Former Halo Director Offers Insight to Activision on Upcoming Game Development
- Former Halo franchise director Frank O’Connor suggests hiring laid-off Bungie and Halo Studios developers.
- O’Connor outlines three potential directions for Activision’s next Halo game: classic, modernized, and a Call of Duty-styled experience.
- Activision’s Halo project has no new team yet and may be years away from release.
Frank O’Connor, the former director of the Halo franchise, has shared several recommendations for Activision as it takes charge of developing the next Halo game. His primary advice is to hire developers who were recently laid off from Bungie and Halo Studios.
O’Connor’s association with the Halo series began in the early 2000s when he joined Bungie, eventually becoming the development director at 343 Industries. He departed from the studio in 2023 during an internal restructure, shortly before the studio rebranded as Halo Studios, which has faced significant downsizing as part of Xbox’s “reset.”
In a recent LinkedIn post, O’Connor discussed Activision’s potential plans, stating, “There are three paths… None of these are easy, guaranteed or necessarily viable.”
The first avenue he proposed is the creation of a “classic” Halo game that maintains the series’ signature movement and sandbox gameplay. O’Connor emphasized that it should be “tailored to a core audience [and] scaled” to appeal to a wider player base, noting that “Halo MP is better [with] more people playing, by mathematical default.”
O’Connor then described a second path as one that offers a “completely modernized and substantially different Halo” that would “reinvent the game/universe in a surprising but fantastic way.” He suggested that this could either take the form of a new first-person shooter or an action RPG, although he acknowledged that the idea of a complete lore reboot might not sit well with existing fans.
The third option resembles the successful elements of the Call of Duty franchise. O’Connor indicated that Activision could “translate Halo IP and sandbox into the [Activision] comfort zone,” utilizing proven “player progress and business models” to develop a major annual or semi-annual release with consistent content updates.
Additionally, O’Connor offered two important suggestions: to hire talent from Bungie and Halo Studios and to avoid linking the upcoming Halo game to “hardware/service launch cycles” or releasing it on outdated platforms, citing the example of Halo Infinite’s version for Xbox One.
With no new development team currently assembled for the project, it appears that Activision’s Halo game remains several years away from release. Fans are left hoping for a smoother return for Master Chief after his last four attempts.
News Courtesy of Eurogamer
