Of Course Halo 6 Is Already in Development

The AAA franchise wheel continues to turn as 343 Industries' leaders revealed they're already working on Halo 6.

In an interview with GamesRadar, 343 Industries head Bonnie Ross and franchise development director Frank O'Connor said they're already planning Master Chief's next adventure. Of course, Microsoft wouldn't just buy the Halo IP from Bungie and open a new studio only for Halo 4-5 and The Master Chief Collection — they're in it for the long haul.

O'Connor reveals his team already knows where they're taking the series next:

We do kind of know what’s going to happen in the next game pretty well at this point. We’re doing serious real planning and even some writing on the next game already, and that’s a luxury – we’ve never been in that position before. So we both know at a very high level what’s going to happen in, say, ten years from now. But at that very granular level knowing what’s going to happen in the next game and that’s just been a great feeling for me.

It should be no surprise that 343 Industries is in the early stages of Halo 6's development, given we're just a little over a month away from Halo 5: Guardians' release. That means that Guardians is likely already heading to the printing presses and just about finished. By this point, 343 Industries is probably focusing on what they could include on a day one update in case they missed any bugs that weren't ironed out before the game shipped.

"You can look at the ending of Halo 4 – and where Master Chief is, and obviously we had to know where we were going to take Halo 5 and Halo 6 with that," said Bonnie Ross. "You have an epic sci-fi universe and we have multiple ways that we can go with this story, but all the pieces are laying there. The canvas is there for us to paint".

O'Connor's closing statement reveals there are all still kinds of tales to be told in the Halo-verse:

Halo 1 was unique, because you don’t know if there’s going to be a sequel, you don’t know if you have a franchise at that point. I think by the end of Halo 2 we knew we had a successful franchise and we knew that we had a story, but Halo 2 itself suffered so many pretty giant changes in the story and in the content as a result of production issues that all the plans for the story kind of got thrown out of the window in some way.

And so when we started Halo 3, there was a lot of kind of... 'OK, we’ve got to finish telling the story that we had in Halo 2, but we also have to move it forward.' So we kind of had the luxury, as Bonnie said, of being able to bond the universe and figure out roughly where the story is going to go.

Halo 5: Guardians will launch on Oct. 27 exclusively for Xbox One.

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