The controversy around loot boxes and microtransactions refuses to die down still. The next game in the Halo series was not an exception to the scrutiny: the rumors resurfaced that the game planned on introduced loot boxes, but after the EA fiasco Microsoft started re-evaluating how they want to implement the system.
However, the franchize’s director Frank O’Connor took to the forums to debunk the vague concerns:
This is bunk. We’re not reevaluating anything (significant) and “Microsoft” isn’t designing anything for the next game – 343 is. We watched the EA battlefront thing with the curiosity you’d expect – but our current req system is player focused and well liked and unintrusive as far as these things go.
We have made zero announcements about our next projects and continue to work on our next game and technology with player’s needs and interests in mind.
However the story as loosely presented as it is – has no bearing on or relation to any current efforts.
I suppose you could say “company x is evaluating feature you” and always have some grain of truth, but we are neither aping nor adapting an unrelated system from another game.
This follows an equally vague rumor about an issue with our engine, which in fact is counter to significant ongoing improvements and evolution of our tech.
If there were some nugget of truth to both, I’d just ignore it. Development is rife with normal examples of both of these “stories” but in this case there aren’t even notable small examples that this could have been based on.
Certainly in the future we’ll be evolving our systems and tech and maybe these general and vague statements will have brief applicability. But right now? Nah.
