343 Industries has faced a ton of flak for Halo: The Master Chief Collection with issues that continue to plague the game months after release. Though updates have been released to repair matchmaking and team balancing, other problems like lag in co-op continue. There’s plenty of concern that Halo 5: Guardians will face issues at launch but franchise development director Frank O’Connor told Xbox Achievements this wouldn’t be the case.
O’Connor explained that the overall endeavour of bringing the Master Chief Collection to Xbox One was troublesome from the start. “Halo: The Master Chief Collection is definitely a black eye for us. We’re not going to rest on our laurels or hide from the mistakes we made. However, I will say that the nature of The Master Chief Collection – you’ve got five different game engines, you’ve got five different studios working on it, you’ve got 343 working on putting it all together – the footprint and complexity was outrageous.” This resulted in many issues appearing from the game’s launch itself, according to O’Connor.
However, he maintained that, “Halo 5 is being made by a completely different team. It’s a singular product. It was built from the ground up for this new technology, rather than being sort of dragged kicking and screaming from 2001 and forced and shoehorned into a 2014 console. So the problem spaces are still very challenging but they’re radically different. I think the beta is already a decent first step, in a retail environment, showing that we don’t have the same problems.”
Halo 5: Guardians is out on October 27th on Xbox One. Stay tuned for more details in the coming months.