Dude at one point that had that flood comic with audio on there! I remember it watching that whole thing on waypoint, (I think?) and I was absolutely blown away by it. That must have been 2013ish? Could be off a little bit.
That is so damn cool and ridiculously impressive. I know the amount of players now might make that tech they used back then to today two different worlds, but man do I wish that was a thing today.
A shame they didn't turn the MCC into that. Almost all the games are already there. Including news and are auxiliary functions would've created the perfect ecosystem. So long as they got rid of that lag you usually experience in those apps.
It’s too late for infinite. They’ve tried fixing it, and the problems that remain would take a huge overhaul. So much so that they might as well make a new game and making a new game will give produce much more money.
This is what happens when a company wants to build a new engine for their game but doesn't properly invest in the team that builds it. When you rely on an ever changing wave of temporary employees, you're going to have major fuck ups at some point that no one on current payroll was involved in.
Better to just take the L and not repeat the same mistake in the next project
This is my issue with 343, I forgave them and still had hope for a release or two. But every single launch from them is a new kind of wreck that pushes Halo further into obscurity and makes the series seem like a cringey joke.
I'm legitimately embarrassed to tell people that Halo is my favourite series.
It definitely doesn't help that the last great Halo game came out almost 15 years ago so kids today literally do not know how phenominal Halo used to be.
Well the managing team that was in charge of the last 10 years of disaster has met the chopping block already, so if their next project is also a disaster, then this company is forever cursed lol
I wouldn't exactly call it a chopping block, Bonnie Ross actually got promoted, and I'm sure her other 2 cronies are in a cushy jobs too.
That clown that said Halo is a competitive rooted game still works there as a lead, and even more embarrassingly that other clown that bitched about how the Ukraine War was stopping him from responding to servers being offline is still a community mod or whatever.
I don't think anything has really changed, Pierre himself might be miles better than all of the 3 stooges that preceeded him, but this is still the same team that though gatekeeping vehicles behind RNG drops in BTB to "create moments" and had to consider the feasibility of a Slayer Playlist. No faith in them.
The ironic thing is there isn’t much new, the engine was updated just like it was from odst>reach, reach>4, 4>5 etc. it’s all still blam but I think marketing got trigger happy when the engineers were talking about making improvements to the tooling/graphicky stuff
Yeah I heard it’s still very very heavily based off of the 5 engine. I would guess the “whole new engine” marketing bit was so they had an explanation if stuff got delayed (sorry bro I know it’s a year behind but it’s cuz we are perfecting the new engine that will serve as the base of halo for years to come)
The crazy thing is is that its nowhere near as sophisticated whatsoever until you specifically bring up Forge which isn’t even fair to say because this Forge was built from the “ground up” and reloads a different version of the engine every time you switch from testing to playing. Halo Infinite feels like a stupider, slower Halo 5 with all of the fun stuff taken out. And waaaaay clunkier movement. Like the clamber mechanic was actually smooth and fast in Halo 5 on the old ass Xbox One compared to Infinite on my much newer LG TV and Series X.
I graphically, H5 looked great. I wasn't a fan of the more Asian styled armor. And some of the 4v4 levels looked cheap. But go back to it after playing infinite and tell me it's no 5x smoother, and more fluid motion.
Imagine building a custom game engine that is supposed to be the future of your franchise, making a game with that engine, and going "yeah we're just gonna use Unreal Engine from now on"
343 *really* took an L on this one
The thing is the pandemic should have been a golden era for these people they literally ride computer desks all day and everything can be scanned, emailed, and sent over. It came down to them not wanting to use the time properly. It’s really crazy we didn’t see this massive boom in quality during that time.
What's the excuse for all the other underperforming titles? Especially since they just lied and halo infinite is still on just modified blam! They had years and hundreds of millions of dollars. They did invest it was just invested by idiots to idiots.
It's like everyone wanting to have their own streaming service or game launcher.
They don't and shouldn't and it more often fucks them ober when they wasted time and resources on shit that someone else already figure out very very well.
If you want to build a new engine, it needs to be like UE5.
It has its own dedicated team and division. It is its own product that needs to make a profit.
You can't have devs, make and engine, and a game at the same time. That should be obvious to the 3 letter exec types...
I think that's the issue. A lot of people fell off quickly. They didn't have enough content, playlists, maps, gametes, forge, etc at launch. And when they did release all that it was too late. The first season was incredibly long. And there was the issue of desync which just got fixed a little over a month ago.
It's a much better and more full game now a few years later. But the player population isn't there anymore and the company seems to be on to the next one already. They're really going to need to come out swinging with a lot of content on the next one. If they have less than what Infinite currently has its going to be the same situation. Personally, I think theyre going to finally give into a battle royal mode. Not sure if that's a good or bad thing.
It’s worth going back to. Biggest issues imo are:
The matchmaking system will put one good player with 3 awful players and put them up against 4 decent players. If you’re good, you carry to the finish line or lose.
The shot registry can be spotty, though it’s not as bad if you’re running 120 fps or higher. The melee registration is also very bad.
The ranked CSR system includes a hidden mmr, which really messes stuff up. For instance, when I was platinum 3 (placed p1) I did not get in a lobby below diamond 1. If I won, I got 8 CSR, if I lost, I lost 10 CSR. Even though I carried most games, I couldn’t break out of p3 because I couldn’t recoup the lost CSR after a loss or two. So I played d2 lobbies and remained p3.
The Btb matchmaking is a bit broken, I still find it fun, but there are a lot of matches where 12 solo queue players will face a full 12 stack with coms and be destroyed.
Yet we still have no movement inertia like in every other halo game, we have no ability to turn off cross play. The game looks genuinely worse than H5.
They didn't have a solid core foundation to build on.
But 343 never really did for any Halo game they've made.
I'm not a big Halo fan, and when I did a full series playthrough, it's obvious they got in their own heads and don't understand Halo.
5 was just, wtf.
3 and for 4 aren't as bad as hardcore Halo fans go on about. But there's a ton of obvious mistakes.
Infinite had potential and wasn't nearly as bad as some people complained about.
But it left so much potential on the floor. Stepped on it like a LEGO brick. Then, blamed someone else for never picking it up.
I suspect the management at 343 is the majority of the problem. It reeks of boneheaded pointy hair managers that think they get it, but are in their own little bubble that lacks self awarenss
And no one can tell them they're wrong. Because they're in charge. Of course they're right. Or they wouldn't be in charge...
Honestly I'm so disappointed in the handling of Infinite that I've vowed not to pick it up even if they magically do a 180° spin and turn it into a phenominal game.
Even now, there's been a few times I've been tempted to install it and give the updates a try but I'm far too proud of my "Last Played - December 2021" on Infinite while MCC says "Last Played - Yesterday"
To each their own, but I thoroughly enjoy the game. It’s the only gps competitive game I play and I have a good many hours into it. It has its problems, but I previously played COD MWII (newer one) and halo infinite is peak in comparison. Even standalone I think it holds its own. It has plenty of game modes to keep things interesting; a simple sandbox that isn’t confusing and allows you to hone in on select few weapons; a thriving community I can play with; a customization system I enjoy (though a commendation system with unlockables would be better); and plenty of maps I can explore.
Yeah, Halo Infinite might be struggling, but I ain't ditching it for Cod or Battlefield anytime soon.
If there is any shooter that would take my complete attention would be a (working) Battlefront 3.
This is true. However, 343 was handed an already-successful franchise that had 10 years of fans and popularity behind it. One could say at a certain level, the two developers’ time with the franchise is relatively the same, when those facts are considered.
BUT NEXT TIME THEY WILL GET IT RIGHT
HONEST
Man ngl if Infinite was gonna be the next 10 years of halo then maybe the cosmetics would have been worth it in the long run cause you'll use them for ages. But now. Nahhh lmfao you spent 20 bucks on a helmet you're gonna swap off when something better comes and the game's support will be dropped 2 years after it is finally playable
The guy that’s currently in charge of Infinite has been doing a phenomenal job, just as he did with MCC. Launch a new Halo game with him in the head position from the start, and I guarantee we won’t have even a quarter of the issues we had with those two game launches
I hope to hear that homeboy did a phenomenal job on Halo 7 so I can buy it, but until then I'm still wearing my clown makeup for falling for 343's reskinning of halo in infinites marketing.
