Halo has always been one franchise that even people who haven’t played any game in the series will spare a moment to at least to take notice. The Halo experience has seen a lot of evolution and upgrades in the past, starting with Halo: Combat Evolved, which changed the entire way the industry thought about first-person shooters, as well as how players see their games.
While the franchise has seen a major shift (from Bungie to 343 Industries) with the latest Halo 4, the entire series never lost its charm, with both the developer and publisher making sure the transition is a smooth one.
Halo 4, since the time it was first conceived, has been a massively anticipated game, mostly because everybody was curious as to how this shift in terms of developing would work out for the game. Needless to say, not only did the game retain its original Halo-ish flavor, but was also rated highly all around the Web.
But Halo 4 is now in the cherished past, and it’s time that all Master Chief fans move on to the next level. And of course the next level is definitely Halo 5. Halo 4 was just the beginning of a new storyline, and with the next Xbox arriving soon, Halo 5 is anything but a surprise. Moreover, everybody has a feeling that this is not the last time we'll see or hear about the Forerunners and their technology. The main question here is exactly when.
Also, many have stated their concerns about the latest Halo title, and this is mostly because of the game’s notable similarity to the likes of Call of Duty and Battlefield. And so the prospect of Halo 5 is even greater considering the devs want to get rid of these “similarities” in the future.
In a recent interview with OXM, when 343's executive producer Dan Ayoub was asked whether there’s more to expect after Halo 4, and if anything was left to be proven, he stated: “Not at all. I like to think that we always have something to prove. I think you definitely touch on our challenge with the first game, but by no means are we done.”
“We have a lot of very cool ideas for things that we're going to do in the future, obviously that I can't talk about right now. I don't think we're ever going to consider it done, and I certainly don't think we'll ever run out of things to prove. Every game we come out with, every product that we come out with, every map that we come out with — I don't think we're going to lose that edge."
This is just the start of the journey for 343 Industries, and by the time the series reaches other possible future Halo games (even after Halo 5), that will be the time to really assess how the series has been doing, after Bungie let go of the developmental responsibilities.
To this, Ayoub states: "I think the advantage Halo as a franchise has over other ones is there's a rich universe that we have to tell stories in. Frank O'Connor will say that all the time. This is a massive universe, and we've just begun to see the stories we can tell in that universe. I think that breadth as a franchise gives us storytelling opportunities that most franchises don't have."
Nobody knows what the future holds for the Halo franchise and how the developing industry will go about the upcoming iterations of Master Chief’s experiences, but it is expected that whatever the outcome is, it will still generate the amount of interest and curiosity that it currently does.
After all, it’s Halo we are talking about. And Halo 4 was just the beginning.
