‘Halo 5’ Campaign Deliberately Excludes Master Chief, Disappoints Fans

343 Industries, the developer of the “Halo 5” game, deliberately excluded the game’s star Master Chief when it launched “Halo: The Master Chief Collection.” The absence angered and disappointed fans of the game, Frank O’connor, the franchise director of Halo, and Kiki Wolfkill, the 343 boss, admit.

The criticisms from fans of “Halo 5” were absolutely merited, O’connor says. When they marketed the game, they deliberately did not include Master Chief as their way of bringing surprise to players. “But for some fans and certainly fans of Master Chief, it was a huge disappointment because they wanted more Chief,” the two add, Eurogamer reported.

It is an admission that the studio underestimated player attachment to Master Chief when they marketed “Halo 5.” O’connor explains that Master Chief was designed originally as a blank slate, an avatar for the player. However, in the last 15 years of the Halo franchise, Master Chief has become “a character in his own right” and the most recognized character of the series.

O’connor says the volume of comments saying “give us more Chief” at the end of “Halo 5” was significant. Following the furor it created, he says for the next Halo games, rather than add more new playable characters, they would shift the focus a little bit to “making the world a little bit more realistic and compelling.” It would be more fun for players who would get to inhabit the Master Chief in the future, GameSpot reported.

VG247 notes that in the actual “Halo 5” game, newcomer Fireteam Osiris is given more campaign missions than the Blue Team and Master Chief. “Doubling down on Master Chief story and the amount of focus on him was probably the easiest learning from Halo 5. That was a really simple thing to absorb and embrace,” O’connor says.