Eén Halo per drie jaar niet genoeg

In de eerste jaren van de eerste Xbox keken gamers nog reikhalzend uit naar een nieuw Halo-spel. Als we kijken naar de afgelopen drie Halo-games, Wars, ODST en Reach, dan zat er nog geen twaalf maanden tussen elk spel. Deze trend gaat zich voortzetten.

De vice-president van Microsoft Game Studios Phil Spencer heeft gezegd dat alhoewel er geen plannen zijn voor een jaarlijks Halo-spel, er drie jaar tussen laten zitten het niet meer doet voor gamers. "There's no explicit strategy that says we're to ship a Halo game every year. I will say I think one Halo game every three years -- which was kind of our old cadence – is probably not frequent enough." 

De lange tussenpauzes die voorheen aanwezig waren zorgden er voor dat spelers zich minder verbonden voelden met de serie, zo denkt Spencer.

"We're coming up on, what, next year is the 10th anniversary. You watch the change in gamers in 10 years. The percentage of players who are playing Reach that were I'll say not old enough to play Halo 1 at the time, 10 years is a long time between launches. We definitely think about a more persistent Halo engagement for customers and not going dark for two years, and Live helps obviously with multiplayer to keep people engaged." 

"343 Industries is thinking a lot about how to take this franchise and turn it into something that people feel like they have an ongoing relationship with and they can entertain themselves more often. But it's not, hey every November 6 or whatever we have to ship a game and build a production plan around that. We want to do things that make sense as a first party." 

De vice-president werd ook gevraagd of ze hebben opgelet en hebben geleerd van Activisions keuze van Call of Duty een jaarlijks terugkerend product te maken. Daar had hij lovende woorden over.

"I'll just, again, be honest as a gamer. I used to look at annual releases of non-sports games as people just trying to milk me. I figured nobody had enough time to do a good job, and all of the negatives that we would associate with those kinds of scenarios. Kudos to Activision because they've done a good job building a good game, continuing to release each year and I think the fans feel like it's a good thing that they do that. I think there are some things to learn, some positives and some opportunities, in what they do with that. Obviously they've kept the quality extremely high, which I think is important."

Maar er zit wel één groot verschil tussen beide franchises, aldus Spencer. "We have some unique challenges and opportunities with Halo because it is a story based game built around a certain set of characters, which is a bit different than what they do with Call of Duty. Not better or worse, it's just different. But watching them and seeing what they do -- we take inspiration from a lot of places -- but obviously they're a big success."