A new type of Halo game drops today. Halo 3: ODST is a prequel to Halo 3, released two years ago to much acclaim. This time around, instead of finishing the fight as Master Chief, you are battling for survival as Orbital Drop Shock Troopers.  Bungie's lead writer Joseph Staten and audio director/composer Marty O'Donnell took time to answer questions and offer insights about the game recently. Here's how it went: Talk about where and when Halo 3: ODST takes place.Staten: Right between Halo 2 and Halo 3. It's a prequel to Halo 3 but what it attempts to do is fill this gap in time while the Master Chief was away at the second halo ring in Halo 2. If you remember back in Halo 2, the Master Chief spent some time on Earth fighting off the Covenant in a city called New Mombasa in eastern Africa. But then he got up sucked up into this time distortion bubble thing and taken to fight bigger problems elsewhere in the galaxy as he usually does. But he left a problem behind in the city of New Mombasa and players have been curious about what happened. ODST tells that tale.  And who are we playing as?Staten: You start out as the Rookie, a shock trooper and the newest member of his squad. As you drop your drop goes wrong. You crash in the city and you basically pass out for about six hours. When you wake up it's night and you are alone in this new film noirish cityscape. What you are doing is fighting around the city and looking for clues that link you to flashbacks. These flashbacks are short, high-action scenes that take place after the drop. You essentially play as other members of the squad and experience the part of the day that you missed while you were passed out. Eventually, the timelines converge and the Rookie hopefully meets up with his surviving squad members and they make it safely out of the city.  How do you keep suspense in a prequel?Staten: In Halo 3, you never actually make it to New Mombasa. In fact the only time you ever really see it is from a town called Voi, which is on the edge of this vast crater in the east African savanna. Across this crater that is kilometers wide and in the distance you see this burning cityscape. That is the ruins of New Mombasa. So as far as you know in Halo 3, the city was totally obliterated by this slipspace rupture in Halo 2. The mystery is what happened to that city and what was so important about it that the Covenant was willing to maybe destroy it, but at the same time there was this giant artifact buried beneath it. It is clearly a really important part of the Halo story, but you never really go there in Halo 3. It's an open question as to how did the Covenant find that? Was that really what they were after? Was there something else in the city? And why would the human military send in this squad of elite ODSTs, valuable soldiers, into a city that was maybe lost already? What was so important to risk their lives? There were a bunch of mysteries that we have left untold and actually mysteries that we have never really clued people into. So New Mombasa is a really fertile ground for lots of new stories and clairifying mysteries of the old stories.  Can you talk about how game play is different from Halo 3 and how the situations you get into are different, since you are not playing as the Master Chief?Staten: If you are a fan of the Halo series, you have probably seen these mysterious guys in their black armor coming in and out of combat. We never really give a clear or strong explanation of what their role is but generally speaking we know them to be slightly tougher than normal marines. They may sound a little bit more rough and tumble. So the ODSTs are this great character in the previous Halo games that you really never got to know. So if you are a fan of the Halo games, you finally get to play as these almost-as-badass-as-a-Spartan, but-not-quite, but still-cool-in-their-own-right characters. If you are not a fan of the Halo series, you can pick up ODST, jump into the boots of one of these soldiers and really know very little about the Halo story and still have a good time. This game, the experience you have in New Mombasa, even though it goes into deeper mysteries, if you are a hard-core fan, it's pretty self-contained. It really is an adventure that we never plan to continue, unlike the Halo games that we have to think about sequels (for).  But you asked about the Rookie, I think he is cool because he is not a Spartan. Master Chief throughout the games became ridiculously overpowered, I think. In Halo 3, compared to Halo 1, he could outrun pretty much any enemy. He could outpace any of his marine allies. He could wade into combat, take tons of damage and not really worry about being killed. He was this really almost God-like figure on the battlefield. If you remember back to Halo 1, that wasn't necessarily the case. ... That health meter that would get red and beep was a constant reminder that inside your armor was an actual person that could get hurt and stay hurt. That is one of the big things we brought back for ODST, we brought back the idea of health. It's a great source of constant tension throughout the game.  Were there certain story touchstones or themes you focused on for the soundtrack?O'Donnell: Right from the beginning, when we started talking about the film noir aspects of it, there are certain things that are common -- the high contrast lighting, the moody, lonely gumshoe detective, all that kind of stuff are immediately evoked in your mind. But one of the other main things I think of is there's always a city and rainy streets involved. The concept of a rainy atmosphere really stuck with me. We've never really done anything from a soundscape standpoint that evoked that feeling of rainy city streets. So believe it or not, we made sure that we changed the sound of something as simple as the footsteps sounds on all the different surfaces. We made sure that there was a whole library of footstep sounds that sounded like a rainy city street.  And how did you approach creating music for the main characters of the game?O'Donnell: As soon as I saw the first discussions about the story, almost immediately Joe was giving us the names of the characters -- Buck, Dare, Butch, Mickey -- really one-syllable character names. They sounded like they were from a noir detective story. So I knew things were going to be a little more, perhaps a little more one dimensional in terms of, this is the tough guy, this is the funny guy, this is the cool guy you want to be, this is the femme fatale. It's those sort of fun characters we were able to play with. I wanted to make sure that the musical themes were equally strong and clear. You have that feeling of tension in the relationship with somebody between a femme fatale. There's something going on there.  Halo 1, 2 and 3 have primarily been big, epic, space operas with a cybernetic super-soldier hero, so a lot of the themes were big and they gave you a very heroic feeling a lot of the time. With this we knew you were going to be playing as a rookie cut off from your troops alone in the city. Basically everyting takes place in the course of one night and one day. I wanted a lot of the music to feel a little more intimate and personal, rather than epic.  Was the creative process different with this game than with previous Halo games?O'Donnell: Sure. With Halo 2 and Halo 3, for example, I already had Halo 1 in my pocket, so to some extent, if I was blocked or didn't know what to do next, I could always take an existing theme and turn it on its head and rearrange it and make something new out of it. With ODST, I really wanted to throw all the Halo music away and sort of start from scratch and have everything in this game musically be thematically consistent with something completely new. I sort of immersed myself in some other kinds of music to cleanse my palate. I watched Blade Runner again for the twentieth time. It's one of the few examples you can state of a director and art director who went after sci-fi film noir. I watched that just to see how it felt and what sort of things Vangelis did musically. I never know where exactly some of the influences come from specifically, but I don't think I was all that influenced by it. But it was good to watch it.  Staten: Who hasn't seen Blade Runner and loved it? But at the same time, Marty, you and I went back on forth on Chinatown, Touch of Evil, all sorts of crazy noirish stuff and I was throwing you some CDs you didn't want to listen to. Some crazy Miles Davis stuff. I had a serious lobbying campaign to get some saxophone in the game.  O'Donnell: There was one point where I hadn't really done anything yet and booted up an early part of the game and sure enough there was Miles Davis already playing in the game. I thought, OK, I got it.
Bungie breaks down 'Halo 3:ODST' - Game Hunters: In search of video games and interactive awesomeness - USATODAY.com - Game Hunters: In search of video games and interactive awesomeness