One of the best parts about Halo: Reach was that, for the game's all-important change of pace, the developers swapped out the awful Flood and replaced them with an enjoyable space battle sequence.
So it's a shame to hear that there was an original - if half-baked - plan to have a lot more space combat in Bungie's final Halo game,. in the form of multiplayer ship-to-ship combat.
"We joked about it from time to time and even had a rough version of it working very early on in development," Bungie's Marcus Lehto tells Game Informer.
"But the mechanics of it were pretty silly and we very quickly realised that the resulting gameplay experience wouldn't hit the bar we were aiming for, nor justify the amount of work required".
Add in the fact the developers had to spend their time getting the proper parts of the game ready and there just wasn't room (or time) to go throwing a space combat mode into the game's multiplayer.
Pity! I'm one of three people to have ever played and enjoyed Project Sylpheed on the 360, and felt that Reach's own space shooting sections were just as good. Having the fighters available on those big space station maps, with turrets and hangars for troops to fight over...it'd be like Battlefield set in the Halo universe, which on paper sounds pretty good to me.
[Game Informer, via CVG]