Over the last few months, there’s been a suspicious turnover at 343 Industries, with several important team members abruptly replaced for some reason. This is happening when we’re around one year from the release of Halo Infinite, so it’s understandably a bit concerning for the fans.
Creative director Tim Longo left the developer only two months ago, being replaced with Mary Olson, who was appointed as lead producer of the story campaign. Then, she also left the company a few weeks ago, and as soon as they noticed it on LinkedIn, supporters of the series have panicked.
343 employee Unyshek wrote down a quick note for fans on Reddit to make it clearer what is happening right now, as he sees there’s “quite a bit of confusion” on the topic. “I’d like to reassure everyone that the entire Halo Infinite team is rallying behind the game and is working hard to make sure we can execute on its vision,” he started with.
“Tim’s role as Creative Director was to help make creative decisions around the design and direction of the game – whether it was a campaign, multiplayer, etc. Mary’s role as an Executive Producer and then Lead Producer on Campaign was to help drive the game to its completion for our holiday 2020 release date – with the latter specifically focusing on campaign deliverables,” Unyshek explained.
That’s before adding that Mary Olson didn’t replace Longo as “she was a Lead Producer and not a new Creative Director. (…) In short, producers are the ones tasked with making sure the studio is always moving forward – even our Community Team has a producer to ensure we’re tracking our deliverables, blogs, social media posts, flighting emails, and whatever pops up in between.”
He wrapped the post up saying that “there is no creative dilemma inside the studio, and there’s no writing on the walls,” so to reassure people that all this is not influencing Halo Infinite‘s development in any way and that it’s still releasing as planned on Holiday 2020.
We’re obviously very excited about that, as the game will also be available since launch on Project Scarlett, so we can’t but hope that everything’s fine and simply turnover is over with this now.
