343 Industries already working on Halo 6, planning for next 20 years

343 Industries already working on Halo 6, planning for next 20 years

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Halo 5 releases in a month but 343 Industries have already begun working on Halo 6. In an interview with GamesRadar, 343’s Frank O’Connor and Bonnie Ross talked about the future of the series for the next two decades. They already have a firm grasp of Halo 6’s story.

Frank O’Connor said, “We do kind of know what’s going to happen in the next game pretty well at this point. We’re doing serious real planning and even some writing on the next game already, and that’s a luxury–we’ve never been in that position before. So we both know at a very high level what’s going to happen in, say, ten years from now. But at that very granular level knowing what’s going to happen in the next game and that’s just been a great feeling for me”.

Studio head Bonnie Ross added by saying that there goal was “to really lay the fictional foundation for the next twenty years. You can look at the ending of Halo 4–and where Master Chief is, and obviously we had to know where we were going to take Halo 5 and Halo 6 with that. You have an epic sci-fi universe and we have multiple ways that we can go with this story, but all the pieces are laying there. The canvas is there for us to paint”.

You’ll be relieved to know that the story isn’t set in stone. O’Conner stated, “If you start making those stepping stones too rigid, then you’re not being realistic about the game development process. That process could change the story but we know what’s going to happen in the next game, and we kind of know what’s going to happen to the Master Chief ultimately. Halo 1 was unique, because you don’t know if there’s going to be a sequel, you don’t know if you have a franchise at that point. I think by the end of Halo 2 we knew we had a successful franchise and we knew that we had a story, but Halo 2 itself suffered so many pretty giant changes in the story and in the content as a result of production issues that all the plans for the story kind of got thrown out of the window in some way. And so when we started Halo 3, there was a lot of kind of…we’ve got to finish telling the story that we had in Halo 2, but we also have to move it forward. So we kind of had the luxury, as Bonnie said, of being able to bond the universe and figure out roughly where the story is going to go”.

I’m glad that the studio has a great plan and can are so organized at this point. That’s the foundation of having a great narrative. I can’t wait to see where Halo 6 takes Master Chief.

Source: GamesRadar

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