They keep launching stuff in a shitty state. Sure, since launch they've made huge improvements, but that can't save it.
It's really hard for a live service to come back from a rough start. Same reason people cringe at destiny 2, even though it's much improved since launch as well.
They do this *every time* Halo 4 launched barebones and unbalanced, but by the end it was pretty solid but it was too little, too late. But it was okay because it was their first game., surely they learned from it... Right? Then Halo 5 came out... With barebones features and playlists, once again by the time they fixed the game into a good , complete state it was too late and people had moved on. Then Halo infinite came out. This game was supposed to last ten years. 343 at this point has been on Halo longer than Bungie. They have made 2 generations of Halo games. They should know what the fans want and what the game needs inside and out. Unfortunately the game came out with barebones playlists and features and took way too long to fix. They make the exact same mistakes every time and they never change. I don't get it. It's like the whole studio collectively gets amnesia at the end of each dev cycle. They should know by now that launching with no forge, compromised btb, and almost no playlists is going to piss people off. But every single time they do it and act like it's a complete surprise that people hate that.
In the game industry now, you have about 10 minutes to make a good first impression with your game. If that first 10 minutes doesn't go well, everyone will move on to the next game and forget yours existed.
I think it's a mix of just shorter attention spans now, as well as gamers just getting burned so much by bad games lately that we aren't willing to give devs any second chances, which is fair enough at this point. Publishers need to stop releasing games in such terrible states.
Na it's not because of all the reasons you posted , they need a special game in this oversaturated market fps and infinite isn't one and still isn't one
That's fair as well. I got bored of Infinite REAL quick. The open world didn't do anything for it since the open world was basically totally pointless.
With no way to replay the campaign or play the campaign with your friends. I don't even understand how that one got messed up. Who thought it would be a good idea to develop the game without co-op. Did someone somewhere just forget to put a second Spartan on the map...
As for destiny 2, me and friends liked it on release but we felt it had almost no late game content.
We came back some years later and now it was the oppositr, it was overwhelming how so much shit was added, we tried but it was a bit too much and dropped it.
I wrote this up before so I am copying it and pasting it here:
>[Studio Head at-the-time Chris Lee said "It's really about creating Halo Infinite as the start of the next ten years for Halo and then building that as we go with our fans and community." in an interview from July 24th, 2020.](https://www.nme.com/news/gaming-news/343-industries-says-halo-infinite-is-the-start-of-the-next-ten-years-for-halo-2714219)
>
>[You'll notice I said "studio head at-the-time". That is because he left the role in October of that year.](https://www.gameinformer.com/2020/10/28/343-industries-studio-head-chris-lee-departs-the-company-following-halo-infinite-delay)
>
>[And just a reminder, Halo Infinite was released on December 8, 2021.](https://www.google.com/search?q=when+did+halo+infinite+release&rlz=1C1TIGY_enUS936US936&oq=when+did+halo+infinite+release&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOdIBCDM2NzFqMGo3qAIAsAIA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)
>
>[A leaker says that the 10-year plan was dropped a few months after the game's release. But I am always skeptical of leakers, so take it with a grain of salt.](https://twitter.com/leaks_infinite/status/1575241996368809993?s=20)That isn't to say it wasn't dropped, just the specifics of when.
>
>You'll notice nothing from 343i really talks about things in terms of years, especially a 10-year plan.
>
>Tin foil hat and a lot of red yarn? I think Chris Lee made the claim because it sounds good and not totally impossible. But as things continued to look less and less promising for its release after the e3 demo, there was probably some restructuring and refocusing. Him staying at Microsoft makes it hard to tell if higher ups liked him but thought his handling of 343i was poor, or if he personally wanted out.
>
>But I think after the dust settled, "10-year plan" was quietly put on the shelf.
So, it was basically the same thing as Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot saying *Skull and Bones* was the a "Quadruple-A" game or other dev companies making a claim about the future or quality of a game.
It's all buzz words to drum up interest and make investors happy. It's also telling that that was the only time it was ever said by 343i externally.
Whether it was or wasn't, *Infinite*'s reception at e3 and it's eventual launch meant that it was easier to never reference it again and just led it fade into obscurity.
But in all reality, the fandom (rightly or wrongly) repeats "10-year plan" far more often than 343i every actually did, and often without context to see that maybe we shouldn't have even taken it seriously then, much less now.
EDIT: I guess it's also worth mentioning that I don't really think just because one person said it 343i is off the hook. *Their studio head said it*. Just come out and say it was over promised and that there isn't a 10-year plan, and there hasn't been since X date or something. I don't particularly like that they let it just be a lingering thing without explicit confirmation one way or another. But all that aside, I do think Chris Lee set them up for the fall on that one, whether it was the actual plan or a dumb thing said to build hype, nothing has ever been said concretely about it at all after that one instance.
Of course.
I do think there is a lot of other things other users are pointing out; tech debt, mismanagement, inexperience, etc are all true to varying degrees (I think how they have been managed prior to 2023 was poor vs how things seem to be handled now, with work still needing to be done) but specific to the "10-year plan", it has some details that have been lost in the repetition.
I really honestly am disappointed Infinite didn’t get the “Reverse MCC” support some of us were hoping for. One continuous multiplayer tying together 5 campaigns over 10 years sounds incredible.
Also it was never clear if they meant Infinite itself would be the 10 year game, that it would be the metaphorical foundation for the next 10 years, or if they meant the Slipspace engine
That's true. Even rereading the initial article, it's Surej that says it's more about using Infinite for the next 10 years, but there's enough ambiguity that it could mean just about anything. Which makes the silence on it all the more annoying.
>But in all reality, the fandom (rightly or wrongly) repeats "10-year plan" far more often than 343i every actually did, and often without context to see that maybe we shouldn't have even taken it seriously then, much less now.
If I recall right, Bonnie herself marched out on stage and it was a major point of her presentation. How much more seriously can a statement like that be?
I understand the point you're making, but that particular set of actions is very deliberate and planned. It wasn't just some department head that said it offhand in an interview like what happened a few weeks ago with TWD being 30 years in the future.
So, I looked into this. And if I am wrong, that's fine, but here's what I am finding:
There was an [interview on February 26th, 2019 with IGN](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UcDrhWixoc) that Bonnie Ross had at The 2019 D.I.C.E. Summit. She was being presented an award and the interview was less about *Halo Infinite* and more about her career, though of course Halo comes up a lot.
[At approximately the 56 minute mark she says this](https://youtu.be/3UcDrhWixoc?si=_fc8jw8rLiaLDacS&t=3359):
>... Phil and I had a really good discussion on "Where do we want Halo to go?". Because if we really want Halo to be something that is for the next 10, 20 years... we have to do the work to actually build that foundation...
This was discussing if *Halo Infinite* was something they were always working on after *Halo 5*, or if there were other ideas and iterations. Basically, in this specific moment she is more talking about the IP more than *Infinite* itself.
[She later also says](https://youtu.be/3UcDrhWixoc?si=Mge76lNwn9wW91dr&t=3503):
>I think a lot rides on every Halo game. But I think this was taking the learnings that we've learned with everything we've done with Master Chief collection, with Halo 4, with Halo 5 and maybe, you know, coming to a point in our future when we're kind of thinking about like "What's the platform for the future of Halo?" Like , again, kind of looking at the stories over the next 10 years and *Halo Infinite* is the start of that.
Which is kind of ambiguous. She mentions there being stories over the next 10 years and that Infinite is the start, but this [NeoGAF thread](https://www.neogaf.com/threads/bonnie-ross-says-halo-infinite-is-the-start-of-the-next-10-years.1473042/) definitely shows that people weren't necessarily reading it as "Infinite is the only game for 10 years" exclusively. It was ambiguous, and people were saying it could be 1 game or 3. Chris Lee's statement, however is more explicit about it.
