How Making Halo A Better Game Can Cause Problems For Red Vs. Blue

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Red vs. Blue recently completed its 16th season of the online series. Recently, I spoke with Matt Hullum, series producer, and voice of Sarge, and Gus Sorola the voice of Simmonds, to talk about the newest season as well as the history of the show overall. Many of the changes the show has seen over the years have come as the Halo games themselves have evolved. New features in the game have often been useful to making episodes, but it turns out that what the developer sees as a bug in the code isn't always seen that way by the team behind Red vs. Blue. Matt Hullum told me that sometimes the show has used bugs to get a particular result for the show, which they then lose once the "bug" is fixed. According to Hullum...

Whether it was Bungie developing the games or now 343/Microsoft doing it, there's always things from one game to another that we think are a feature and they think is a bug. So there'll be something in a game like 'oh, the way that the lighting works in this one particular area if you do this in this combination of events, will make our shot look better.' And [later] that will be gone.

Bugs in games are usually annoying details that get in the way of a good experience. However, if you're not trying to play the game as intended, they can come in quite handy. Many speedrunners find ways to exploit bugs to get through games faster, and in a similar way, the creators of Red vs. Blue found ways to use bugs to their advantage.

Losing bugs has forced the show to improvise but there was apparently a bug so important that Red vs. Blue actually reached out to Bungie, the original developers of the Halo games, to ask them not to fix it. It turns out that the fact that it was possible to get Spartans in the game to lower their weapons wasn't supposed to be possible, and the developers planned to fix that until they were asked not to do so. According to Gus Sorola...

The one that sticks out in my mind is, the way that we got the guns to lower so the characters could talk to each other, I think it was still Bungie, thought that was a bug in their game and they wanted to get rid of it and we asked them 'please, could you please not get rid of that bug cause it's a feature for us.'

At the request of Red vs. Blue, the bug was left in the game.

With a new Halo title, Halo: Infinite on the horizon, there were surely be all new features, and bugs, that Red vs. Blue will have available for the next generation of episodes. Red vs. Blue: The Shisno Paradox is available via Digital today and will be out on DVD in January.

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