Trivia / Halo 4

• Acting for Two: Bruce Thomas, the Master Chief's motion capture performer, also portrays the ONI interrogator in the game's prologue.
• Actor Allusion:
  • It hardly seems like a coincidence that Jennifer Hale voiced a redheaded super-soldier with the rank of commander. Halo 5: Guardians even reveals that Palmer has an alien with a crush on her!
  • Japanese dubbing example. Before voicing Cortana, Ayumi Fujimura voiced Fi, a character that plays a similar function to Cortana.
• B-Team Sequel: The first Halo game to be created entirely by 343 Industries, not Bungie.
• Content Leak: A truly bizarre one: In May 2012, before any gameplay was officially revealed, extended footage of the multiplayer was posted online...in complete Stylistic Suck form, as the footage was recorded from a VHS tape with a potato-quality camcorder in what appears to be a barn and awful, ear-destroying music playing throughout the entire thing.
• Creator's Favorite Episode: Steve Downes has said this was his favorite game to work on, appreciating the more dramatic characterization for Master Chief and because this game uses Voices in One Room he got to meet Jen Taylor for the first time.
• Development Gag: The UNSC Infinity is yet another one to the Halo franchise's Spiritual Predecessor, Marathon.
• In Memoriam: The soundtrack is dedicated to David Anthony Pizzuto, the original voice of the Didact, and whose performance inspired the track "Revival".
• Milestone Celebration: The game's 10th anniversary was celebrated with a blog post featuring retrospectives from many of the game's original developers, along with the announcement that the Master Chief Collection version of the game would be receiving modding tools, additional Skulls, and Theatre mode finally being added to the Campaign and Spartan Ops.
• The Other Marty: David Anthony Pizzuto was the original voice for the Didact, but unfortunately he died before he could finish recording. Keith Szarabajka voices the Didact in the final game.
• Prop Recycling: Of a single-work, single-level example, though it is so subtle that it is practically unnoticeable. In the level "Reclaimer", the Mammoth includes an amount of textures and geometry shared with other human vehicles and weapons, only exploded and scaled. For examples, the wheel mountings share color-shifted textures with the Warthogs, and the hand rails in the interior catwalks use geometry from battle rifles. This was not done out of laziness, but necessity, since the level was just so big that they had to use these ways of stretching the memory budget as far as they could due to the finite memory of the Xbox 360 console.
• Refitted for Sequel: The Light Rifle's firing modes (a three-round burst normally, single-shot when zoomed in) is based on how the Battle Rifle behaved in the Halo 2 beta.
• Stillborn Franchise: Not Halo itself, but the Spartan Ops spin-off, which never progressed past a first season. Overall reception to the first season was lukewarm, with much debate about it replacing Firefight, its level design, the storyline, and the lack of Master Chief. They ended up having to end it by completely destroying its setting of Requiem, with Halo: Escalation being forced to pick up the unresolved plot threads, such as Fireteam Majestic's fate (DeMarco dies, Thorne becomes the new leader, and they get a new member) and the battle between Infinity and the Covenant over the Janus Key (a Forerunner AI ends up taking it away from both sides).
• What Could Have Been:
  • After the release of Halo 2, when Bungie began to negotiate their independence from Microsoft, it was agreed that they would oversee three more Halo games before leaving. The original plan was that those games would be Halo 3, the cancelled Peter Jackson-led Halo: Chronicles, and Halo 4. Ultimately, Halo 3: ODST and Halo: Reach were the games Bungie decided to finish their franchise commitments with, but there was a genuine possibility that they could have made Halo 4 themselves instead of Reach; they passed on it because they didn't want to be constrained by trying to follow the events of 3. In an interview, Marcus Lehto (the Creative Art Director of all of the Bungie Halo games) explained that the ideas floating around for Bungie's Halo 4 would've been similar to 343's in a few respects, such as by focusing on the Forerunners and by introducing a new faction to fight, but that he would've preferred to keep the Forerunners as a more mysterious presence.
  • Originally, episodes of Spartan Ops would have been accompanied by a stylized motion comic instead of the final photo-realistic CGI cutscenes.
  • The Mammoth was originally conceived as being a much more literal Base on Wheels in its original concept as the "Tortoise" deploying into a siege-mode with bracing pistons, a raising sniper nest, and a deployable landing pad which accommodated a Falcon.
  • Concept art reveals that Drones were at one point considered for inclusion, including a sniper variant.
  • The Prometheans went through a lot of revisions throughout the game's development. For one thing, it was originally intended that there would be six enemy types, each corresponding to a chess piece. The Knights' name comes from that idea, while the Watchers were originally Bishops and the Crawlers were Pawns. The Rook, King and Queen were cut in order to focus resources on the ideas which were further along development. For the development of each individual class:
    • The Knights in particular were constantly in flux; one concept was rejected for being too similar to the Geth, while many more revisions were turned down for making it too obvious that the Prometheans are made of composed souls. In gameplay, it was originally intended that they would be able to roll around the battlefield when not in attack mode, Morph Ball-style; this was cut for not fitting in well with the rest of their kit. It was also intended that they would lack shields, and instead show damage by allowing you to dismember parts of their body, with their strength deteriorating as you did so. This idea would be revisited for Halo 5: Guardians, where their weak spots can be exposed by blowing off their armor. Finally, early versions had the Knights capable of taking cover, which was removed to both emphasise the unit type as the centrepiece of Promethean forces, as well as to make the Watcher's support abilities more useful.
