I guess now I'm confused about the workflow at 343. Does Kynan do the map overviews and blockouts, then hand it off to whoever they're outsourcing to for artists? In the walkthroughs, he speaks as if the core MP team is really involved, so I assume they've got a high level of oversight on the outsourcing. I just wonder if the level of control is really what it needs to be to maintain the quality bar they should be hitting - things like the framerate on Wreckage just flat out should not happen.
The Halo 2 Map Pack disc came with a cool documentary that showed how the MP designers would split up into small teams with a designer and a couple of in-house, full time artists and really be able to create something cohesive that they had intense amounts of control on. I wonder how much of that is simply not realistic anymore due to how expensive asset generation is now. I just think that the benefits of having a unified vision and being able to quickly hammer out the issues and not have to wait for check-ins and milestones from another developer would outweigh the cost of having that talent in-house, but I'm not really much of a businessman, nor do I really know what their process is like.