Halo 4’s Release Set the Foundation for The Master Chief Collection
When 343 Industries started planning out Halo 4, it was originally pitched as an Xbox One launch title.
Head of 343 Industries, Bonnie Ross, revealed this information in February’s IGN Unfiltered, an interview show with their very own Ryan McCaffrey. While that may have been the original pitch for the game, eventually it was decided to become an “end of life-cycle” Xbox 360 game. This decision, however, created a gap in the launch portfolio of Microsoft’s new console.
Because Halo games traditionally take a minimum of three years to make, 343 settled on working on Halo 2 Anniversary. This was intended to be a stop-gap release between Halo 4 and the then-upcoming Halo 5. However, this didn’t quite appease the powers that be, aka Microsoft, so the developer chose to do more than simply remaster the second game.
They hadn’t yet come to the conclusion to do The Master Chief Collection. At first, the plan was to just add the campaigns from the other Halo games to the remaster. At some point down the line, 343 eventually chose to “do them all” and incorporate all the campaigns and multiplayer modes into one big package. “We probably got a little bit too ambitious,” said Ross. “We did a lot more than, maybe, we had time for… with a brand new console.”
It might have been too ambitious of a task, as The Master Chief Collection suffered a multitude of network issues at launch. Ross said it was “incredibly crushing” considering how much time was spent on the project which was always intended “to be a love letter” to fans.
In the same interview, Ross also revealed that the 4th entry in the mainline series was almost made by Borderlands developer Gearbox.
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