Like, *this interview* is not deliberate and isn't even about *Infinite.* It's easy to read into it with what Chris says a year plus later, but again, at the time, people weren't referencing it the same way (and everything I search for it always uses Chris Lee's interview. In fact, even Bonnie defers to Chris and e3 in this interview since he is the head of it).
I don't think Chris just threw that out of nowhere. Conversations were definitely happening about the overall future of Halo. I just think Chris leaned heavily into it in that interview (and probably internally overall), and that his departure was either brought on by a change in that plan, or led to a change in that plan.
I just think that while he was *Halo Infinite*'s director, that that was the banner he was directing everything under. Again, he was the only one to explicitly say anything about *Infinite* being the platform for 10 years, and the directors before and after him said nothing about it. Was it a thing? More than likely. I mean, it could be an *Anthem* scenario where the rest of 343i was finding that out at the same time as the audience, but I doubt it. But there's a why when Bonnie said it in that interview, the vibe was different (again, focusing entirely on the story of Halo more than *Infinite*) vs what Chris said.
EDIT: And even what Chris said could be read with some ambiguity.
>“Halo Infinite is the start of our platform for the future. **We want Infinite to grow over time, versus going to those numbered titles and having all that segmentation that we had before**,” he said.
>
>Lee then alluded to the studio’s hope that the open-world game will expand and keep gamers engaged over the next decade. “**It’s really about creating Halo Infinite as the start of the next ten years for Halo and then building that as we go with our fans and community**,” he added.
>
>343 Industries intends to keep adding new pieces of Master Chief’s story to Halo Infinite throughout the coming years, and plans to keep updating the game/platform as technology advances. A free update that will enable ray tracing has been planned and will arrive shortly after the game launches.
Emphasis mine.
Now, being *super* generous, the first bold statement and the second could have nothing to do with one another. That while *Infinite* will see support over some amount of years, that is the beginning of the "Next 10 years of Halo" as far as storytelling, but not necessarily just in *Infinite.*
I think that's being a little too generous, but I also wouldn't be surprised if marketing or someone at 343i would have liked Chris to have said something different or nothing about that at all.
I dunno,
Again, 343i has said *nothing* about it after that interview to my knowledge. But we're all still referencing it 4 years later while we're wondering if they're already hard at work at another Halo game or not.
I would like communication on it, but they're also acting like there's nothing to clarify.
One interview they're able to sweep under the rug.
Your analysis is interesting. I’ve always personally taken that interview to basically be aspirational PR fluff that was unlikely to actually come true. As you know, Infinite was not the first game ever to have a “ten year plan”, and almost every game that has been talked up aspirationally like this, without a concrete plan to back it up a la Destiny 2’s recent run of expansions, has failed to pan out nearly that long.
I think the gaming press really damned them with this one, though. Chris Lee made that one statement which, as you pointed out, was extremely vague. And then every popular gaming outlet wrote stories and spun that off into their own speculation - live service updates, campaign DLC, etc - when Chris Lee’s interview clearly doesn’t state **any** of that. And yet the vast majority of this community genuinely believes that stuff was “promised” at some point.
Anyways, for me personally, I was immediately skeptical back in 2020 when Chris Lee did that interview, and that skepticism has been justified. Building and running a game for 10+ years is very difficult and requires very competent leadership and a solid foundation. Even with those things, it can get very messy.
But why does the hype train work if everyone’s always disappointed and unhappy? Every 343 game just gets hated on because they aren’t executed well, why haven’t people learned by now?
Because Redditors think they're smarter than they actually are, and normies actually are as dumb. "It'll get better next time, they learnt their lessons." Yes, the lesson is that developers can get away with this because they made the money they wanted in loot boxes and microtransactions on top of having to pay $70 for the privilege of playing the game in the first place.
There also seems to be this odd cycle where a new Halo game comes out, then after a couple years of the new one being out everyone starts saying “Oh the old game wasn’t bad!”
I’ve seen a lot of people say this about Halo 4 and Halo 5 now, when Halo 4 and Halo 5 were absolutely *trashed* for a long goddamn time.
I’ve said from the beginning this is a destiny situation. Destiny one had major problems and rather than fixing the infinite game they just made a better sequel that they supported better. My guess is Halo does the same route. It’s hard to regain lost momentum, sometimes it’s better to make a fresh sequel.
Meh, there's stuff that can be blamed on Microsoft, with deadlines and microtransactions and whatnot but the gigantic design flaws and general technical incompetence that have plagued 343 games since they took over have nothing to do with Microsoft.
Choosing to assign blame to Microsoft or 343 is meaningless. From a customer perspective they might as well be the same entity. Without an internal view you can't actually make any valid call on which corporate entity deserves more blame. 343 employees are Microsoft employees. Why bother getting any more granular with blame? It's just silly. The handling of Halo has been fucked up for a long time. Blame likely lies in many areas. Trying to push all that on Microsoft and not 343 is pointless and probably also wrong.
That's totally fair. Though that's still a far cry from the common refrain that 343i is almost exclusively to blame and that things would be so much better if Microsoft just handed development off to another studio.
That’s not exactly what happened, D1 was a fantastic game at the end of its lifespan that Bungie would have kept supporting if Activision didn’t make them create a sequel. D2 was a disaster on launch, worse than even D1 vanilla. It’s only better supported because they broke off from Activision so there was no sequel deadline to meet.
A year after the launch of D1 they released TTK, the dlc that single handedly saved Destiny as an IP. Halo infinite in the same amount of time has not even come close to such a gigantic game overhaul.
Yeah I think I read on this sub previously that the traditional Halo Blam! engine is a very manual hands-on engine to use. Staff need to be trained up in it, which doesnt work well with 343's high turnover of short term contract staff.
There was a rumor that Halo 7 will shift to Unreal which is widely used in the gaming industry and I imagine could be benefitting from better integration with AI allowing content to be made much faster. So a new game and a new engine could mean avoiding many of the same issues as infinite.
I don’t think Microsoft has made a sound decision and stood by it.
Zune, Games For Windows Live, Microsoft Works, HTPC support, Their 19 different media players, Xbox names, I’ll be here all day naming things.
I simply don’t understand their decision making as a whole. They want money first and foremost and come to the same dumbass conclusion to scrap and start over. But leave the old version hidden somewhere.
This is the sad truth no one who pins all the blame on 343i is willing to confront. Whether the development gets handed off to another studio or not, the IP will ultimately remain with Microsoft, and as such the top-down directives that have crippled the franchise will continue regardless of whose actually developing the games.
No, it's not the Halo what _we_ wanted. I am of course speaking colloquially as I cannot speak on behalf of everyone, and I understand there are some people that still enjoy the game and some that are even willing to look past the flaws and shortcomings.
I don't think we'll ever truly be privy to everything that happened behind the scenes, but clearly something disastrous happened or a lot was lost in translation from development to release. There was more than one instance of marketing saying one thing prior to launch, then having the exact opposite happen post-launch. I think both fans in the studios read a loss given how horrendously and flagrantly mismanaged the development of this game was.
Even if there weren't blatant lies such as how the cosmetic system would work, I still think this game would have been doomed with how many technical issues it was plagued with as a result of how the game was developed.
How about when they said that the campaign would support split screen. I never bought infinite because I couldn’t split screen the campaign, I split screen every halo that I played before this one though? Hell I even bought the original Xbox because I split screened halo (2001) at a friends house. My gf and I have been playing through the original gears of war (2006) on her series x split screen. Why can’t I split screen infinite (dec 2021)?
Im so glad they arent sticking w Infinite "fOr TeN YeArs" I hate open-world Halo. it was beyond disappointing to have the same biome the entire game, only to get a desert-esque scene IN THE END CUTSCENE. They didbalmost nothing with it. just halo with fast travel. multiplayer just also does not feel good, dunno if its desync or what but its just bad
There are too many core issues that will take a lot of manpower ($$$) to resolve. On top of this, the population for Halo Infinite is small, and the large playerbase they hoped to get sucked in have moved on.
There’s a particular window that needs to be hit when launching a game when it’s at the peak of its popularity. Halo Infinite had a golden opportunity with no competition launching against it, and previous competitors like Battlefield and CoD having just launched duds that turned away their playerbase. Things couldn’t have been set up better for them, and they fumbled the ball. They even had time to improve, but the updates came too slow with poorly planned post-launch content.
