After a messy reveal in 2020, the company’s signature gaming franchise needed a rescue effort to get across the finish line.
In July 2020, Microsoft Corp. showed a nine-minute trailer of Halo Infinite, the latest installment from its blockbuster gaming franchise, which has sold more than 81 million copies and brought in almost $6 billion. Halo fans had been waiting to get a taste of the game since the company first told them about it two years earlier, and Microsoft was counting on their enthusiasm to propel sales of its newest Xbox, which it planned to release in the fall. The trailer showed an expanded playing field and new weapons, but gamers immediately fixated on the graphics, which were so blocky that cynical fans began to joke that Xbox must have mixed up its Halo and Minecraft franchises.
Even within Microsoft, there was wide acknowledgment that releasing a half-baked demo was a big mistake. “We should have known before and just been honest with ourselves,” Phil Spencer, Xbox’s head, said in a recent interview with British GQ magazine. “We were there not out of deception, but more out of ... hope. And I don’t think hope is a great development strategy.”
Staten also persuaded Microsoft’s leadership to give 343 as much time as it needed to fix things. Microsoft saw Halo as critical to influencing gamers to buy the new console, but releasing a buggy version could have soured players on the game.
The studio made that mistake once before, with its 2014 release of Halo: The Master Chief Collection, whose multiplayer version was so glitchy that 343 ended up making multiple public apologies. Serious gamers still remember the episode as a significant breach of trust that Microsoft couldn’t afford to repeat. “There’s nothing worse for a game than to release it and have all sorts of bugs or things that are going to ruin the gameplay experience,” says Jason Brown, who once competed in Halo’s professional e-sports league under the name Lunchbox.
The risky decision to slow down seems to have transformed a potential disaster into a real success. In November, 343 surprised fans by releasing a free multiplayer mode of Halo Infinite on the 20th anniversary of the release of the first Halo game. By the next day, the game had set an Xbox record for most concurrent players on the online gaming platform Steam. The full version went on sale Dec. 8 to positive initial reviews. “Halo Infinite can’t just be another Halo. It needs to be the Halo that exists in your imagination,” wrote CNET reviewer Mark Serrels. “And incredibly, against all odds, it pretty much is.”
Gamers, notoriously difficult to keep happy, seem ready to forgive Microsoft for its false start. “I don’t want to say the Halo community has done a 180, because gamers now are just kind of skeptics, but they’ve turned maybe 130 degrees,” says Matt McDonald, moderator of a Halo forum on Reddit.
Halo pits a genetically modified Marine—the Master Chief—in a battle against a religious cult of aliens, with the future of humanity on the line. Coming into being alongside the first Xbox, it’s been produced in-house at Microsoft since its inception. In 2007, 343 took over production of Halo from Bungie, the studio that made the earliest versions. The Microsoft-owned studio has been characterized by flawed internal tech tools, infighting, and high turnover, according to interviews with more than 20 current and former employees, who requested anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicl
All those factors played a role in the difficulties with Halo Infinite, which the studio began planning in 2015 just after Halo 5, the last full installment of the game, was released. After kicking around various formulas, the developers landed on an idea that stuck: Halo as an “open world” game. Rather than progress through a series of levels, players would explore a giant land mass, completing missions in any order, as they did in Nintendo Co.’s 2017 The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which is considered one of the greatest games of all time.
Video games are built using software tools called gaming engines. The engine used to build Halo was one that 343 had based largely on old code from Bungie. Parts of the engine, a set of tools called Faber, became infamous at the studio for being buggy and difficult to use. Within engineering, there’s a concept known as “tech debt,” which refers to problems one puts up with because the previous programmers of a system chose quick, easy solutions over more sustainable ones. Faber’s code, some of which dated to the early 2000s, had so much debt that some 343 engineers mockingly referred to its “tech bankruptcy.”
The staffing at 343 was also unstable, partially because of its heavy reliance on contract workers, who made up almost half the staff by some estimates. Microsoft restricts contractors from staying in their jobs for more than 18 months, which meant steady attrition at 343.
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.”
By the summer of 2019, Halo Infinite was in crisis mode. The studio decided to cut almost two-thirds of the entire planned game, leaving managers to instruct some designers to come to the office and do nothing while the studio figured out the next move. Eventually the game’s open world was cut back from a vast, Zelda-like experience into something far smaller. It soon become clear to some on the team that, even with the compromises, getting Halo Infinite into decent shape by the following fall would be impossible. Still, the timing of the release didn’t seem up for discussion. Microsoft told 343 that it had to be a launch game for the next Xbox, which meant releasing it in November 2020.
For now, Halo players are content to play the version 343 is releasing. “It just has a really good balance of new and old, which can cater to classic and newer fans alike,” says Marcus Lovejoy, who competed in Halo’s professional e-sports league under the name “Elumnite” before becoming a team manager. “That has been one of the biggest game changers.”
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