Ryan Payton, the Creative Director of 343 Industries left back in early September due to not being ”creatively excited” by the project anymore. He states that although he know the game will sound ‘epic’, there hasn’t been enough changes in the franchise to keep it fresh and fundamentally different.

Frank O’ Conner, 343′s franchise development director, has today told CVG 343 staff  ”probably wouldn’t know what he was actually doing on the game” anyway.

“I’m not really going to get into that conversation because Ryan’s a friend of mine and he’s nearby, but Ryan hasn’t been the creative director on Halo for more than fifteen months and he was doing something different in the game when we left,” O’Conner explained.

“He was working on the narrative design on the game. I absolutely get that in some ways he was making a game with cinematics and for want of a better term – fairly conventional storytelling.

“Ryan comes from a Japanese gaming background; he worked on Metal Gear, obviously, and he chose a fairly surreal blend of storytelling and action. I think he wanted to do something much more…

“I don’t want to speak for him, that’s so unfair, but definitely coming from his Japanese narrative background, the narrative design stuff that he was doing with Halo was very sort of European-American style of conventional narrative story-telling,” he added.

“I can absolutely see why he wouldn’t find that challenging and innovative. I wish him well. He wasn’t working on game design at all.”

Halo 4 is the 7th installment in the Halo series. This is the first game which isn’t being developed by Halo’s creators Bungie Studios. Although this is 343 Industry’s first attempt at taking on the halo franchise’s, they have already been fully involved by helping Bungie create the DLC map packs for previous games such as Halo 3 and Halo Reach.

Halo 4 is set to be released in late 2012.