Destructoid Checkpoint: Is this the end of Master Chief?

We are a little late this week for medical reasons, but we are back and rolling again, so expect no further interruptions and a return to Friday deliveries from now on.

Halo Studios is largely dead, Microsoft announced this week. With most of the staff laid off, what remains is moving into a support role, and the franchise shifting to Activision for future development. It's only the second-worst status a Bungie-originated game is currently in, which is odd. 

I remain seriously unsold on the move, and I worry for the game's creative future.

Institutional experience

Whether 343/Halo Studios were making good or bad Halo games is beside the point, because they were actually making some. Even the bad ones felt, by and large, like Halo games are supposed to feel. Infinite was only okay, but not because of the gunplay or how it felt to play as the Master Chief. The open world and campaign both sucked because they were trying to make the game something it just wasn’t supposed to be.

Multiplayer was lackluster, which is criminal for a Halo game, with a lack of playlists, netcode issues, bad monetization, and a trickle of content really taking a toll. 

Not only is a lot of knowledge being discarded, but the studio taking over the production of the next game is known for making a completely different type of shooter. You likely couldn’t get further from what Halo is meant to be than Call of Duty, as the clash between the foundational elements that make up arena and arcade shooters couldn’t be more different.

And that's before you even get into the brutal levels of microtransactions and over-monetization in CoD, and how we should all worry that the same structure will infiltrate Halo.

Master Chief matters

Rumors are currently swirling that this will be a chance to completely reboot the series, which would be a terrible idea. We have, as a community, invested in the Chief and all his comrades and enemies over the years. 

Halo Studios did not always handle the story well; I think that much is obvious to almost everyone, but Master Chief was still our hero. He was still singular, and focused, and unyielding in the face of titanic odds. He was built upon the foundation of events that happened in those early games. Attempts to broaden his character were handled awkwardly at points, but there was a good attempt to turn the Chief from a stoic in the “feels nothing” sense to the “feels things but is able to control those feelings” sense, which is more in line with actual Stoicism. 

It wasn’t amazingly well written, but it was giving us an interesting version of the Chief, someone who understood the struggle of the world around him and opted to face the storm instead of someone who was just kind of running on autopilot because that’s what Spartans do. 

The problem with a reset is that it might undo progress, or it might just feel the need to try and deepen the Chief from the get-go. Master Chief needs to spend some time as the cold Stoic before he warms up a little, or else the warmth has no value. 

This is not a solution to the franchise's problems

I think my biggest issue with this solution to the perceived issues around Halo is that it is very much corporate logic. You take what you want to do well and give it to the people who are doing well. In this case, Microsoft has handed a need to perfect pizza to the biggest burger producer in the world. Yes, both of them are technically food, but the nuance between them, the audiences that enjoy them, and the means of production is actually much bigger than you realize.

In corporate land, Activision is really good at making money, and Halo is just another IP, so there is no real reason Activision can't keep making money with it the same way it does with Halo. 

The big question is who Activision will hire to lead this project. Right now, the team doesn’t exist; this is another rushed decision from the new Xbox team because the most important thing right now is building momentum and being seen taking action by the rest of Microsoft.

We will learn a lot more about how this will all go when we find out who is actually going to make up this team that will shepherd Master Chief into the future, but until then, my hopes are low.