Halo 5 launches on October 27th for Xbox One, but developer 343 Industries has already begun work on the following instalment of the franchise.
In a Golden Joysticks Halo 5 special reported by gamesradar, 343 general manager Bonnie Ross and franchise director Frank O'Connor discuss the shooter's future, as well as the "fictional foundation" which will serve as the basis for the next 20 years of Halo.
"We do kind of know what’s going to happen in the next game pretty well at this point," O’Connor explained. "We’re doing serious real planning and even some writing on the next game already, and that’s a luxury – we’ve never been in that position before. So we both know at a very high level what’s going to happen in, say, ten years from now. But at that very granular level knowing what’s going to happen in the next game and that’s just been a great feeling for me".
Ross pointed to Frank and the role his team played in creating ODST and Halo Reach, "to really lay the fictional foundation for the next twenty years". 343 has several ideas in place, "You can look at the ending of Halo 4 – and where Master Chief is," she added, "and obviously we had to know where we were going to take Halo 5 and Halo 6 with that. You have an epic sci-fi universe and we have multiple ways that we can go with this story, but all the pieces are laying there. The canvas is there for us to paint".
While Microsoft has a plan, Frank was reluctant to be drawn on absolute certainties for the series' future. "If you start making those stepping stones too rigid, then you’re not being realistic about the game development process. That process could change the story but we know what’s going to happen in the next game, and we kind of know what’s going to happen to the Master Chief ultimately."
Explaining how this could happen practically, he gave the example of development changes early in the series. "Halo 1 was unique, because you don’t know if there’s going to be a sequel, you don’t know if you have a franchise at that point. I think by the end of Halo 2 we knew we had a successful franchise and we knew that we had a story, but Halo 2 itself suffered so many pretty giant changes in the story and in the content as a result of production issues that all the plans for the story kind of got thrown out of the window in some way. And so when we started Halo 3, there was a lot of kind of… 'OK, we’ve got to finish telling the story that we had in Halo 2, but we also have to move it forward.' So we kind of had the luxury, as Bonnie said, of being able to bond the universe and figure out roughly where the story is going to go'".
This isn't the first time Ross has spoken about a 20 year plan for Halo, in November 2014 she commented, "I wasn't looking at just the next Halo game [when 343 Industries was established], I was looking at the next 20 years of Halo. When you're thinking about it that way, you have to think about what sandbox you're playing in, what stories you're going to tell – I think you have to own everything. For us, it's about how we build that universe."
