Experience the events preceding Halo 3 through the eyes of Orbital Drop Shock Troopers (ODST) as they return to familiar ground and attempt to uncover the motivations behind the Covenant’s invasion of New Mombasa. Isolated and vulnerable, use stealth and precision to survive the dangers of the Covenant occupation in a gripping new take on combat in the Halo universe.
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During the epilogue, right as Vergil lights up Sergeant Johnson's cigar, nudge the right stick to the left and the camera drifts off to the side. You'll catch Buck crouched next to what looks like an ape, grooming it and, well, eating something out of its fur before the screen cuts to black. Look closer and that creature is wearing the face of Halo art director Marcus Lehto, the same joke used for the cavemen back in Halo 3's Sierra 117.
Tucked off to the side of one of the open Firefight areas, away from the main fighting, is a strange little figure doing a dance loop that nobody in the story ever acknowledges. Players have long taken it as a cheeky nod to Bungie's audio director Martin O'Donnell, one of those in-jokes the team slipped in purely for the fans who go looking off the beaten path.
The AI subroutine that watches over Sadie throughout her half of the story is called Vergil, and that's a direct pull from Dante's Inferno, where the poet Virgil guides Dante through the circles of hell. In Sadie's Story, Vergil plays much the same role, steering Sadie and Mike (and eventually the Rookie) through a New Mombasa that's very deliberately structured like Dante's descent.
The 30 audio logs scattered around Mombasa Streets weren't just an in-game collectible. Studio Fourth Wall built Sadie's Story as a companion alternate reality experience on Bungie.net, complete with the same illustrated slideshows, so fans could follow Sadie's side of the invasion outside the game entirely. Bungie.net is long gone now, but the whole thing still survives on the Wayback Machine.
Every one of the Inferno's circles gets mapped onto a chunk of New Mombasa in Sadie's Story: Gluttony belongs to a hulking butcher named Jonas handing out food while the city falls apart around him, and Avarice is the casino district being looted blind. It's a small detail, but once you notice the Dante structure the whole audio log trail reads completely differently.
ODST's wave-based Firefight mode is Bungie's own spin on the Horde mode Epic had introduced in Gears of War 2 the year before. It went on to become one of ODST's most enduring contributions to the series, sticking around in nearly every mainline Halo game that followed.
When 343 built ODST's Master Chief Collection season, they'd originally planned an unlockable nameplate styled after an NMPD police lightbar, tying into the city police force you run into throughout the campaign. It got cut before launch out of sensitivity to the real-world conversations happening around policing at the time, in 2020.
In Uplift Reserve you'll find a Warthog with a medic trying to calm down a marine who's completely losing it. That's the same panicking soldier from the Floodgate level in Halo 3, so if his reaction feels oddly specific for a random NPC, it's because he's already had one very bad day before this one.
Somewhere in ODST there's a framed photo meant to be the Rookie's girlfriend, and the picture used is actually an edited shot of Bungie developer Chris Butcher. It's the kind of joke that only really gets explained once you know the studio well enough to recognize the face.
Sadie Endesha was originally written as Maddie. The name got changed late because a marketing trailer used the line 'Maddie, where are you,' and someone realized it landed way too close to a certain unrelated pop culture reference for comfort, so the team swapped it before launch to avoid the coincidence.
