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Halo: The Master Chief Collection might still be suffering with issues, it might have damaged the Halo brand, it might even have lowered 343 Industries in the eyes of some players, but even with such a bunch of failures it has still offered a positive learning experience for the studio - something it can put towards development of Halo 5: Guardians.
Bonnie Ross, founder and head of 343i, spoke with Game Informer about the Master Chief Collection - initially it was intended to be separate releases of the four Halo games, but at some point in development it was decided this would all be combined. And that, apparently, was a mistake:
"I think when you look at that and being the first time for us being on Xbox One, new platform, new matchmaking, I think that actually kind of wrapping them all together… it’s hard. I wanted the team to push for that because I do think that it’s a magical experience, but I think that it definitely created huge challenges.
“In hindsight,” she continued, “It would probably have been better to ship the four games separately. And I think that fans would’ve loved that. [But] we wanted to do more. We wanted it to be this gift to the fans.”
But it wasn’t just the packaged nature of the games that held it back - it was the lack of beta, something Ross is adamant will never happen again:
"There is so much we learned with the Halo 5 beta. There is actually stuff we took from our Master Chief Collection - learnings that we were able to put into the beta. Going forward, you will never see a Halo game coming out without a beta.
“It was obviously painful for our fans and for us. But it won’t happen again. There are things we put in place to make sure that we know everything, how it stands up outside and in the wild.”
Source: Kotaku.co.uk