In the final installment of my three-part Halo 4 interview series with creative director Josh Holmes, we explore the game’s refined tactics and deadly new enemies, illumination through death, the new episodic content and why Microsoft isn’t charging for it, and how Master Chief is still the man despite lagging technologically behind Halo 4‘s new breed of Spartan super-soldiers. The alien Covenant in Halo 4 still feel very much like the Covenant, but the new enemy, the Prometheans, as promised, are playing a very different tactical game. What inspired their tactical design? That was one of the biggest bets we decided to make almost from the very beginning. We knew players had been fighting the Covenant for a decade — more than a decade by the time the game came out. With familiarity comes predictability, and we wanted something that would breathe new life into the Halo sandbox and really challenge players in new and exciting ways. The obvious addition was a new class of enemies. That really made sense as we were honing in on wanting to explore Forerunner culture and going to a new location that would be the core of much of our story. That led us to explore Forerunner enemies. From the beginning, one of the concepts that resonated with the design team was the idea that the enemies would be collaborative, that they would represent a certain level of challenge individually but when you put them together, they would complement one another on the battlefield. That was a core concept, and we started out prototyping simple behaviors, like the Watchers’ ability to shield other enemies. Then we added the Watchers’ ability to resurrect the Knight. And we looked at the Knight and the different ways it could move around the battlefield to dramatically shift your focus as a player. Those core behavioral components stuck from the beginning, and we just kept iterating and iterating. We knew we had to get it right, to make them feel very different from the Covenant, yet still feel like![]()
