I would have cared but they kept not resolving stories in the games or even side games. So I checked out.
Just make a good one. 343/halo studios just seems to hate the original Halos. Fire all those people and bring in people that love the originals and you already have a way higher chance of getting something successful.
They made good ones plenty of times, and I think I agree with the author that Halo is tapped out. We’ve seen the best it has to offer, and the best thing to do from here is something new. What they made in Infinite is definitely not what I want from Halo.
I’d actually say the problem is that they can’t decide on a direction, and a good chunk of the reason there is decision by corporate committee and the fact that most of Microsoft is contractors. Not dinging contractors, but the longest you can have influence is 18 months, then it’s onto the next.
Then also Microsoft teams are always under intense scrutiny for how profitable they are, which in gaming we all know doesn’t really work out. How can you determine if a team is profitable or not when your product doesn’t release for 2 years. It’s also why their release dates are so strict, if you miss it you’re not profitable, and to Microsoft it doesn’t matter if it’s 95% done, you’re not profitable.
Bungie was a tiny studio full of gaming veterans who were passionate about the game. Microsoft is simply too big to replicate that.
Bungie did not have gaming veterans when they made Halo. They had worked on small stuff like a rip off of Pong for Macs, Marathon, Myth and the like. That’d be kinda like saying an indie team are game veterans because they released one successful game. Plus they only had like 50-100 people that made Halo CE.
Compare that with 343s like 500+, thats massively embarrassing.
Lol, they CANT make games good because then people will keep playing and won’t buy the new thing because the old is too good.
Payday is a good example.
Then it’s a development pacing issue and/or the new game not offering enough to make it worth it. Killing floor 1 is similar to 2 but 2 looks way better. 3 looks even better than 2 and trailer teases interesting fights ahead. If they released those back to back no one would buy.
Eh I don’t think that’s necessarily fair.
The best multiplayer in the series was Halo 5, which is also the farthest from the original in many ways. It just had a crappy story.
Then Halo Infinite was great, and extremely faithful to the original, but I would argue to a fault, as you could see them repeating the exact same story beats and moments rather than coming up with new ones.
I respect your opinion but wholly disagree with H5 having the best multiplayer. In my opinion, Reach had the best feel to its multiplayer, up until 343 got hold of it and introduced their Title Update patch. I also say H4 was better than 5 and Infinite is lacking something I cant grasp, something is missing or maybe theres too much?
Imo, Halo 5 is easily the best gameplay of the 343i games. It also added the most interesting plot threads of their games, despite having a terrible plot.
Halo 4’s gunplay is the worst in the series, especially in the campaign when balanced with the Prometheans. It’s not so bad in the multiplayer, but still not great. Halo 5 improved both the enemies and the weapons pretty spectacularly.
Agreed on Reach being the best though.
How can you say that when forge exists
Forge existed in Halo 5 too, and doesn’t impact the campaign…
Or, just like make a good game. You can work on a game until it’s good and then release it. Come up with some fun ideas, hire some good writers and graphic designers, spend some time making the controls and UI intuitive and responsive, and then balance gameplay through testing.
Oh, and get the music right. Halo: CE was like 90% about the music. When you hop in the back of the jeep, and the music is like “dun duh duh DUUN da dun duh duh DUUUN” and you start mowing down Grunts, or when you meet the Flood for the first time, those moments made Halo an experience worth sharing.
The whole experience was carefully tuned to be fun.
The music was great, but the Puma (jeep), was also a huge part of it. The developers are on record talking about how they made the Puma, realized how fun it was, and then basically built the whole game around having fun moments with it.
This conversation makes me want to plug in my old XBox and fire up some Halo.
Wasn’t it called the Warthog, though? Or am I thinking of Halo 2?
It’s the Warthog. There’s an old webseries called Red vs Blue from like 20 years ago (they just finished the whole thing last year) where they refer to the Warthog as a Puma.
It’s hilarious by the way. If you have an hour to kill, you should check out the first season.
That wasn’t twenty years ago … It was, like, three. Right? Please tell me I’m right.
21 years, sorry.
I can hear this comment.
Does this website have… articles? All I ever get is a headline and a comment section.
I presume it’s an anti-adblock thing, but if so, fuck 'em.
Yes
I think that’s on your adblock. Works here without ads fine.
If the film industry won’t learn that lesson, then the gaming industry certainly won’t.
IP rot will continue until it’s no longer profitable.
Stop pre ordering games and watching every milked franchise sequel.
It will never rot so completely that’s its never not salvageable. Imagine some alternate universe that 343 actually hired people who knew what they were doing and they created a new Halo that was as well received and as talked about as much as the first Halo. That shit would fly off the shelves, sure it wont be pre ordered (nobody should ever pre order anyway) but it will sell and sell and sell once word gets out.
This is what the cling to as they try to make a successful game, despite having as much understanding as to what makes a great game as my dog does of planning a manned mission to mars. What happened was they confused the people pre ordering and buying the game off previous quality games for actual talent in game development, so they endlessly try repeating what they did previously and it just works less and less. Meanwhile utter tools add DLC of ever lower value, loot boxes and skins, to squeeze a bit more cash out of those not quite ready to give up on the series.
That’s easier said and done with movies and tv where the enjoyment isn’t dependent on player base. For multiplayer games at a certain point you have often have to move to the newer versions.
It is not as if people keep rewatching the same old movies twenty times a week. The problem with gaming is that some players seem incapable of even considering trying something new that isn’t part of the same series.
Yes they do, I’ve rewatched seasons 2-9 of the Simpsons about 25+ times, I’ve watched it’s always sunny a similar amount, my dad has seen the movie Independence day about 300 times. Both of us play the same sport, which we’ve played most of our lives.
So many franchises need to be laid to rest.
I am still somewhat hopeful because 343 Industries did make a couple of good things along the way.
I really have not much to complain about Halo 4 besides unpleasant sound design and story slowly starting to be stretched between games, novels, comics, etc. Media around the game should be complimentary, not mandatory to getting the full picture in my opinion.
Saw an opinion on Halo 5 that I totally agree with — best multiplayer, poor campaign. Even though the REQ Packs are lootboxes, I never felt forced into buying them and could earn Gold ones without much trouble.
Halo Infinite felt like a Halo themed playground. Grappling hook and open world are fun as hell, and I really enjoyed collecting audio logs for the first time since Halo 3: ODST. Loved the post-rock sounding soundtrack wich still has familiar tunes. But in all other directions it’s a bit of a letdown, even after they mostly fixed everything after a disastrous launch.
I really want to believe that the situation here can be better than simple “they want to sell everything until it’s not profitable”. The universe is massive, there are loads of stories to tell, worlds to explore, guns to shoot, vehicles to ride even without further expansion of the universe. Everything is there, just do something good with it.
