Halo 4

THE BUZZ: Frank O’Connor, Franchise Development Director at 343, reassured the departure of Creative Director Ryan Payton has not affected the team.

Payton left the team a few weeks ago stating that his decision was a result of not being “creatively excited” by the project anymore. O’Connor discussed Payton’s departure with CVG in a recent interview:

“He was working on the narrative design on the game. I absolutely get that in some ways he was making a game with cinematics and for want of a better term – fairly conventional storytelling.”

“Ryan comes from a Japanese gaming background; he worked on Metal Gear, obviously, and he chose a fairly surreal blend of storytelling and action. I think he wanted to do something much more … I don’t want to speak for him, that’s so unfair, but definitely coming from his Japanese narrative background, the narrative design stuff that he was doing with Halo was very sort of European-American style of conventional narrative story-telling. I can absolutely see why he wouldn’t find that challenging and innovative. I wish him well. He wasn’t working on game design at all.”

When asked if the departure had affected the team in anyway he replied, “Not really. I mean Ryan was reporting to a guy called Armando Troisi from Bioware, who was heading up our design. We valued Ryan’s input but he hasn’t been leading the project for more than fifteen months so it didn’t affect us at all. Ryan had actually been gone for quite some time before that news story showed up, so it was kind of a surprise for us that it actually came up.”

EGM’s TAKE: It appears that much of the team expected the departure to occur and we can’t see this seriously affecting the finished game in anyway.

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Source: CVG