While 343 Industries did announce that they would not be showcasing anything during this year’s E3, fans were still hoping to see some form of Halo presence. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case. Now 343 studios boss, Bonnie Ross, has explained why they didn’t reveal anything during this year’s biggest gaming expo.
Taking to Twitter, Ross mentioned that the studio is currently working on “the next big game of Halo,” however, “they are not yet ready to be announced.”
@MG_Grilo Team back at 343 heads down on next big Halo-it is good, but not ready to announce yet. New HW2 in Daily Show tomorrow.
— Bonnie Ross (@PlutonForEver) June 11, 2017
Die-hard fans will be happy to note that later on Ross went on to confirm that there will be LAN functionality for the next Halo instalment.
Earlier this year Studio Head Kiki Wolfkill and Franchise Director Frank O’Connor were featured in a lengthy interview on the latest GamesTM magazine. The two stated that the next Halo instalment will definitely have a greater focus on the franchise’s protagonist, Masterchief.
We took some digs for storytelling in Halo 5, but they were absolutely merited. We very much realized that people wanted Master Chief’s story of Halo 5.
We definitely marketed in a way that we hoped was going to bring surprise, but for some fans and certainly fans of Master Chief, it was a huge disappointment because they wanted more Chief.
They loved Blue Team, they liked Osiris, but they wanted Chief. And that has been a big learning. Chief we tend to think of as kind of a vessel for your adventure rather than necessarily this major character in the universe. He’s really just your entry into the universe.
But people have become attached to him over the last fifteen years and they’ve started to sort of fill in the gaps that the character deliberately has for gameplay reasons with a genuine emotional attachment. We certainly underestimated that with Halo 5.
The effect that the character has on his surroundings and ‘the fate of the galaxy’ has had a resonant effect on fans over the years. It wasn’t that surprising to me, but the volume of ‘give us more Chief’ at the end of Halo 5 was significant and so I think if anything he’s slightly more important now than he has ever been, certainly to our franchise. Instead of focusing on bringing new characters into the world and expanding the playable characters we’ve sort of shifted the focus a little bit to making the world a little bit more realistic and compelling and, I would say, more fun for players who get to inhabit the Chief in the future, pretty much as they demanded.
There’s always a call and response element of shipping a game, you have to ship improvements, you have to ship tweaks and you have to ship changes and sometimes you have to walk some of those back.
Doubling down on Master Chief story and the amount of focus on him was probably the easiest learning from Halo 5. That was a really simple thing to absorb and embrace.
