With a $1 million prize pool on the line, the Halo World Championship sees its next North American qualifier hit Las Vegas this week, serving as the debut event for a new esports arena in the city. The weekend’s LAN tournament was preceded by the Halo World Championship making its next stop in Mexico City, marking the first ever official open HaloWC or HCS event in Latin America as the season heads toward the Halo World Championship Finals 2017 in Los Angeles from March 24-26.
As the Halo Universe continues to explore new frontiers, Cynopsis asked Frank O’Connor, Halo Franchise Creative Director, about Halo’s legacy in esports and what we can expect in the year ahead.
On Halo’s influence on esports: Actually I think our evolution goes all the way back to 2001 when halo Combat Evolved first launched. It was before Xbox Live, and so to play competitively, even hobbyists had to create mini-tournaments and daisy chain Xboxes and TVs together with LAN cables. Although the lack of online seems at first blush like a limitatuion for that game it actually engendered a culture of collaborative competition and “real-life” events. Not to mention creating thousands of indelible friendships and maybe the occasional enemy!
On 2016 takeaways: Not only did we get feedback about the game content, rules and tournament setup, we also got and continue to get, really useful feedback about how brackets, tourneys and open events are, and could be better set up. We do see interesting feedback on a region by region basis, and the idea that our esports competitors and viewers are all in monolithic agreement I’m sure I don’t need to tell you is faulty. So while there’s definitely some hard science involved in the numbers, settings and logistics, there’s also a great deal of art and diplomacy involved in finding settings, venues and timing that works for a global community. Based on feedback coming out of Summer Season 2016, we added back in open LAN events to our roadmap, and for the first time this year, Halo World Championship LAN qualifiers were all open events. We will continue to focus on these and have seen great support and reaction from our community as our attendance, participation and viewership continue to grow. We are doubling down on storytelling and content, and hired a new team member specifically to tell the amazing stories of players and teams from around the globe
On 2017 changes: We have a team that is focused on continued support for Halo 5, including basic maintenance, making tweaks and adjustments, playlist updates, as well as a few test scenarios that are focused on learnings for our next big game. Naturally we’re not going to mess with successful bits of the formula, so players don’t need to worry about permanent overshields or active camo, but we may test a few things in well-marked hoppers.
On Las Vegas: The eSports scene is already massive, and growing every day. So while there’s an allure to Vegas with its rich history of sports competition and giant events, boxing, for example, there’s also the matter of scale. Vegas is big enough to support players and fans in terms of hotel and event infrastructure. Picking cities is easy when you’re thinking about event space and player infrastructure, but it’s also important to have cities that work as hubs and have plentiful air and transport options so that fans can get there and not break the bank in terms of hotels and entertainment.
We want our events to be welcoming and we’re rapidly approaching events that are as big as, and in some cases bigger than traditional physical sports events. The beauty of our sport is that it isn’t tied to a geographical location, like a single stadium, so we can scale to national and international events quite easily.
On the Halo Universe: Of course 2017 is going to be another big year for Halo 5 our qualifier events and the HaloWC Finals in March, but we’re also just getting started with Halo Wars 2, so expect additional content and a few announcements in the coming weeks and months. As for future game features, our CVP, Bonnie Ross, recently announced at the DICE conference, that Halo shooters in the future will include split screen mode. This won’t have an effect on Halo 5,but the team is already hard at work on this and other compelling competitive (and co-op=) features for future games. Split screen is really important to fans, since it enables competitive and co-op play with minimal setup and maximum social interaction. We know it is a big deal for a bunch of our fans, and we’re committed to supporting it for future games.
