Can anyone give any insight to game development? I'm obviously biased, but it seems level design is most of the work. If character models, guns, animations, and all mechanics are already developed, what is left for design in new content? Voice acting, all graphic interfaces for quests, a cutscene or two is all that is left no? Once a landscape is created, and once everything is already developed, its a matter of setting up triggers. For example, spawn point here, here and here. Enemies spawn when you cross this line. Dinklebot says this line when X happens. Setting up triggers seems like a straightforward task. Level creation on the other hand takes a huuuuuuge amount of time. All landscapes need to be created by hand by artists and take the most time. Think about it, every FPS game ever created does not run out of spawn points, it runs out of landscape. ANY HALO gameplay time could be doubled by adding twice the maps, and adding spawn points. Do you think anyone said 'Nooooo, larger maps would harm the game and upset the players."? Nope, it probably came down to development time didn't allow creation of larger maps. My point is, Bungie sold out to Activision with a huge contract. Unfortunately, the contract put the asinine requirement of all these DLCs for activision to suck us dry. Bungie scrambled to meet the contract by chopping off TDB and HoW and selling as DLC. Chopping off DLC created a huge disconnect to the story so the head writer left. Read the contract, Bonuses given to Bungie are based on playerbase, sales, and review scores. rather than making a great game, they are doing everything to meet the contract bonuses.