14 DAY TRIAL // Dan Ayoub, a developer working on the Castle map pack for Halo 4, says that his team at 343 Industries and fellow developers Certain Affinity are constantly surprised by the multiplayer community and the way they come to use the content that they receive.
He tells VG247 that, “we’re constantly surprised by our community, especially when it comes to emergent gameplay or some of the videos that get posted online. They may show things that even we never intended, and I think the Halo community is fantastic for finding things that maybe we didn’t consider.”
The developer says that his team always aims to create maps that players will learn quickly and where multiple strategies can work, but there’s no guarantee that a certain piece of content will be a hit.
The Halo 4 player community seems focused on innovative ideas and constantly delivers feedback that allows 343 Industries and Certain Affinity to refine their future products.
Tom Patter, a producer of the Castle map pack, adds, “The maps we’ve created scored very, very high in our user tests, and just seeing people play who weren’t involved in development agree with our intuitive notion that hey, these maps are great is really exciting for us to see.”
The developer then goes into more detail about how certain maps are used by the multiplayer community.
The team employs ex-Halo pro players to test all the maps, even if they tend to dominate the developers in competitive matches.
It seems that 343 Industries wants to keep Halo 4 relevant in the long term by deploying more maps for gamers to use and new modes to try out.
A new game in the second trilogy of the series, with Master Chief at its core, is at the moment rumored to be in development and will be launched for the next generation of Microsoft home console.