343 Industries has revealed that they now have multiple job openings, and they’re all for making more Halo.
Within the past few months, we had been seeing a Twitter user named Bathrobe Spartan share rumors about goings on behind the scenes at 343 Industries. Much of what they had been sharing seemed credible, because we did see them comment on the exit of many 343 employees.
However, as it came to light, their claims aren’t entirely credible after all. Jez Corden recently debunked one such claim, from Bathrobe Spartan, that 343 would only be overseeing Halo games, and no longer making them themselves.
In fact, Jez claimed that not only does 343 still have employees in the hundreds, they also have a lot of open positions.
And now we see that 343 is being more aggressive in advertising those open positions. 343’s Community Director, Brian Jarrard made this tweet on their account:
“We’re hiring! Come join us and help create the next era of @Halo games. Visit the Microsoft Careers Site to learn more and apply “
You can see the Microsoft job openings site for 343 Industries here. There are seven different kinds of jobs that need to be filled right now at the studio, as follows:
- Software Development Engineer
- Senior AI Engineer
- Senior UX Engineer
- Business Manager
- Lead Game Systems Designer
- Lead Game Designer
- Lead Gameplay Designer
For those wondering, no, these openings do not match up to the jobs of the people we know left 343 Industries. It seems that 343 already did hiring without the public noticing, and it’s possible some of those people went directly to apply without any online footprint.
And there isn’t anything particularly different about these job openings. Whether we like it or not, the video game industry at large, not just Microsoft, have opened up new AI-related jobs. And really, video games had been making Ais for decades, at a much more primitive level, and with a considerably smaller carbon footprint, than those generated by OpenAI’s AI modeling technology, like GPT-3.
If there’s anything to glean from these openings, it’s that they’re somewhere between the start and the middle of development of a Halo game. While some can speculate these jobs will just be for future content for Halo Infinite, Jarrard made it clear that they are making future Halo games right now.
And yes, we don’t think it’s a mistake that Jarrard worded this in such a way to dispel those rumors that 343 is no longer making Halo games. It seems 343 has a chip on their shoulder now, and they’re aching to prove that they have what it takes to take Halo into the future for Xbox and Microsoft.
