overall campaign experience, so we decided to create a new enemy race, applying the fundamentals of what makes Halo work to them,” wrote 343 community manager Jessica Shea over on Waypoint. “While we understand the importance of the Covenant’s role in the game for continuity purposes, we didn’t want to focus solely on those particular species. Thus, the idea for the Prometheans was born.”
Shea adds: “Our goal was to design a type of enemy that is highly adaptive from a tactical standpoint, basically transforming the player’s idea of how the world and combat works in order to try and gain the upper hand. If these are advanced beings, it seems like they would be intimately connected with the world they made, so the Prometheans can manipulate their environment and themselves in a way that makes them part of it. That is where you get to the final end result of Forerunners being able to spawn in and out of the world, spawn other creatures, phase back and forth, and environments moving around. They are able to manipulate things in a way we haven’t seen before, and they complement existing mechanics and change the way the player engages in the combat encounter.”
That’s enough words. Check out the new trailer below in which the designers, artists, engineers, and production staff of 343 Industries talk about the goals they set and challenges they faced in creating the new enemy.
Halo 4 will be released on November 6, 2012 for the Xbox 360.
