Halo 4 part of the ‘Reclaimer Trilogy’

The ‘Reclaimer Trilogy’ – that’s the name of the three games that will kick off with the arrival of Halo 4 next year, 343 Industries has told an audience at the Halo Fest event.

Eurogamer reports that around 200 developers are currently working on Halo 4 and that work on the game has been underway for two years. In all around 30 different studios are represented by the current workforce at 343.

The game will place more direct focus on Master Chief, who himself was absent from the most recent release in the series Halo: Reach. And by the sounds of it the title will prove both instantly familiar and at the same time a little different.

"It plays like Halo," creative director Josh Holmes explained. "It sounds simple but that was really important to us. As a team we were brought together by this love for this universe and this play experience, and we wanted to maintain the core of that magical Halo feel.

"But at the same time, it was important for us to have the courage to take risks and evolve the gameplay feel so it is fresh and different. It’s this constant question of balance for us we’ve wrestled with since the beginning as a team.

How do we maintain both what is the core of Halo, making sure it feels like Halo, while at the same time adding new weapons, new abilities, new experiences you’ve never had before in a Halo game?

"But at its core it does feel very much like Halo. It was important to us to maintain that commitment to the sandbox nature of Halo gameplay, making sure we’re empowering players to make choices in how they approach each problem instead of giving them only one solution. That was one of the things we held at the core of everything we did."