Former Halo chief says Activision should hire laid-off developers for next Halo
Frank O'Connor, Halo's former franchise director, says Activision should build its next Halo with developers Microsoft just laid off.
O'Connor, also ex-development director at 343 Industries, laid out the advice in a LinkedIn comment after confirmation that Activision will lead the next Halo title with a purpose-built team Eurogamer. That team is separate from ongoing development work, and the announcement came amid continuing Xbox lay-offs Variety.
He urged Activision to hire staff from Bungie, Halo Studios and other teams hit by cuts. He described those developers as people with talent and ideas that had been nerfed or shut down over the years, according to reporting on his comments IGN. For players, that frames the next Halo as a staffing decision first, not only a design one.
O'Connor then sketched three possible paths. He warned that none of them are easy VGC.
The first path is a classic Halo. That would mean familiar heavy movement and a chaotic sandbox, the loose mix of weapons, vehicles and physics that lets fights spiral, tuned for the core audience that grew up with the series.
The second path is reinvention. O'Connor floated a modernised take, possibly a new kind of first-person shooter, a game played through the eyes of the character, or even an action role-playing game built around real-time combat and character growth.
The third path leans into Activision's strengths. O'Connor described translating Halo's intellectual property, its characters, worlds and stories, into Call of Duty-style systems, with familiar player progress, long-term payment models and annual or semi-annual content drops.
He also cautioned against tying the next game to a hardware or service launch, or to ageing platforms. He pointed to Halo Infinite's Xbox One version as a warning. That version forced the team to support older hardware alongside newer machines, shaping design around the launch calendar.
For fans, this means patience. A new lead studio, a new team still to hire and three very different designs on the table point to early thinking rather than a finished plan.
What makes this stand out is who is saying it. O'Connor ran Halo's story and franchise direction for years. His note reads less as a wishlist and more as a production warning: pick an audience, staff it properly, and do not let the release calendar decide the design.