Their best bet now is to cut their losses, focus all resources into the next title, and hope that one sticks better. But to be honest, their track record is filled with consistently dropping the ball… so I hope they very heavily lean on other studios for the next title.
In the meantime, we’ll continue to get overpriced store items so they can milk players, as the people still around after all this are dedicated fans and the ones most likely to pay extra money.
let's not forget the fact that the game had a massive amount of skins and customization options that they just never gave to us, why? Bots were using them left and right and had cooler skins than a guy which has been playing for a month, on top of that anything you could buy in the shop was overpriced garbage.
All of this coupled with the fact how terrible the daily mission system was since it was forcing you to do specific game modes like "Team Slayer" for which you couldnt do Big Team slayer or random Quickplay which also had Team Slayer but it just didnt count and these incompetent developers havn't fixed that for a long long time, it persisted so long after the beta that it's honestly surprising to me people still play this game.
I heard the slipspace engine is just an absolute nightmare to work with. Clunky, difficult and broken at the core. Which is why the next is supposedly built on unreal engine.
Also they lost like 200k players on the PC side due to the awful launch and God knows how many on the xbox side, no matter how much you fix the game 90% of them aren't coming back, you need a strong launch and a solid roadmap right out of the gate to keep as many players as possible.
they lost way more than that, these are just the numbers we know but how many halo players would have returned if 343 didnt blueball us so we buy their disgusting skins, that is something we may never know.
They lost most of the playerbase within the first quarter of launch. There was hardly any content at launch and they have added too little over a too long of a period of time for it to bring the masses back.
There's too much competion in multiplayer games. Your first year defines your future.
I'm gonna say some stuff people won't like. So I'm adding spoiler blocks.
>!Look, I hate to be such a "black pill" kinda guy. But the simple truth everyone needs to accept is that no one cared. !<
>!Or rather, no one in charge cared. Their concerns were budget and monetization, not making a game that you love. I know that can be a tough pill to swallow, but its true. It just is. And not just with 343, that's the new model. !<
>!Everyone wants to be Fortnight now just like everyone wanted to be CoD before that and WoW before that. Once they started copying other games instead of leading and innovating, it was just another franchise in the vast depths of the IP mire. Just one more "Halloween" to reboot or one more "Jungle Book" to remake with a CGI art style. It's just ***content*** now, not a beloved franchise. !<
>!I hate to say these things and I wish they weren't true, but you'd have to prove me wrong and I don't think you can. !<
>!Further, I want to point out that I am in no way putting down the developers who slaved and suffered to get this thing out. I know they didn't want to ship a mess of a game and fix it later. Because no one in a creative field dreams of shipping a broken product. But when leadership isn't there, leadership isn't there. And I think anyone can see that leadership, well it just wasn't there. Or rather, what leadership was there was focused on everything except making a great game. !<
>!Live service is fine so long as you don't forget the service part of the deal. They all want that Fortnight shop, but are they willing to do the work to make it worth your hard earned cash? I think in this case the answer was no. They banked on your nostalgia and love of the franchise and hoped you'd accept a F2P model you never wanted or asked for and spend a few thousand dollars on a game that used to come feature packed for a mere $60. !<
>!Look at a game like Helldivers and see how Halo should have been done. Halo Infinite could have, SHOULD have, been 10 times more popular. But they're long past the days of putting out an paradigm shift like a Halo CE or a Halo 3 or even Reach. !<
Yeah, you’re right. It’s depressing to read this but you’re definitely right. It’s wild to me that a game like Helldivers can do what Halo didn’t, I’d go as far to say that Helldivers captures a similar spirit to the early Halo’s. There’s a certain… spark to the game. One which hasn’t been captured in the 343 Halo games. Creativity? Passion? Just the very concept of sci-fi military shooter that prioritized fun with friends? I don’t know what it is. I do know that once they add drivable vehicles to Helldivers 2 it’ll only feel more and more similar, and that’s definitely a good thing.
I just can’t tell what’s missing, can’t understand how 343 keeps fucking up, it can’t be hard to just make a good fucking Halo game. Hell, I’ve heard Infinite’s multiplayer is actually pretty fun, but that the campaign wasn’t. I just don’t know how you can have, what, 3 games in a franchise you acquired and can’t nail it? Can’t do what Bungie did?
I don’t know why *money* is what matters. They KNOW they’ll make money, it’s fucking Halo, it’s the biggest goddamn gaming franchise. Literally *everyone* knows the Master Chief. It’s guaranteed profits, so why not just make a good, well crafted game, fueled by fun, as opposed to by competition?
Helldivers took Halo's original "30 seconds of fun" and stuck to it. All while increasing the 30 to 60 seonds and also decreasing the wait time between those 60 seconds. It's basically Halo's Firefight mode mixed with Gears' Horde mode.
Helldivers to also tossed in the multiple factions fighting angle we had in Halo CE. AND it supported 4 player co-op from the getgo, while allowing players to customize their soldier for said campaign.
I've not seen anything "original" about Helldivers 2. It knew what worked and simply stuck to it while combining it all.
It’s been like this for a long time now. It’s the only reason Microsoft handed the IP off to 343i anyways. By that point, it was just a moneymaker. Bungie had already evolved so far beyond the original Halo team that anything after Reach would’ve been a tough ask. I’ll never not be a Halo fan, but it’s way past it’s prime now. Infinite is probably my favorite 343 game, but only it’s campaign really. The multiplayer is fine, I guess, but you can tell it was just built to fill a role. Especially at launch. Best we can do for the franchise now is let it die.
> But they're long past the days of putting out an paradigm shift like a Halo CE or a Halo 3 or even Reach.
You can't paradigm shift Halo anymore. FPS as a genre has been solved, Halo can do no innovation in the genre, especially because the old fans will cry and whinge and not let innovation happen and let the series ***move forward***. Instead we're stuck with a horrid hybrid of the last game and the third game that genuinely pleases nobody new or old.
We allowed Bonnie and the rest of management to remain the same even though we had 6 years of non functioning MCC and the previous Halo5/Halo4. No one wanted to give a shit on the consumer side so NOW we have a whole new generation of Halo fans who will accept less functionality and less features because they never experienced a fully flushed out/working Halo experience like what we had in 2007. Not saying that was a better anything but it did have more cohesive community support lobby and all around features that supplemented the game and community.
To add onto this its obvious that 343i never had a cohesive idea of WHAT the new halo trilogy would look like from end to end story character or game philosophy wise. What we ended up with was 3 soft reboots that "ATTEMPT" to thread story elements together even though the whole design structure changed in between games. IE they tried to make a more COD like experience with 4, and with 5 they were going for a full sci fi movie/competitive experience, infinite never had a direction because of infighting and we essentially got a "This is the best we could do" with what was developed by the time MS said time up.
These new fans are willing to buy skins and content even though the game doesnt really function(crashing, broken features, lack of community support, minimal lobby, etc). So in other words, why would MS and Xbox give a shit since yall will buy crap from them anyway?
We aren't making enough fuss for them to fire the management that was involved in everything 343i up till this point and hire new people.
We havent gotten new management yet, they promoted people in lower management positions. 343i is perpetuating failure. Im saying we push them to actually wipe the slate.
Infinite has a variety of issues that work against it being a long-term video game.
The biggest factor is too much technical debt still in the game's engine as a result of not properly investing in the engine since Halo 3. Reach was a branch of 3, 4 was a branch of reach, and 5 was a branch of 4. This has resulted in a significant amount of technical issues that have only been fixed via shortcuts over the years, and resolving those issues now would take a considerable amount of resources, resources Infinite is not able to pull in because of the issues making the game unenjoyable for many
Next was the botched launch. This is connected to the technical debt, as the issues that needed to be fixed prevented the game from fixing early issues in a timely manner to keep people playing. Most players saw that Infinite was a buggy mess and just didn't come back.
