Halo: MCC "a black eye for us," Halo 5 won't suffer the same fate, says franchise director

The development of Halo: The Master Chief Collection was of an "outrageous complexity," which was one of the reasons it suffered a horrible launch. None of that will happen with Halo 5: Guardians, according to Frank O’Connor.

Frank O’Connor, Halo franchise development director opened up to Xbox Achievements about the difficult task of developing The Master Chief Collection and how it's a completely different beast from the upcoming Halo 5: Guardians.

"Halo: The Master Chief Collection is definitely a black eye for us," he began. "We’re not going to rest on our laurels or hide from the mistakes we made. However, I will say that the nature of The Master Chief Collection – you’ve got five different game engines, you’ve got five different studios working on it, you’ve got 343 working on putting it all together – the footprint and complexity was outrageous."

O’Connor said that many of the issues users encountered on day one were not discovered in testing, and caught the developers by surprise.

"Halo 5 is being made by a completely different team. It’s a singular product. It was built from the ground up for this new technology, rather than being sort of dragged kicking and screaming from 2001 and forced and shoehorned into a 2014 console. So the problem spaces are still very challenging but they’re radically different. I think the beta is already a decent first step, in a retail environment, showing that we don’t have the same problems."

Halo 5: Guardians is out October 27.