And then we've very purposefully said, well, if you hold that button and you choose to play it, it will take priority over everything else. “Like when you find one, you can just hit X and you will collect it or you can hold and you will get to play it. “We made conscious decisions with the audio logs in the game,” Crocker began. But 343 was keen to make sure that finding one won’t stop the action. Some audio logs will tell one-off stories relevant to the location you find them, but for the bulk of them that spin a larger yarn, you can discover the data pads in any order and they’ll play out in linear order so that you hear the story as it was meant to be experienced. ”Ĭrocker characterized them as “really polished kind of radio plays,” and thankfully, you don’t have to worry about trying to piece the story of these audio logs together yourself. “Each one of those then leads to another connecting kind of piece of the game, whether it's the Marines you're finding, the Spartans and what happened to some of them.
“The great thing that the audio logs gave us is the opportunity to fill in some of the blanks that players can experience at their own pace,” said Halo Infinite associate creative director Paul Crocker. But there are multiple stories within those groups.
You’ll find data pads scattered all over Zeta Halo, and they house audio logs that fall into three categories: UNSC, Banished, and Spartan. But Halo Infinite – thanks to its campaign’s open-ring structure – is putting them to use in a contextually fascinating way: to tell multiple sides of the larger story about the fight on Zeta Halo between the UNSC and The Banished that takes place prior to the start of when you as Master Chief enter the fray. In fact, audio logs aren’t even new to Halo, with Halo 3: ODST’s Sadie's Story being one of the most memorable parts of an incredibly memorable game, and Halo 4’s Terminals delivering key details about the Didact. Using audio logs to help convey a game’s story is nothing new.