It is unknown as to why the development staff at 343 didn’t receive far more scrutiny after the jarring reception of Halo 4.
Though a lot of creative leads did swap seats from Halo 4 into Halo 5’s early development. The issue with that is during the mid-development of Halo 5 the creative leads played musical chairs AGAIN and that is why that game is also a strange deviation from Halo’s status quo.
Nicholas Buver replaced Kenneth Scott as the Senior Art Director
Josh Holmes replaced Tim Longo as the Creative Director
Brian Reed replaced Christopher Schlurf as the Franchise Lead Writer
Thus
The story being set up by all the trans-media set between Halo 4 and Halo 5, especially Hunt The Truth and live-action trailers, no longer led into the same story it was supposed to. After all, the story of Halo 5 Guardians is not the story that was originally intended for Halo 5.
The visual off-shoot of Halo 4 was further enhanced and mutated into something that looked less like Halo.
And the gameplay for some reason tried to merge an FPS arena shooter with mobilty shooter aspects. Thank the rings we did not have wall-running in Halo 5 Guardians.
Not all.
The spin-offs have been great successes.
But that is mainly due to the fact that a spin-off game is allowed to deviate from the status quo of a franchise within reasonable parameters.
Take a look at Halo Wars. It is an RTS game instead of an FPS game. The design of the Marines looks quite different from the rest of the franchise’s depiction of Marines. The aliens have some issues with their body proportion designs. But the game still tries its best to look and sound like a Halo title.
Ensemble Studios made HW1. And when a sequel was made under 343’s management and developed by a different third-party studio, Creative Assembly knew that the game would have to play like the original but with some upgrades where needed. Had Halo Wars 2 played more like Command & Conquer instead of Halo Wars 1, the game would probably not be as successful.
Unfortunately, 343 took too long to understand this golden rule of game design. Had Halo 4 and Halo 5’s gameplay and art style been attributed to being spin-off titles instead of main-line titles; the fanbase would be much less irate.
As for MCC?
That was just a cheap cash-grab by 343 at the time. And like I said in my previous post on this thread, 343 overdid it. The consumer base was wanting Halo 2 Anniversary. Had 343 focused development efforts with Saber Interactive and Certain Affinity on just H2A instead of trying to make a compilation of the mainline games from beginning to end, then 2014’s release game would’ve been likely more well developed and networked.
Instead, 343 tried too hard to stand out when there was no crowd to stand out from. And Halo MCC was practically unplayable for half a decade.
Same.
Halo 4’s player count dropped harder than Halo Infinite’s. And it resulted in Halo 4 having to scrap Year 2 and Year 3 post-launch content.
In the game files you can find the early builds and file-names for many of Certain Affinity’s DLC map packs.
Some of the armors in Halo 5 were actually intended to be DLC content for Halo 4, such as the Mark IV armor set.
And Seasons 2 and 3 of Spartan Ops had their stories added to the Halo Escalation comic series, extending what likely was originally going to be a 4 issue series into a 24 issue series.
You would think that after such a “resounding success” that Microsoft would start hovering over 343’s shoulder when making the next game in order to ensure such an embarrassment doesn’t happen again to their Xbox’s flagship character.
Imagine if Nintendo had entrusted a studio to develop exclusively the Mario franchise and then didn’t have precision oversight on all aspects of development to the franchise, especially after the first game from said studio did barely anything that the franchise entails.
Hearing Nintendo do such a thing would be ludicrous and irresponsible.
And yet, Microsoft decided instead to allow 343 to carry on seemingly consequence free.
