The uproar surrounding Star Wars: Battlefront II‘s loot boxes was one of the biggest gaming controversies of 2017, so it’s no surprise that any upcoming title with similar mechanics or microtransactions is scrutinised to hell and back. The next title in Microsoft‘s popular franchise, Halo, is the latest to come under fire for the issue.
Brad Sams – a noted industry source who leaked accurate information on both the Xbox One X and Xbox Elite controller – claims Microsoft has been considering loot boxes and microtransactions for Halo 6.
Franchise director, Frank O’Connor, has denied the claims in a ResetEra forum post, stating their focus is on the interests of the player and that no announcements have been made regarding the company’s next project. You can suss the entire statement below.
This is bunk. We’re not reevaluating anything (significant) and “Microsoft” isn’t designing anything for the next game – 343 is. We watched the EA battlefront thing with the curiosity you’d expect – but our current req system is player focused and well liked and unintrusive as far as these things go.
We have made zero announcements about our next projects and continue to work on our next game and technology with player’s needs and interests in mind.
However the story as loosely presented as it is – has no bearing on or relation to any current efforts.
I suppose you could say “company x is evaluating feature you” and always have some grain of truth, but we are neither aping nor adapting an unrelated system from another game.
This follows an equally vague rumor about an issue with our engine, which in fact is counter to significant ongoing improvements and evolution of our tech.
If there were some nugget of truth to both, I’d just ignore it. Development is rife with normal examples of both of these “stories” but in this case there aren’t even notable small examples that this could have been based on.
Certainly in the future we’ll be evolving our systems and tech and maybe these general and vague statements will have brief applicability. But right now? Nah.
So you can rest easy, Halo fans. At least for now.
