DF Direct Weekly #283: Halo Moves To Activision, Next-Gen TFLOPs, Silent Hill Townfall Tested!

Richard Leadbetter (0:02)

Hello there, and a warm welcome to this, the 283rd edition of DF Direct Weekly, our weekly show where we tend to discuss the latest gaming and technology news. Plenty to get through this week. Man, there's been so much going on recently. Joining me to discuss a range of topics. First of all, Oliver McKenzie, hello.

Oliver McKenzie (0:21)

Yes, I know very busy behind the scenes, but we should have a good show for you today, hopefully.

Richard Leadbetter (0:29)

And of course, joining us as well, Tom Morgan, hello.

Tom Morgan (0:33)

Hi there. Yeah, I'll echo that. It's been very busy in my side as well, but glad to be on this one. So lots of good news stories coming up.

Richard Leadbetter (0:44)

Lots of big discussion points to go through and actually just generally an exciting week coming up on DF, so plenty of good stuff to look forward to.

But before we go on, a big shout out to our website presence, digitalfoundry.net. Yeah, just check out all of the news stories and stuff that we don't really have time to do videos for and other stuff that our editor, Will Judd, is up to. There's all good stuff. And of course, store.digitalfoundry.net for our merchandising wares. So let's kick off with our first news topic of the week. And I guess the headline, the big headline for this week is that Microsoft has executed phase two of the quote unquote Xbox Reset. Quite bizarre that there's kind of like almost a brand now attached to its reorganization and various layoffs. But there we are. The key headlines were basically that big moves happening with Halo, the Halo franchise is now moving to Activision. And there's going to be a purpose built Activision team separate from the Call of Duty team that will be making the next Halo game. And Halo Studios itself, which was recently rebranded from 343, it's now a much smaller team supporting the community and the kind of multiplayer stuff they've got going on there. Activision is also taking care of Rare, and I believe World's Edge, which is the Age of Empires people.

Other corporate restructuring stuff, Obsidian, that is going to be moving into Bethesda. And there's also been some reports that Playground Games and Turn 10 are kind of merging into one entity. Oliver, I'm going to come to you first on this, because crazy stuff kind of makes sense in some regards, but I'm curious, first of all, about your take on what's happening with Halo.

Oliver McKenzie (2:34)

Yeah, I mean, I think you have to have like two perspectives a little bit on it in some sense, which is obviously the first thing is people losing their jobs is something you don't really want to happen under any circumstance. And especially because, you know, I think the majority of the people who are laid off were in the US., where you get pretty poor in employment insurance and your health coverage is tied to your employment, so you lose your job, you lose your health insurance. That leads to a lot of really negative outcomes. And then also if you're on a visa, you have a limited amount of time in which to secure continued employment, right, to stay in the country. Any discussion about people losing their jobs has to really be foregrounded with that kind of concern. I think the second question is a question of management. And there I think it's more complicated because Halo Studios has a track record that they depended a lot on external development partners. They had an issue where they were slipping on certain titles. I know that with Halo Campaign Evolved, they were moving a lot of people around from different projects and ended up kind of delaying certain other Halo projects, ended up canceling a couple of Halo projects. And in the end, of course, all those projects have now presumably been canceled now that they've been cut down to 20 or 30 people.

I thought the games they shipped were very good. I thought Infinite was very, very good even though it was obviously severely cut down from its original brief, right? In terms of what we saw at E3, I think 2018, the Slipspace Engine trailer, I believe, the kind of biomes they were showing off. Obviously, the final game only featured one biome, much more limited title, kind of scrounged together over the last 18 months, two years of development. Not really something that came together super great in the end. I thought Campaign Evolved was very good, but it was relatively conservative in what it was trying to tackle. It was a very, very good game, but perhaps not what people were expecting from another big Halo game. So moving the franchise under Activision, under a new studio structure, I get that. I don't know if it will work, but maybe that is a better outcome. A lot of people took issue with the 343 era slash Halo Studios era. I thought the games were pretty good, but Microsoft presumably had a lot of data that was suggesting this approach. It isn't working, or there could be a better approach. Ultimately, I guess we're just going to have to see on that. I could believe definitely that there could be a new studio that would be formed, maybe a more centralized studio, a studio with less reliance on contractors, a studio with less reliance on external partners, that could maybe deliver Halo games on a better schedule with perhaps better quality as well.