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Years before Destiny released, an advertising billboard reading 'Destiny Awaits' appeared in Bungie's Halo 3: ODST, complete with an image of Earth and what looks like the Traveler hovering above it, an early, subtle tease of the studio's next project.
For years, the coveted Recon Armour wasn't something you could simply unlock in-game. Getting it meant completing a brutal set of Vidmaster Challenges spread across Halo 3 and Halo 3: ODST, things like finishing a level solo on Legendary without ever firing a shot or throwing a grenade. Complete them all and Bungie would grant you the Armour through their 'Road to Recon' program on Bungie.net.
Alongside the classic campaign skulls, Bungie hid a separate set of skulls exclusively inside Forge-enabled multiplayer maps like Sandbox, Assembly, and Orbital, later expanding the hunt with three more skulls on maps added by Halo 3: ODST. These didn't unlock cheats like the campaign skulls did, but collecting all of them triggered its own dedicated achievement.
ODST started life as a scrappy little side project called Halo 3: Recon, something Bungie figured they'd knock out quickly to fill the gap before Halo: Reach. Then-CEO Harold Ryan basically told Joe Staten and Paul Bertone to build it fast using the existing Halo 3 engine, with zero extra engineering support. It grew arms and legs along the way and turned into a full retail release.
Rather than another straight-line Spartan shooting gallery, Joe Staten pitched ODST as film noir: a lone soldier wandering a rain-soaked, ruined city piecing together what happened to his squad through flashbacks. It's basically a detective mystery wrapped in Covenant armour, which is a big part of why it still feels different from every other Halo campaign.
Three of your five squadmates are played by former Firefly cast members. Nathan Fillion (Captain Mal himself) voices Buck, Adam Baldwin plays Dutch, and Alan Tudyk voices Mickey. Romeo's the odd one out, but if ODST's banter ever felt weirdly like eavesdropping on the Serenity crew, that's why.
Veronica Dare, the ONI officer who takes command of the squad before the drop, is voiced by Tricia Helfer. Sci-fi fans will know her better as Number Six from the rebooted Battlestar Galactica, so ODST quietly doubles as a bit of a genre casting crossover.
Lead writer Joseph Staten has voiced every single Grunt in the Halo trilogy, but in ODST he also stepped in to voice the New Mombasa Superintendent, the calm AI narrating the Rookie's wander through the city. So a fair chunk of the game's dialogue, both the smallest alien mooks and the biggest guiding voice, comes out of the same guy.
Martin O'Donnell and Michael Salvatori threw out Halo's usual sweeping choral sound for ODST and went moody and jazz-inflected instead, all rain-slicked saxophone and quiet piano. It fits the noir detective angle so well that the soundtrack is still one of the most-praised things about the whole game.
Halo's always worn its Starship Troopers influence on its sleeve, but ODST leans in hardest. The orbital drop pods echo the Mobile Infantry's capsule drops from Heinlein's novel and Verhoeven's film, and the ODST rule of sending commanding officers down first mirrors the Mobile Infantry's own 'officers first' doctrine.
