In the wake of a big strategy shift at a major company, especially one fueled by mass layoffs, every thought leader and their dog is ready to crawl out of the wood work on LinkedIn and tell you what it means. But Frank O’Connor isn’t just anyone. He was at Xbox for nearly 20 years and spent a lot of that time working on Halo, departing as creative director of the entire franchise back in 2023. So when the industry veteran recently opined on the fork in the road the sci-fi shooter now faces, people take note.
He briefly shared his view of the situation in the comments to someone else’s post on LinkedIn (via IGN). It laid out three possibilities for where Activision could take the series from here:
1. Make a “classic” Halo movement/sandbox/shooter experience tailored to a core audience & scaled to be successful with that core audience and attractive to a broader one so it can grow (not to mention obvious fact that Halo MP is better w. more people playing, by mathematical default).
2. Make something new, modern that >reinvents< the game/universe in a surprising but fantastic way. An action/sandbox game (maybe it’s a new take on the FPS, maybe it’s an action RPG but it’s fundamentally different) and succeeds with a combination of strong story, IP use and gets a small head start based on curiosity or loyalty.
3. Translate Halo IP and sandbox into the ATVI comfort zone. Use the player, progression and business models that are proven to work and craft a big annual or semi-annual spectacle and constant content.
He noted that none of these would be easy or guarantee success, but his bonus advice was much more straight forward. The first nugget of wisdom was for Microsoft not to arbitrarily hitch the next Halo game to the Xbox hardware or services cycle and not to abandon the game’s longstanding sandbox elements. The other “pro-pro-tip” was for Activision to hire from the pool of recently laid off developer talent, including from Bungie and Halo Studios.
Sony’s latest round of downsizing at Bungie saw many veteran developers cut from or voluntarily depart the studio, and Halo Studios appears to have been all but gutted in the latest phase of Xbox’s reset. And of course there’s the talent floating around from years of mass layoffs throughout the rest of the game industry.
Activision has yet to offer many clues about its plans for Halo’s future, or how it will go about building the new team in charge of it. Somehow I doubt it will include hiring back any of the folks it just cut loose. I also imagine many of them might think twice about coming back after everything that’s gone down.
