The Halo 5 Campaign Designer, Chris Haluke, announced earlier today in a surprise tweet that he is leaving 343 Industries with today being his last day at work.
Chris had been with 343 Industries for 6 years and joined them in 2011. Since then, not only did he work on the Spartan Ops mode for Halo 4, which started the Reclaimer Trilogy but also served as the lead Halo 5 Campaign Designer.
Besides the Halo franchise, Chris has also worked on other projects such as Killzone 3, Assassin’s Creed and Splinter Cell Chaos Theory.
Whether Chris’ departure from 343 Industries has anything to do with the lackluster campaign of Halo 5 Guardians or not is unclear. However, it is natural that the Halo 5 Campaign Designer would be partly blamed by at least some people if the game failed to deliver in the campaign department. What Chris’ future plans are currently unknown but hopefully he continues on to some other amazing projects.
However, the departure of the game designer doesn’t necessarily spell doom for the development of Halo 6. It is also good to know that 343 Industries, who took the Halo torch from Bungie with Halo 4, learned from their mistakes in Halo 5 and have promised to improve upon those issues.
Speaking of Halo 6, despite the game being in development and Microsoft getting ready to unveil Project Scorpio at E3 2017, it doesn’t look like the company’s flagship franchise will be releasing this year.
343 Industries has also made it clear that not only will Halo 6 not be shown at E3 but will also be absent from Gamescom 2017. This suggests the game might be in very early stages of development and a release before Holiday 2018 is unlikely, putting at least a 3-year gap between the launch of Halo 5 and Halo 6.
