Shipping all four games included in Halo: The Master Chief Collection separately may have helped 343 avoid some of the issues suffered by last year’s anthology, studio head Bonnie Ross has said.
Reflecting on last year’s problematic release in the latest issue of Game Informer, Ross admitted that the studio had “let our fans down [with Halo: The Master Chief Collection], and that’s not acceptable”.
“Everything we do in Halo should be a triple-A experience,” she said. “When we set out to do the Master Chief Collection, the original pitch that we wanted to do was sort of a war chest. Ship all four games separately. Package them up. And the team came up with this idea of this universal UI. It is a magical experience when you can pull it all together and seamlessly move across games, but it’s also very ambitious.”
Ross explained that 343’s ambitious approach to the anthology coupled with it being the studio’s first Xbox One release led to “huge challenges” that the team struggled to overcome.
“In hindsight, it would probably have been better to ship the four games separately,” she continued. “And I think fans would’ve loved that. We wanted to do more. We wanted it to be this gift to the fans.”
343 has learned from its mistakes, though, and “going forward, you will never see a Halo game coming out without a beta,” Ross says.
“It was obviously painful for our fans and for us. But it won’t happen again.”
Source: Game Informer | July 2015
