343 Industries: Halo 4 and the untapped power of Xbox

This generation of consoles isn't dead yet, says Frank O'Connor. And his latest game will prove it
343 Industries


Walking across the floor of the Eurogamer Expo with Frank O'Connor, Halo 4 franchise development director, takes longer than you think. People stop him to talk about Fable, developers want to chat, and the odd dude clutching a Halo poster even wants an autograph.
O'Connor is polite but baffled, but it's a good sign. Halo 4 is the first original title from 343 Industries, and comes with a load of new features, including new episodic cooperative content, Spartan Ops. And as O'Connor explains below, in-between chat about the survival of this gen consoles and world wars, the internet isn't keen on change.
"There are 9 million people in the rest of the world that are the silent majority who don't know who makes the game. They don't play certain parts of it and they don't care"

Q: Are you tired of being asked about the pressure that comes from following Bungie's Halo titles?
Frank O'Connor: I'm not tired of it at all. I was obviously part of Bungie for a long time and it's a completely legitimate question. I think that Bungie was so innovative and so technically adept and so originally that when you put the number 4 in front of something people are naturally cynical anyway and they have absolutely no reason to trust or believe that this new outfit is going to be able to follow in those footsteps. So I'm not sick of the question, and I'll be answering it for years. And that answer is always going to be the same, it's a hard act to follow but I think we assembled a team that was capable of doing something really interesting in the universe and taking it forward in appropriate ways.
Because it's not going to be perfect, when the game comes out, there are going to be things as it was at Bungie that people don't like a complain about and that's the nature of gaming. Especially the nature of a game like Halo which has so many constituent pieces, and so many constituencies of players.
Q: The fan base seems to have some very specific ideas about what they want to see in the game, down to certain types of armour...
Frank O'Connor: And that's the beauty of the internet. Before when you had a subjective opinion nobody got to find out how wrong it was and now people instantly broadcast how wrong your opinions are all over the world, and again, Halo has got lots of different parts and so it has lots of different audiences and they all think they're the main target.

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