Just got finished watching the video.

I totally believe what he's saying. Pretty much every story about how MS handles their studios points to this being true. MS has a vision for their games division and all of their developers are there to help them achieve their vision. So, MS retains a huge amount of control over them.

Personally, I think it sucks. I think you're going to get the best games by letting the people who actually make the games decide what they want to work on. Not to say they should have total freedom. But the vice grip MS seems to have its studios under is ridiculous.

Sadly, I haven't gotten a chance to play Halo 5 yet. Hopefully in the next year or so I'll pick up and Xbox One and play it then. But I'm not terribly optimistic about how it's going to be. I wasn't impressed with Halo 4 and from what I hear 5 has the worst campaign in the series.

Yeah about that video.. why exactly am I supposed to believe what he's saying? I mean, I think it's usual that plans change many times when developing a game and publishers most likely have control over developers. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, it's possible for devs to take a wrong direction. Like an artist might have all the elements for a great album but a producer is needed to make the most of it. Microsoft most likely had control over Bungie too and people love those Halo games.

Especially the part about Cortana is very hard to believe, it really doesn't even make sense. Neither does the stuff about polished MCC pc-port. Of course, if there's some evidence to back this up I'd like to see it. Right now it just seems the guy is misinterpreting things he has (possibly) heard to make 343 Halo's look like huge disasters heh. And they obviously aren't.

As far as I know, he got most of this from ex-343 employees. And 343's Halo's while not awful clearly shows problems. Now before I say anything, much of this is due to Microsoft and how they always are trying to control game studios. Look at Halo 5 at launch, it was missing so much content. We didn't even have a BTB gamemode for Arena till the following month! It took months to add many game modes that have been STANDARD to the franchise, and many such as king of the hill, a dedicated CTF mode, and many more are still missing. Why was the campaign executed so poorly? We chase chief for a few hours, have a non-interactive boss fight, and find out he is doing the right thing? It was such a cliche, and totally destroyed hunt the truth. I was expecting that we'd go from world to world, gather evidence, and slowly piece together this whole thing. Remember at E3 when they were using the scanners or what not to scan for evidence? Well I was expecting something along that lines. We'd play as the chief through his perspective, and see why he is doing the right thing going AWOL (which we did see, but for only 3 missions). Well what happened to that? I do believe Halo 5 was going to be far better, but Microsoft's interference destroyed that. I'm really hoping Phil can do more to stop this, but I'm just not holding my breath. I will always love Halo, and I think of 343 as someone who sees far too much critism thrown at them.

Maybe it depends on the IP. There are studios that have flatout said MS didn't interfere much if at all.

And likely also depends on the developer aswell.