    • The Watchers' design came about fairly quickly, though their abilities received many revisions. Among the abilities that never made it to the final game include the ability for multiple Watchers to join together for a strong, focused attack, the ability to throw physics objects at the player, and the ability to send out a large shockwave on death that would throw the player backwards.
    • The Crawlers were originally envisioned as being bipedal, which was canned for both being indistinct and for being too similar to the Grunts. Once the decision to make them insect-like quadrupeds was made, their design came together relatively quickly.
  • Gek, The Dragon of Spartan Ops, was originally going to get his own subplot, but it was cut for time.
  • As usual for games of this size, there are mountains of dialogue that were recorded but cut from the game. Some of the more consequential moments include:
    • At the start of "Requiem", lines exist for a Covenant scouting party finding you and engaging in combat if you hang around the Dawn's crash site for too long.
    • A cut line in "Requiem" implies that the Sentinels you see in the Cartographer room would've tried to destroy the terminal you need to interact with in that room, necessitating a fight with them. In the final game, you never fight a Sentinel outside of an Easter Egg in "Midnight".
    • Another scene in "Requiem" would've seen an unknown enemy attack the Chief by invading his Mjolnir armor, causing an Interface Screw while distressing Cortana. Little is known about how this would've actually played out beyond the dialogue.
    • Sergeant Stacker has an expanded role in the level "Infinity" where he leads the Marines found in the first half of the level, significantly expanding from his short cameo in the final game.
    • "Reclaimer" features many lines indicating that the way you were supposed to complete certain objectives was in-flux until late in development. There is the implication that you were supposed to have the Target Designator from the start of the level rather than needing to go retrieve it from a downed Pelican, and lines indicating that you could shoot down the Lich with the Mammoth's MAC Cannon instead of destroying it from the inside also exist.
    • Dialogue intended for the arial section of "Shutdown" implies that the Forerunner spires that surround the Didact's ship was supposed to be much more dynamic, including moving around and using weaponry to prevent you from getting too close, along with a place they would be rebuilt if you destroy them.
    • The end of "Shutdown" also features a list of dialogue that reveals there was supposed to be a longer gameplay sequence where the Chief would jump from Lich to Lich in an attempt to reach the Didact's ship; this is cut in favor of a cutscene in the final game.
    • Regarding Halo 5: Guardians, there is much more Foreshadowing about Cortana's eventual Face–Heel Turn. Much of it is centred around her contempt against the UNSC for treating herself and the Chief as disposable tools of war, as well as her slowly developing a God complex regarding the ignored potential of AI.
  • A cut Covenant vehicle was a redesigned Revenant, returning from Halo: Reach. Instead of the driver-controlled mini-plasma mortar, it would've featured a gunner-operated plasma turret similar to the Specter from Halo 2, with a single seat for the driver in the front. It was cut fairly late in development, at a point where a fully complete and functional model of the Revenant exists. This vehicle was also canonised in the 2022 Halo Encyclopedia.
  • A number of multiplayer maps are known to have been pitched, but didn't make it to full production. These include a map set in an underwater Covenant facility (possibly an inspiration for "Fathom" in Halo 5), a Forerunner map named "Genessis" (sic, and possibly a prototype of the planet Genesis in Halo 5), and remakes of the Halo 3 maps Last Resort and Narrows (which would've been rethemed to take place at a UNSC base), along with around a dozen others that only have map names and placeholder descriptions to them.
  • A few more maps exist in more complete blockout forms, intended for both the base game and DLC. These include a map set in a canyon named "Dish" (which features functioning weapon and vehicle spawns, including the aforementioned Revenant), an open symmetrical map similar to 3's Sandtrap, two symmetrical space-themed maps named "Constant Strife" and "Shipyard", an asymmetrical map on the corner of an island named "Peanut", and a remake of the Halo 3 map Standoff.
• Word of Dante: The game's article in Official Xbox Magazine claimed the new Covenant splinter faction was called "the Storm", but this turned out to be a mistake stemming from the lowest ranks being called "Jackal Storm" or "Elite Storm", etc. In-game, the faction is only referred to as "the Covenant" as before. However, many have taken to calling them "the Storm" anyway, to differentiate them from the previous empire.
• Working Title: Halo Onyx.
• Write What You Know: Cortana's Ramapancy is based on creative director Josh Homles' experience when his mother was diagnosed with dementia around the start of the game's development.
  Josh Homles: Over the course of the production of the game, I watched [my mother] deteriorate as a human being and become someone I couldn't even recognize, and that was really hard. But it was also an inspiration for me to want to tell Cortana's story.

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