Halo: Campaign Evolved reportedly outsourced the ‘majority’ of its development, and it may only get worse from here
The latest Halo remake, Campaign Evolved, had a troublesome development cycle. Accusations of mismanagement, harassment, and numerous other issues in the studio during its creation were made on several occasions, but it seems outsourcing also caused many headaches that, frankly, could have been avoided.
That is according to RebsGaming, a well-known reporter on all things Halo, who said that Microsoft had outsourced Halo: Campaign Evolved to as many as 15 external studios. Furthermore, some of these studios don’t appear in the credits because they were booted off the project mid-development due to, as Rebs claims, severe mismanagement of co-development partners.
Additionally, Rebs says that every new Halo project will likely be heavily outsourced, with the canceled multiplayer Halo codenamed Project Ekur also seeing the vast majority of its development handled by external partners. On top of that, Microsoft is reportedly broaching the idea of outsourcing Halo partly or entirely to Activision, with the latter looking for options to bring Sledgehammer Games in to develop Halo‘s multiplayer.
Outsourcing in the case of Campaign Evolved was severe. External studios handled core parts of the game, as Rebs puts it, “from start to finish,” including AI behavior, scripted scenes, art, and more.
He claims that this doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing because it’ll definitely speed up development and allow individual studios to create much more content in their own areas of expertise, but Halo Studios’ past cases of mismanagement aren’t helping things.
He even says that this mismanagement of co-developers is the exact reason why Campaign Evolved had such a chaotic development cycle and almost wound up never releasing. It was salvaged somehow and launched, but it did not meet much of a positive response from players, though mostly because many believed the remake was unnecessary.
Still, outsourcing is, if you ask me, a horrible idea. It creates a huge disconnect between departments, slows down communication, and does not allow a project’s creative director to involve himself or herself deeply with every part of development.
It’s just a bad idea all in all, especially when we consider that a lot of outsourced studios employ developers of lower skill for very meager salaries, which is, unfortunately, probably the reason for their existence.
Halo definitely isn’t in the best standing at the moment, and if Activision starts getting involved and outsourcing continues to grow rapidly, I’m not holding my breath for Master Chief’s triumphant return to culture.
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