YAY (Destiny)

by Quirel, Friday, October 02, 2026, 19:14 (1 hours, 36 minutes ago) @ Claude Errera

Sorry to litigate, but I'd like to see the source for that. Who boasted about hiring people who hated Halo?

I remember 343 leadership saying they had hired people outside the gaming industry with the goal of creating a diverse team. I remember some quote stating that some people had been hired who weren't Halo fans when hired. And so what? Tony Gilroy wasn't a Star Wars fan when he was hired, and he ended up making the best Star Wars creation since 1980.

Man, I said I was only gonna say the one thing. And HBO and Google exist. But Frankie said it, and yes, he used the word hate. You can hire people who aren’t fans of a thing and have that be great. But hate? That’s quite the word.

Here's a copy of the article in question:

https://web.archive.org/web/20141014092328/http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/191234/making_halo_4_a_story_about_....

Frank said "We had people who we hired who hated Halo because of 'X', but what that really meant was, 'I feel like this game could be awesome because of 'Y input' that I'm going to bring into it. I want to prove it, and I'm passionate about proving it.' So we ended up with a bunch of people who were genuinely passionate about the product. That is a huge advantage, and that helped in hiring and forming our team."

I think if you're interpreting that as "we hired people who hated Halo because we hate our fans", I think you're missing the forest for the trees.

No, but 'hate' is still a load-bearing word in that paragraph.

How should I put this... There's a difference between iterating on a previous formula because you think the formula would work well with new elements, and forcing new elements into a formula (Or replacing it altogether!) because you think it's lacking without them.

It's the fine line of fans who want to see a Halo game that does X cool thing, and non-fans who don't like Halo because it's not CoD or CSGO or Overwatch. The latter probably aren't going to make a good Halo game because they don't love it enough to understand what made it work in the first place.

And Halo 4 was rife with that problem. Every gun in the sandbox, every enemy you fought, just felt wrong. Jaime Greisemer said that there wasn't a single good thing added to the sandbox, and I can't disagree with him.

Everything looked wrong, too, because most of the artists working on the game didn't have respect for what came before. That's why the Forward Unto Dawn was completely changed, because one of the artists decided that UNSC ships should look like more than "Just an aggregate of boxes". That's why the Covenant were beaten with the ugly stick.

The Covenant vehicles had to wait until 5 to get beaten with the ugly stick, but that's only because 4 was developed on a bit of a time crunch.