Halo Infinite's Master Chief

gamedeveloper.com:

Halo Infinite has been in the works for a long time. So long that 343 Industry campaign associate creative director Paul Crocker and character director Steve Dyck joke that they sometimes forget when some parts of their work came to be. "I can't remember how time works anymore," Crocker joked at the start of our conversation.

That's partly because the COVID-19 pandemic has categorically fudged with everyone's sense of time, and probably because of the long, tumultuous journey Halo Infinite went through in development. It makes even trying to remember the ins and outs of a feature like the Grappleshot--Halo's new traversal tool to help players move through the series' first-ever open world--kind of a challenge.

Temporal fuzziness aside, Crocker and Dyck are still proud of what the Infinite team accomplished with the Grappleshot. It's a tool that makes protagonist John-117 (mostly known by his rank, Master Chief) more maneuverable without compromising his super soldier sensibilities. Halo players are still meant to flow in and out of combat against their alien enemies with an eye on what gun loadouts they have available.

But the zipping around, and being able to catapult the Chief to any point on the map--it just works. There's no explanation for why the Chief got such a device installed on his armor, but as soon as the adventure on Zeta Halo begins, it feels like a natural evolution for Halo's longtime hero. The definition of Master Chief's core power fantasy was at the center of the Grappleshot's development--and the many, many iterations it went through. 

343 Industries divides its developers into different groups in order to support the Halo franchise's balance of multiplayer and single-player content. 343 has developers