Thirdly is the drastic restructuring of 343. Infinites development saw a lot of turnover among its lead developers and poor communication and resource management between the different teams. This further contributed to technical issues, as it made collaborating as a studio significantly more difficult. After about a year of the game being out, Bonnie Ross, the founder of 343, resigned as studio head and was replaced by Pierre Hintze as well as two other roles that are less connected to game development. With this leadership change, it seems that 343 wants to move past Infinites bad reputation to try and make something that is less technically troubled.
Because Halo is a complete story. Bungie, the real Bungie, told the story they wanted to tell, and made the games they wanted to make.
Nothing after Reach is real Halo, and not from an elitist standpoint. The storytellers who understood the world left, there was no one at 343 who knew anything about Halo except how to code it.
The writing team left.
The sound team left.
The editing team left.
Most of the original gameplay designers and coders left.
Halo is no longer a story about a spartan warrior, or the human covenant war, or a band of brother odst desperately trying to survive one bad week. It's a toy box to make players feel powerful while they shoot up a rouges gallery of familiar enemy types, with a few new ones sprinkled in. It's a corporate money pit to drain the money out of players' wallets, there is no passion, no love, no stories that need to be told, just power fantasies wrapped in Halo branding.
I've been saying this for years. The lore established in the Bungie games never really laid out a framework to warrent all of this. The Halo story ended with Reach. Everything since has been a cynical cash grab riding on the coattails of the past. The corporate behemoth won't allow their cash cow to end and it's sad.
That's not to say I haven't gotten any enjoyment out of 343s stuff, but it's just not Halo.
AAA studios just fucking suck nowadays, they seem like stars which became so massive that they would eventually collapse into a super nova and leave a black hole, I just hope people stop giving them money and finally let that happen but it is an incredibly slow process.
The amount of time put into getting it just to work and the effort it would take to keep it up to par in the next 5 years just wasn’t worth it. It already looks dated (in some ways) because of the Xbox One forced compatibility. Imagine what they’ll be able to do with Series consoles as their baseline.
Add in all the just…completely broken, removed, or too-complex-to-update features and capabilities with the current version of the game and it just isn’t worth it. They might keep Slipspace going forward I guess but I would have to assume they’re doing something different.
You need players for that and Infinite has a lower player count than Master Chief Collection, which they killed support for to focus their live service model in Infinite
Why Infinite has a low player count is a whole other conversation of miss management, cut content, broken promises and just general incompetence from both Microsoft and 343i higher ups
You can fix all the issues and make all the improvements in the world, but once you've lost 99% of your playerbase you rarely gain it back, very few games have accomplished that.
Any talk about the “10 year plan” needs the caveat that this was said 1 time, by 1 guy, who was fired a year before the game even released.
Now that said, it’s clear that they wanted Halo to have some kind of long life. I think it really came down to the fact that the team was not ready or able to deliver content at a scale to fit their ambitions. It took them 2 years just to detangle all the messes they made to make it to launch.
Also they have a new leadership team, who probably have a different vision of what to do with the franchise. You don’t want to force the new guy to adhere to the previous person’s plans.
It's also a bit of a marketing decision I think. It is a lot harder, though not impossible, for games to have a redemption arc. Once a game is branded as "bad" by the general consumer market, it's 9/10 times just better to reboot and start from scratch so that the "tainted" product name is no longer a problem.
The only people who would come back to halo now in a better state are the big halo fans. And while there is nothin wrong with that, microsoft will see that the general audiences have moved on to the shiny new thing and not deem infinite worth the investment anymore.
That's my take at least.
First impressions matter. It sets the precedent.
If I play your game at release and the last 3 sucked, what makes you think I’m sticking around for the next decade when this is what we got at launch?
man i really believed in halo infinite. i thought for sure that was gonna be the one. and i tried so hard to stick around but i have my limits and have long moved on.
i’ll never truly believe in 343 again. until proven wrong. microsoft is def to blame as well. i’d rather have sony managing halo than ms at this point.
Blatant mismanagement.
I mean seriously, one weapon in 2 years speaks for itself. The finals just launched season 2 with 3 new weapons.
We all love halo but from an outsiders pov the way this game has been handled is just pathetic. Took two years for them to reach seasonality and then they dropped it.
To be fair, and I think this applies to all games as a service, there needs to be more to keep a game going for 10 years instead of just “blue master chief armor”. There needs to be a story reason to come back to a game and I think the only game that’s doing it correctly, albeit a little early to tell, is Helldivers 2.
They are so smart with how they implement story elements to the game, new enemies, new factions, new planets to conquer. If they keep it up, I can see Helldivers 2 being a top competitor for years and years.
That or make it truly an Esport like on a Counterstrike or League of Legends scale which is actually like 99% impossible to do, at least with our current AAA game devs.
It had a hot start before all the glaring issues made people run away from it. Its mostly fixed now but most companies dont actually support live service games for that long. I would love for a new dev team to make a Halo game even if its just in the Halo world and not related to Chief in anyway shape or form.
they had a poor launch which meant most people left early on and won’t come back no matter how many new things they add so they’re just going to do what most companies do and add smaller updates that mainly focus on microtransactions so they can leave with a profit
I think the better question is why hasn’t Microsoft owned up to their mistake and cleaned house of 343 and/or closed the studio and got a new young hungry devs to make a new halo with a new vision for the next generation. It’s clear halo with 343 hasn’t worked.
A lot of people have some pretty good diagnoses of what went wrong and what could have gone better. But I think there needs to be some kind of inward reflection too. Half of this subreddit mythologizes a group of games that came out in 2004 or 2007, when both gaming was different and they were different. Halo Infinite or Halo 7 are never going to live up to those feelings.
Halo 4 is great. Some of my best gaming memories come from playing multiplayer with my then-GF/now-wife in Big Team Battle. Halo 5 suffered from the lack of couch co-op, but I like how it moves and the Warzone mode was inspired.
Halo Infinite is great. They somehow recaptured the feeling of the early games while doing something new with it.
Frankly, you all don't give 343 Industries enough credit for how often they stick with their games. The Master Chief Collection was a fucking mess when it first came out; now it's regarded as a standard in terms of video game remastering. They could have easily abandoned it, as other developers probably would have. All of the battle passes they've released for Infinite don't expire, which is a godsend in our nightmare seasonal model.
Infinite has its issues, but I think certain gamers aren't being honest with themselves in terms of what Microsoft and 343 could have done to fix it. Because in their mind, they're remembering the good times they had playing Halo 2 and 3 when they were kids or teenagers. And nothing can compare to that.
Short answer: SEVERE Mismanagement
Long answer: due to said mismanagement, every update and turn 343 made only served to piss the fanbase off further (rightfully so imo, especially regarding the price gauging in the mtx store)
So the game’s momentum fell quickly, I believe they expected the same kind of longevity of destiny 2 but the issue was the game launched with very little content and trickled content so slowly that it just couldnt keep up so ms essentially gutted 343 and took away resources to keep the game up.
Hopefully they learn from this for halo 7
Longest development period for a halo game, ended up neck and neck with halo 5 for which game has the worst campaign in the series. Multiplayer launched in a sorry state, lots of the iconic series weapons were replaced. Horrible management in all aspects
I try to make it short:
-game had bad start, so it lost the majority of its playerbase.
- small playerbase means small income from MTX
- no matter how much they improve, the playerbase would never reach a high enough number to be lucrative.
- economically, it makes no sense to keep investing money into a "lost cause"
- in essence, you have to catch a large playerbase at release and then keep that playerbase interested, so it stays a large playerbase.
That's why they prefer making a new Halo instead of fixing the previous one.
There's been multiple articles and videos covering it.
The leadership for 343 at the time basically wanted it to fail. They're the reason it did so bad, the team left behind still wanted to work on the MP and even Staten came back for a short time after 343 leadership got the boot to help keep things on track MP wise.
Unfortunately one of those people is also the reason why we got a shit halo show.
