- It was rough.
I think it was worse than we expected.
We knew that weren't where we needed to be
and that obviously we had a lot more work to do,
and this wasn't necessarily our best foot forward.
- We knew that the product was good.
Like, if we just had that extra time, we knew what we could get.
- It was a lot harder than we thought it would be,
and we obviously fell down.
- It broke my heart to not be able to ship that day one.
We were pushing hard to get the game done and then,
you know, the global pandemic hit and just, like, floored us.
- The team was basically saying this isn't a game
we're going to be proud of.
- "Halo" is a space opera franchise
that first debuted in 2001 alongside Microsoft's answer
to the Sony PlayStation, the Xbox.
It quickly sold millions of copies and solidified itself
as one of the premier brands exclusive to the Xbox.
- Everybody has that first-love moment for "Halo."
I took three days off work -- my best friend and I --
and we just sat in his house drinking beer
and eating pizza and inviting friends over.
Like, we both played the campaign next to each other
and then did some co-op.
- Lugging LAN parties around and playing Blood Gulch
with our friends until 2 in the morning.
You know, that had been common in the PC world,
obviously, you know, that wasn't a new thing,
but has not been that ubiquitous in a console sense before.
- Not all games have the franchise component
where you have 30 books and you can go deep
and you can have all these characters
that represent a huge spectrum of people in the future
doing all these cool things.
- That's the very cool part about "Halo."
I think if you asked 50 different people,
"What is it about the franchise,"
you'd get a variety of answers.
- It's like a break dance battle, right?
But we have, like, rocket launchers and things like that.
- In 2007, "Halo's" creative studio, Bungie,
split from Microsoft, leaving Microsoft to hand off
the "Halo" franchise to 343 Industries,
a studio that had just formed the same year.
- When we spun Bungie out,
I would say those were huge shoes to fill.
Building "Halo" and creating "Halo" is not easy.
- In today's day and age, the community never goes away.
Communications never go away.
It's real-time feedback constantly in your face,
whether you want it or not.
It's stressful, to be frank.
- In "Halo 4," a lot of us
were figuring out us as a studio,
and, like, how are we the new "Halo."
We were probably chasing the tail of some of
the other dragons at that point, right, a little bit.
And then "5," we went back to kind of an identity.
- The story didn't meet players' expectations,
but I think the multiplayer did.
We really took that moment to kind of say, "What is 'Halo'?
And, like, if we're gonna move
'Halo' forward, what is that deliberate core part of
'Halo' that we can't deviate from going forward?"
"Halo," traditionally, has been every three to four years,
blockbuster movie.
We didn't feel that we should be telling a blockbuster
"Halo" story every year, like "Call of Duty."
How do we still have our big campaign stories,
but then how do we also keep our users engaged
and keep them having new content?
- 343 Industries opted to take a free-to-play route
with updating seasonal content
to maximize the amount of audience they could reach.
They also wanted to return "Halo" back to its roots
and be a spiritual reboot
that would speak to the core values
that "Halo" fans came to love.
- The relationship with a product
isn't just from the creator perspective.
You need to be able to get as much information
as you can about how the people are receiving that product
and wanting to engage with it.
In the previous years,
we would typically just bring in 60 people to come play
the game in a playtest lab, getting tons of surveys,
and then bringing them back the next day to play it.
That was impossible once COVID hit.
- We have kind of routines and rituals,
and suddenly, we're home.
And so we had to rebuild, like, processes,
and, like, I was writing batch file scripts to deploy builds
and, like, make a process for that
so we can get people to build quickly and effectively
and working with our engineers on how often can we deploy
and building new playtest routines
and how do we communicate.
And it's, like, all of these things had to be figured out
while we're trying to ship this thing.
We have an internal pro-team that gives us feedback,
and we have the HCS competitive community,
real telemetry data that tells you
what is the average kill per weapon.
And, like, Twitter, you have people -- Reddit --
vomiting things all over the place.
We have to pull all of this data together.
- But campaign, you can't just put those bits out there.
That is the thing that's probably most sacred to fans.
They don't want to be getting spoiled.
We went after those challenges by trying new technology,
streaming things to people.
One of the things from user research
that we saw from this testing --
we actually were kind of withholding the items
from people and the upgrade path a little bit
like a traditional RPG-type experience.
In reality, what we needed to do --
and I believe we changed some of the tuning
to bring that power in
so that you could experience the grapple shot
and its power earlier, so you were Master Chief
at his fullest potential much earlier in the experience.
Those bits, it's not maybe something
that a player would realize, but it's absolutely something
that great designers can do when they have time.
- On July 23, 2020, 343 Industries
showcased their progress in "Halo Infinite."
Immediately, fan reaction was mixed,
with many detractors pointing out
the last-gen quality of the graphics.
Less than a month later, on August 11th,
343 Industries and Microsoft made a decision
to delay the release of their game by one year.
To help right the ship, they brought on Joseph Staten,
one of the original creators of "Halo"
who was taking a 12-year hiatus from the franchise.
But regardless, "Halo Infinite"
would not launch alongside the Xbox Series X.
- That was an incredibly painful decision,
because it was so important to us as a team
to actually bring "Halo" back to launch with the console.
- It got all caught up in the console wars,
and so just everything got magnified.
We weren't as far along or in a place
that we would've liked to have been to land that reveal.
- So, when the decision came to take that little breath, right,
and kind of realize that we were not in a good place,
we wouldn't have shipped something we weren't proud of,
it was kind of relieving.
- It would've been great for the business to be there.
It would've been great for "Halo" to be there.
But it wasn't the right thing for "Infinite."
- I don't shy away from the harsh feedback.
I've said this before -- it's not always easy,
but I would much rather have a community
that's super passionate than just apathy and no one cares.
- It's challenging to always be constantly open
and transparent with fans,
because we don't want to expose them to the uncertainty
and sometimes that churn that happens
on any game development process.
- Shipping this game was hard.
Like, COVID smacked us in the face in the middle of it all.
And we want to make sure it's right.
- The decision we're making, though --
and I believe this is the right one,
even though it's hard some days --
is to make sure that when we talk to our fans
that they can rely on what we say.
Fans are really soon gonna be exposed
to some really cool stuff
that we've got going on for season 2.
It's taken a little bit longer to get the engine up to speed,
communications flowing in a way that we want to,
but the engine is cranking,
and I'm super excited about the next year and beyond.