It’s hard to believe that it’s been over fifteen years since the release of Halo: Combat Evolved. The video game grew to become a massive franchise that is still going strong to this very day. With this past installment, Halo 5: Guardians receiving a fair amount of positive reviews, one thing is for sure, gamers want more Master Chief.
Looks like the folks over at 343 Industries has heard from gamers loud and clear as they spoke about their time developing Halo 5: Guardians. During an interview with GamesTM magazine, courtesy of WCCFTech, 343 Industries head, Kiki Wolfkill, along with franchise director, Frank O’Connor, spoke about the need to double down on Master Chief.
Within the interview, Frank O’Connor along with Kiki Wolfkill saw Master Chief as an entry point into the Halo universe, but not necessarily a lead protagonist that would show up in every video game title. This is why the development team opted to make new characters to play as in Halo 5: Guardians, though the result was gamers pleading for more Master Chief in the future developed installments.
“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.”
After this was discovered the development team knew that they would have to double down on the character in the future.
“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.”
Gamers can expect to see a ton of focus on Master Chief in the upcoming Halo 6 installment, which will likely show up during Microsoft’s press briefing at E3 2017.
