LogInYouTuber Rebs Gaming has talked to a former Halo Infinite developer and shared some exclusive insights on poor leadership decisions in handling the development of Halo Infinite's campaign.
Image Credits: 343 Industries, Halo Infinite
While Halo Infinite was initially well-received as a promise of being legacy-minded, its first year has been tainted by persistent development issues. As the game campaign was obviously weak, the interest in multiplayer quickly began to die down as well due to a lack of content and what seemed, even from the outside, to be poor management.
If you've been following the development of Halo Infinite, you know that the general consensus is that Microsoft and 343 Industries set it up to fail. A fractured production cycle, unclear post-launch plans, there's a long list of issues that took root in the bad leadership and policies that resulted in an undeniable failure of a game that is quietly being killed off a little over two years since the launch, when it could've had the world.
Recently, YouTuber and games news reporter Rebs Gaming, a big Halo fan, has released what he calls an exclusive report, focusing on how exactly Halo Infinite's campaign was ruined by the leadership as revealed to him by an anonymous former Halo Infinite developer. Now, obviously, take everything with a grain of salt since the source can't be verified, but the facts shared in this video aren't exactly surprising, since it's exactly what you would expect, although shocking nevertheless.
Here are the key points:
- The campaign team was placed in a "box" without studio collaboration, which drained the team
- The campaign didn't receive any external focus testing, unlike previous campaigns
- Leadership didn't play the campaign during internal testing days and eventually canceled internal testing which cut off all feedback loops for the campaign team
- Leadership didn't ask for campaign feedback until months before the game shipped
- There were hackathons to boost morale and several awesome prototypes were created, yet leadership abruptly scrapped both them and the hackathons
Image Credits: Rebs Gaming
If you want to know more about the infamous story of Halo Infinite development, check out another Rebs Gaming's report that compiles all of the publicly available evidence of how former 343 Industries and Microsoft leadership and contractor policies hurt developers and destroyed Halo Infinite, including covering Halo Infinites development stages and some cut content.
"Halo Infinite's creative direction was also in flux until unusually late in its development. Several developers described 343 as a company split into fiefdoms, with every team jockeying for resources and making conflicting decisions.
One developer describes the process as 'four to five games being developed simultaneously'."
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