343 Industries, the company that took the Halo reins when Bungie stepped away from the FPS franchise after Halo: Reach, have suggested that the large plot points for the series have been "mapped out pretty far".

Studio head Frank O'Connor suggested that the vague direction for the Halo series is pretty much in place for the next decade, noting that it's tricky to map out because their not planning for an ending.

“Story is funny because I’ve been thinking about where the Halo story goes for ten years. And even as a fan, I wonder, ‘what’s gonna happen next?’,” said O’Connor.

“We have things mapped out pretty far, probably about ten years, but they’re pretty vague, they’re big plot points. We think that X wlll happen, we think Y will happen, we think they should go visit Z. There’s a danger that you’ll get granular in your planning because if this was a novel, you could just write an end. But it’s not a novel."

O'Connor also suggested that things were being kept rather open-ended so that the company can best take advantage of the new generation of console technology.

“New technology appears and give you new opportunities, pieces of the sandbox end up being less or more popular than you might have expected. And so the constant shift in reality, never mind the technology of the gameplay content, should be the thing that defines your gameplay universe.”

Halo 4 launches on November 6th worldwide for Xbox 360. [Game Informer]