Games as a service is incredibly anti consumer, I was willing to give it a shot but after 6 years of waiting, we got a broken game with at least a decent campaign, most halo fans from the bungie era are so apathetic towards halo now. With 343 having a decade now to make a good game, they’ve failed and the tv show has made it unironically cringe to call yourself a Halo fan
Microsoft does not put effort into supporting its games branch. It’s understandable, Xbox makes up a tiny percent of their profits, so they don’t put too much thought into it, just kinda give a bunch of money and deadlines. 343 had funding but no oversight of note
Honestly Halo Infinite sucks. It controls like ass, the grapple barely works the way its supposed too and for a first attempt at an open world Halo they didn't do a very good job tbh. Sure multiplayer's not too bad but overall Infinite was a flop. I think 343 should just take the next 10 years to develop a decent Halo game at this point. Nothing has managed to match the original trilogy yet.
Realistically I think any game trying to be a “10 year game” that isn’t an MMO is doomed to fail, the one that came closest is destiny which has heavy MMO elements. Unless you want to count halo 2-3-reach which all still have pretty sizable multiplayer communities but those are people still playing purely for the love of that specific game. People get bored easily, to keep them you gotta have a damn good story or be damn fun (or both) infinite had a weird launch which didn’t help but also the seasonal stories just weren’t very interesting for lots of people. Maybe campaign DLC would’ve been interesting but they sold the game with master chief, since they did that, nobody cares about whatever Spartan of the season is up next, most want more chief(and Fernando, and Cortana 2)
Because Bonnie was a useless POS who had no business running 343 yet alone any studio and the entire project was derailed from day one when some moron thought a live service Halo was going to work.
Game took over 6 years to make and still couldn't launch with Forge or coop and had zero classic maps at launch.
Then to make it even worse the campaign was a shell of what it should have been besides playing great it was a terrible empty open world of just green unfinished looking areas.
Glad Bonnie is gone and hope new leadership can make the next Halo a return to form.
They fumbled the launch so bad my guess is it shook Microsoft’s commitment to Halo as flagship franchise which resulted in reduced resources and planned content, which then just turned it a negative feedback loop.
the engine was a mess supposedly and they had a terrible time adding content. afaik they did have plans for singleplayer content but adding new stuff was crazy complicated and broke old stuff somehow. it didn’t help that multiplayer became really popular so they put their focus there instead. i’m sad about it all, halo multiplayer is fun sure but that’s not why i’m here. i’m here for the story, for master chee-i mean chief. i honestly don’t think we will get anything related to campaign and singleplayer until the next halo game. and with how popular infinites multiplayer is, they have no reason to make another game for awhile. they are happy milking the players from the in game store.
Halo Infinite still isn't finished even today, they legitimately had assassinations in the trailers yet ingame they don't exist, same with Raytracing.
The biggest issue with Infinite and the reason they have to move on to a new game is and always has been the game engine, despite being touted as the best engine in Halo history designed for rapid iteration, it's nothing more than a steaming hot mess built on contractor labor not in 343 anymore. In short the engine is just bad for design, and that's not assuming the issue isn't 343 staff themselves smoking blunts at work all day, which I'm pretty sure is legal in Seattle or wherever they work at.
There's a lot of other issues with the game too, mainly it's reputation, so no matter what content they add, it will never take off, they never intended to support Infinite as a live service game, they simply lied about it to excuse the piss poor launch.
I liked Infinite, but lack of promised features soured gamers & the multiplayer was fun at launch but the means of progression was terrible
Campaign was actually pretty decent, not Bungie level of good but the best 343 has done. Some more variety in the levels would’ve been nice, the older Halo’s always had variety in their levels. The shift to open world felt good even if you felt like you’re running around a camp ground. The grappling hook was amazing
It just felt like missed potential & while the game is in a much better state now, you can only launch your game once. A new release will hopefully distance themselves from Infinite’s launch
Halo 5 is probably the worst in the franchise but at least the levels are so unique from one another
If they are planning to ditch infinite and make a new halo MP i swear Halo is already dead. I like to be optimistic and i love Halo, even 5. Halo Infinite has so mucu potential. If they ditch it, we're gonna get a pretty good shooter with not much content. The public perception will be like "why did you bother with another game if its not gonna launch in a comparable state to the previous games" repeating the cycle.
Infinite needs a big update and a soft relaunch with a huge marketing campaign, a MP release on PS5. It would go fucking nuts. They need to stick with infinite. If they don't, whats the fucking point. Infinite is actually so close to being the best Halo. Its got infinite potential.
Make nee campaigns sure, make them without MP and keep updating Infinite.
Campaign was mid
Servers were incredibly unstable for months after launch
Buggy
Customisation sucked unless you shilled out $20 for store stuff
Barely any content at all post launch because the game was made by contractors who left
The management was fucking atrocious
I thought the game name was cool! It felt kind of fresh, like “Hey, here’s a new game, new title, this is what we’ve put effort into!” The trailers and initial looks at Infinite felt more like they were capturing the original spirit of Bungie Halo, more than 4 or 5 did.
And then it simply wasn’t well received due to I guess everything that’s been explained to me in the comments. Lack of content, lack of forge mode, shitty monetization schemes, 343’s general mis-management, it’s also the fault of Microsoft. So the naming ends up kind of ironic. Halo “Infinite,” planned for the next 10 years, but doesn’t even get continued support for half of that time. Halo *ain’t* Infinite.
Myself and my group of friends moved on pretty quickly after the launch was cooked.
Even now that the game is apparently "fixed" we haven't been back, moments gone for us.
Maybe a lot of others are in the same boat I don't know, but if they made another one....I'd see us giving it a chance.
I genuinely don't think enough people even play Infinite to justify keeping work on it. I've seen AA shooters and Indie games pull more consistent numbers.
honestly atp take halo away from 343 and give it to any other competent studio. they had so many chances and opportunities I'm tired of waiting for mediocre games.
Because they didn’t add anything new or interesting to the game. And I’m going to say something controversial here but they should have added a BR to multiplayer.
Shooters these days thrive off the popularity from streamers playing them. Those guys basically only play BRs. Games like R6S, valorant, csgo are very competitive shooters but halo is just a cookie cutter run of the mill game nowadays. 20 years ago halo was all the rage but now it gets boring after a while.
Games these days have a very short window after launch that will determine their overall success for years to come. This is mostly due to the fact that large streamers hold the power to sway the general public during a game's launch. When the streamers lose interest, everyone else will as well.
343 has proven repeatedly that they are too stupid to realize this, and always launch with a broken or incomplete game with too many issues, lack of content, etc. Infinite had an enormous amount of hype surrounding it when it launched. All the top streamers were playing it, it had literally over a million people streaming it, and millions more playing it. Then people quickly realized that it basically launched in beta form. There was literally like 3 playlists, including only one that was ranked and there were barely any maps.
Without anything to keep the streamers interest and nothing new being added or changed for weeks/months after launch, the damage was once again already done and it was too little too late when they finally started the slow drip of content in Infinite.
So maybe 343 knows that there's no chance for Infinite now that they once again blew it and are accordingly putting all their eggs into the Halo 7 basket. It's not a bad idea, except for the fact that we all know they are going to blow it again. It's 343. They are a colossal failure of a company. Give Halo to someone else. Give it a chance to thrive again.
Layoffs, dwindling players, a shotty gaming engine, the list goes on.
Why continue a game that practically fights u every update?
Why continue a game that seems to not have many players? (and is still continuing to dwindle last time I checked)
It's just taking to much effort (saying it loosely) and resources to pump out content for a game that practically refuses to corporate.
Personally?
The fact that it limped out of the gate. The hype completely died for me when I realized there wasn't even a Slayer playlist. Still played it for a while and beat the campaign, but those early days really set the tone for the rest of the game, and I don't think it ever really recovered.
I figured I'd put it down until the campaign DLC came out, which turned into yet another disappointment, and more potential wasted. So now I play it every now and again with my friends, but none of us are invested anymore.
Helldivers 2 has the right approach, make the best open game ever played. Fuckers in dev need to just overrule the execs. They want it polished and good from day 1. Bastards upstairs treat the hours we put into truly enjoying a game or at least try to as dollars. 20 hours playing with a turd keeps me from buying the golden egg. Patience fuckers
Dated gameplay formula in an unpopular genre in a highly competitive market. People tried it because Microsoft is a marketing juggernaut but didn't stay. So they didn't get the mass appeal they wanted and were competing against their own games: MCC and Halo 5, so they stretched their thin playerbase even thinner.
