The head of Microsoft Game Studios revealed in an interview that the most expensive games made by Microsoft is Halo 4.
In an interview with Polygon, Phil Phencer said, "Absolutely. Nothing's even close," when asked if Halo 4 was the most expensive game Microsoft ever made.
He also said that the Halo game franchise is now worth $3 billion.
When the Microsoft team started to work on Halo 4, they made sure it looked like a Halo game.
"We did a bunch of iteration and test on different ideas really early on, experimenting with new mechanics - many of which didn't make the cut because of that process...I think for Halo in particular, because there's a competitive aspect to it in multiplayer, it's really important to us to keep that consistency," said 343's Josh Holmes.
"So players can learn a skill, pick it up, and know that they can apply that skill without the game sort of overriding their expectation. And so philosophically, that is something that we really held very dear," he added.
"A lot of the stuff has been ironed out already," said Eric Schuh, senior user researcher at Studios User Research.
"One of the things we're going to be looking at is a mission that's fairly late in the game, and it's had some issues with people understanding what the goals are, what they're trying to achieve," said Schuh, keeping things vague to avoid late-game spoilers.
"It's one where it's not completely clear. We didn't have completely working waypoint markers to drive people to the right place. And so last time, we saw a lot of people wandering around being lost. We're trying to see if - we put some wav points in; we added audio - to see if that actually solved the problem."
