343 founder: We won’t skip beta tests for Halo games from now on

343 Industries head Bonnie Ross has stressed the need to run beta tests for future Halo titles, citing Halo 5: Guardians and Halo: The Master Chief Collection as right and wrong ways to go approach development of the FPS franchise.

In an interview withEngadget, Ross begins by pointing to the different teams as a major separator between Master Chief Collection and Halo 5, before diving into the importance of Halo 5’s beta test taking place during MCC’s launch disaster.

First off, when I say it’s not the same [team], it is 343 Industries. We’ve taken full accountability and we obviously let the fans down. That’s crushing to our studio as well. I think we’re doing everything to make sure that that will never happen again. The difference with Halo 5 is that it was purpose built for the Xbox One in close partnership with the platform team. It’s a brand-new networking stack built for Xbox One, which is not what we were using with MCC; we were using old code.”

Being able to solve and understand what the problems were with MCC right before we had the [Halo 5] beta, the timing was very beneficial. We did a ton of changes with the beta. It was a huge learning of the issues we fell down with with MCC that we were able to quickly incorporate into the beta and make sure that we were standing up.

We took that learning to make sure that this [game] is purpose built for Xbox One. You will never see us not do a beta again because there were a lot of things we couldn’t see when we stood up externally.”

When asked what would happen to Master Chief Collection once Halo 5 arrives, Ross made it clear the compilation effort will not be left to die.

We will keep supporting MCC. You’ve seen that we’ve given continuous updates, and as fans are giving us feedback we will continue to support MCC.”