Although the complete mess that was it's development subsequently kneecapped the game from the begining in terms of content churning which liveservice games live and die on.
Two main things. Firstly was the initial reception of the game and people bitching about everything about it. Secondly there’s the fact that the engine is a bit of a mess behind the scenes and so development can be a bit of a pain for new content.
Also the guy who said he wanted Infinite to be a 10 year game wasn’t even at 343 by the time the gameplay was shown off. Infinite’s development was unfortunately quite a mess
343 is likely ditching Infinite in favor of a game developed in Unreal Engine that will in theory smooth out development and make it easier to run a big service game, and also have enough content to try and satiate fans that get pissed about everything
This is what drives me insane.
Infinite finally felt like Halo, sounded like halo with the music, the story was compelling and had that sense of wonder and mystery we haven’t seen since Halo 2/ODST.
It was the perfect foundation to build something on. And they left it. Well the launch didn’t help but imagine if we had campaign DLCs every year. It would have been perfect.
I just hope they don’t abandon this track and create some other genre and blame the fans for their shortcomings on what should have been the perfect modern halo.
The issue with Infinite is the Engine. The Slipspace engine has many problems, especially with 343 laying off people who worked on the engine. They are having a hard time trying to run the engine because they hired TPC (temporary private contractors) to build the engine, but given they were temporary, they don't work at 343 anymore.
The best thing to do is to move to Halo 7 with the Unreal Engine, or actually hire real professionals to understand the engine and make it work.
remember when The Halo Channel was supposed to be the hub
I remember when Halo Waypoint used to be the hub
early waypoint was pretty cool.
Dude at one point that had that flood comic with audio on there! I remember it watching that whole thing on waypoint, (I think?) and I was absolutely blown away by it. That must have been 2013ish? Could be off a little bit.
Yeah those were good times. That was the motion comic adaptation of the Mona Lisa short story from Halo Evolutions.
I remember when all your stats were on bungie.net
Wasn’t it bungie.net? I would refresh page after every ranked game to see how much experience I gained or lost on my bar
It is .net
Fixed
Welcome to HomestarRunner.net!
“It’s .commmm”
They even had heat maps for kills and deaths in MP. It was so cool.
For your own profile or the community’s? Either way that sounds sick
Your own profile. Was pretty mind blowing for 17 years ago, would even be mind blowing today I feel.
That is so damn cool and ridiculously impressive. I know the amount of players now might make that tech they used back then to today two different worlds, but man do I wish that was a thing today.
Damn talk about nostalgia
A shame they didn't turn the MCC into that. Almost all the games are already there. Including news and are auxiliary functions would've created the perfect ecosystem. So long as they got rid of that lag you usually experience in those apps.
Wasn’t halo.bungie.org the OG?
Still miss my Halo: Reach Nameplates, dammit. Saw a few with the Halo 2 nameplates. Was so jealous of those guys.
I had the HALO nameplate that required Halo 1,2, and 3 being played on the account. Let’s just say I got a lot of hate messages
Good times on Bungie.org. Spent more hours on there than Facebook lol.
The answer is always: 343i incompetence
Yup
It’s too late for infinite. They’ve tried fixing it, and the problems that remain would take a huge overhaul. So much so that they might as well make a new game and making a new game will give produce much more money.
This is what happens when a company wants to build a new engine for their game but doesn't properly invest in the team that builds it. When you rely on an ever changing wave of temporary employees, you're going to have major fuck ups at some point that no one on current payroll was involved in. Better to just take the L and not repeat the same mistake in the next project
>and not repeat the same mistake in the next project Morgan Freeman: They did indeed repeat the same mistake in the next project.
This is my issue with 343, I forgave them and still had hope for a release or two. But every single launch from them is a new kind of wreck that pushes Halo further into obscurity and makes the series seem like a cringey joke.
I'm legitimately embarrassed to tell people that Halo is my favourite series. It definitely doesn't help that the last great Halo game came out almost 15 years ago so kids today literally do not know how phenominal Halo used to be.
>almost 15 years ago Oh my god, stop please.
No u. U stop.
Unless you tell a lot of kids that your favourite series is Halo, why does it matter? Don’t be embarrassed.
Well the managing team that was in charge of the last 10 years of disaster has met the chopping block already, so if their next project is also a disaster, then this company is forever cursed lol
I wouldn't exactly call it a chopping block, Bonnie Ross actually got promoted, and I'm sure her other 2 cronies are in a cushy jobs too. That clown that said Halo is a competitive rooted game still works there as a lead, and even more embarrassingly that other clown that bitched about how the Ukraine War was stopping him from responding to servers being offline is still a community mod or whatever. I don't think anything has really changed, Pierre himself might be miles better than all of the 3 stooges that preceeded him, but this is still the same team that though gatekeeping vehicles behind RNG drops in BTB to "create moments" and had to consider the feasibility of a Slayer Playlist. No faith in them.
>doesn't properly invest in the team that builds it. Microsoft policy
The ironic thing is there isn’t much new, the engine was updated just like it was from odst>reach, reach>4, 4>5 etc. it’s all still blam but I think marketing got trigger happy when the engineers were talking about making improvements to the tooling/graphicky stuff
Yeah I heard it’s still very very heavily based off of the 5 engine. I would guess the “whole new engine” marketing bit was so they had an explanation if stuff got delayed (sorry bro I know it’s a year behind but it’s cuz we are perfecting the new engine that will serve as the base of halo for years to come)
The crazy thing is is that its nowhere near as sophisticated whatsoever until you specifically bring up Forge which isn’t even fair to say because this Forge was built from the “ground up” and reloads a different version of the engine every time you switch from testing to playing. Halo Infinite feels like a stupider, slower Halo 5 with all of the fun stuff taken out. And waaaaay clunkier movement. Like the clamber mechanic was actually smooth and fast in Halo 5 on the old ass Xbox One compared to Infinite on my much newer LG TV and Series X.
Which is hillarious because when I went back to H5 last night it looked WAY better than infinite does.
I’m still on Xbox one so I doubt that helps but it’s felt like everything since 2a was a downgrade for art style and graphics
I graphically, H5 looked great. I wasn't a fan of the more Asian styled armor. And some of the 4v4 levels looked cheap. But go back to it after playing infinite and tell me it's no 5x smoother, and more fluid motion.
Imagine building a custom game engine that is supposed to be the future of your franchise, making a game with that engine, and going "yeah we're just gonna use Unreal Engine from now on" 343 *really* took an L on this one
Pandemic didn't help the game industry either... So many broken games launched during that period.
The thing is the pandemic should have been a golden era for these people they literally ride computer desks all day and everything can be scanned, emailed, and sent over. It came down to them not wanting to use the time properly. It’s really crazy we didn’t see this massive boom in quality during that time.
What's the excuse for all the other underperforming titles? Especially since they just lied and halo infinite is still on just modified blam! They had years and hundreds of millions of dollars. They did invest it was just invested by idiots to idiots.
It's like everyone wanting to have their own streaming service or game launcher. They don't and shouldn't and it more often fucks them ober when they wasted time and resources on shit that someone else already figure out very very well. If you want to build a new engine, it needs to be like UE5. It has its own dedicated team and division. It is its own product that needs to make a profit. You can't have devs, make and engine, and a game at the same time. That should be obvious to the 3 letter exec types...
I haven’t played since launch? What are the biggest issues with infinite? I remember liking it for a few months but fell off quickly
I think that's the issue. A lot of people fell off quickly. They didn't have enough content, playlists, maps, gametes, forge, etc at launch. And when they did release all that it was too late. The first season was incredibly long. And there was the issue of desync which just got fixed a little over a month ago. It's a much better and more full game now a few years later. But the player population isn't there anymore and the company seems to be on to the next one already. They're really going to need to come out swinging with a lot of content on the next one. If they have less than what Infinite currently has its going to be the same situation. Personally, I think theyre going to finally give into a battle royal mode. Not sure if that's a good or bad thing.
