Digital Foundry: Are there certain givens about a Halo game that put limitations on the tech upgrades? Traditionally you've always supported split-screen, for example, whereas the majority of FPS titles are online-only for multiplayer.

Chris Tchou: Absolutely, it would simplify my job immensely if we could drop split-screen, not to mention give me more time to work on cool new things. But it's such an integral part of the Halo experience that there's no way we'd ever drop it! With split-screen, every piece of functionality in the render engine has to be able to handle different resolutions, which can get especially hairy when you're optimising things down to the render target tile size.