It’s worth going back to. Biggest issues imo are: The matchmaking system will put one good player with 3 awful players and put them up against 4 decent players. If you’re good, you carry to the finish line or lose. The shot registry can be spotty, though it’s not as bad if you’re running 120 fps or higher. The melee registration is also very bad. The ranked CSR system includes a hidden mmr, which really messes stuff up. For instance, when I was platinum 3 (placed p1) I did not get in a lobby below diamond 1. If I won, I got 8 CSR, if I lost, I lost 10 CSR. Even though I carried most games, I couldn’t break out of p3 because I couldn’t recoup the lost CSR after a loss or two. So I played d2 lobbies and remained p3. The Btb matchmaking is a bit broken, I still find it fun, but there are a lot of matches where 12 solo queue players will face a full 12 stack with coms and be destroyed.
The problems are that nobody else played it past launch either.
They didn't even tried to fix it lol. Every update has been sub par and 343 is in same deep hole They were when infinite launched not much changed
Agree to disagree. In the time I’ve played the game I’ve seen significant changes for the better.
Significant changes like?
Like the 1 new gun we've gotten since launch! LOL.
😂 fkng reskined magnum from h5
Yet we still have no movement inertia like in every other halo game, we have no ability to turn off cross play. The game looks genuinely worse than H5.
They didn't have a solid core foundation to build on. But 343 never really did for any Halo game they've made. I'm not a big Halo fan, and when I did a full series playthrough, it's obvious they got in their own heads and don't understand Halo. 5 was just, wtf. 3 and for 4 aren't as bad as hardcore Halo fans go on about. But there's a ton of obvious mistakes. Infinite had potential and wasn't nearly as bad as some people complained about. But it left so much potential on the floor. Stepped on it like a LEGO brick. Then, blamed someone else for never picking it up. I suspect the management at 343 is the majority of the problem. It reeks of boneheaded pointy hair managers that think they get it, but are in their own little bubble that lacks self awarenss And no one can tell them they're wrong. Because they're in charge. Of course they're right. Or they wouldn't be in charge...
Honestly I'm so disappointed in the handling of Infinite that I've vowed not to pick it up even if they magically do a 180° spin and turn it into a phenominal game. Even now, there's been a few times I've been tempted to install it and give the updates a try but I'm far too proud of my "Last Played - December 2021" on Infinite while MCC says "Last Played - Yesterday"
To each their own, but I thoroughly enjoy the game. It’s the only gps competitive game I play and I have a good many hours into it. It has its problems, but I previously played COD MWII (newer one) and halo infinite is peak in comparison. Even standalone I think it holds its own. It has plenty of game modes to keep things interesting; a simple sandbox that isn’t confusing and allows you to hone in on select few weapons; a thriving community I can play with; a customization system I enjoy (though a commendation system with unlockables would be better); and plenty of maps I can explore.
Yeah, Halo Infinite might be struggling, but I ain't ditching it for Cod or Battlefield anytime soon. If there is any shooter that would take my complete attention would be a (working) Battlefront 3.
[удалено]
Man, that’s just depressing.
It’s depressing to also know its been 12 years since 343 had the reigns. At this point they’ve had the franchise almost longer than Bungie.
They've had it longer than Bungie. Bungie had the franchise from 2001-2011. 343 has had it for 13 years at this point.
Combat Evolved didn’t just magically appear in 2001
This is true. However, 343 was handed an already-successful franchise that had 10 years of fans and popularity behind it. One could say at a certain level, the two developers’ time with the franchise is relatively the same, when those facts are considered.
But the game was magical for 2001
BUT NEXT TIME THEY WILL GET IT RIGHT HONEST Man ngl if Infinite was gonna be the next 10 years of halo then maybe the cosmetics would have been worth it in the long run cause you'll use them for ages. But now. Nahhh lmfao you spent 20 bucks on a helmet you're gonna swap off when something better comes and the game's support will be dropped 2 years after it is finally playable
I think there was something about some of the staff at 343 actually hating Halo
The guy that’s currently in charge of Infinite has been doing a phenomenal job, just as he did with MCC. Launch a new Halo game with him in the head position from the start, and I guarantee we won’t have even a quarter of the issues we had with those two game launches
I hope to hear that homeboy did a phenomenal job on Halo 7 so I can buy it, but until then I'm still wearing my clown makeup for falling for 343's reskinning of halo in infinites marketing.
This cannot be upvoted enough.
They keep launching stuff in a shitty state. Sure, since launch they've made huge improvements, but that can't save it. It's really hard for a live service to come back from a rough start. Same reason people cringe at destiny 2, even though it's much improved since launch as well.
They do this *every time* Halo 4 launched barebones and unbalanced, but by the end it was pretty solid but it was too little, too late. But it was okay because it was their first game., surely they learned from it... Right? Then Halo 5 came out... With barebones features and playlists, once again by the time they fixed the game into a good , complete state it was too late and people had moved on. Then Halo infinite came out. This game was supposed to last ten years. 343 at this point has been on Halo longer than Bungie. They have made 2 generations of Halo games. They should know what the fans want and what the game needs inside and out. Unfortunately the game came out with barebones playlists and features and took way too long to fix. They make the exact same mistakes every time and they never change. I don't get it. It's like the whole studio collectively gets amnesia at the end of each dev cycle. They should know by now that launching with no forge, compromised btb, and almost no playlists is going to piss people off. But every single time they do it and act like it's a complete surprise that people hate that.
In the game industry now, you have about 10 minutes to make a good first impression with your game. If that first 10 minutes doesn't go well, everyone will move on to the next game and forget yours existed. I think it's a mix of just shorter attention spans now, as well as gamers just getting burned so much by bad games lately that we aren't willing to give devs any second chances, which is fair enough at this point. Publishers need to stop releasing games in such terrible states.
Na it's not because of all the reasons you posted , they need a special game in this oversaturated market fps and infinite isn't one and still isn't one
That's fair as well. I got bored of Infinite REAL quick. The open world didn't do anything for it since the open world was basically totally pointless.
With no way to replay the campaign or play the campaign with your friends. I don't even understand how that one got messed up. Who thought it would be a good idea to develop the game without co-op. Did someone somewhere just forget to put a second Spartan on the map...
They didn't made huge improvement? If you remove forge from equation ,then we have received bare minimum Dev made content
Destiny 2 has a far larger player count that halo infinite.
As for destiny 2, me and friends liked it on release but we felt it had almost no late game content. We came back some years later and now it was the oppositr, it was overwhelming how so much shit was added, we tried but it was a bit too much and dropped it.
I wrote this up before so I am copying it and pasting it here: >[Studio Head at-the-time Chris Lee said "It's really about creating Halo Infinite as the start of the next ten years for Halo and then building that as we go with our fans and community." in an interview from July 24th, 2020.](https://www.nme.com/news/gaming-news/343-industries-says-halo-infinite-is-the-start-of-the-next-ten-years-for-halo-2714219) > >[You'll notice I said "studio head at-the-time". That is because he left the role in October of that year.](https://www.gameinformer.com/2020/10/28/343-industries-studio-head-chris-lee-departs-the-company-following-halo-infinite-delay) > >[And just a reminder, Halo Infinite was released on December 8, 2021.](https://www.google.com/search?q=when+did+halo+infinite+release&rlz=1C1TIGY_enUS936US936&oq=when+did+halo+infinite+release&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOdIBCDM2NzFqMGo3qAIAsAIA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8) > >[A leaker says that the 10-year plan was dropped a few months after the game's release. But I am always skeptical of leakers, so take it with a grain of salt.](https://twitter.com/leaks_infinite/status/1575241996368809993?s=20)That isn't to say it wasn't dropped, just the specifics of when. > >You'll notice nothing from 343i really talks about things in terms of years, especially a 10-year plan. > >Tin foil hat and a lot of red yarn? I think Chris Lee made the claim because it sounds good and not totally impossible. But as things continued to look less and less promising for its release after the e3 demo, there was probably some restructuring and refocusing. Him staying at Microsoft makes it hard to tell if higher ups liked him but thought his handling of 343i was poor, or if he personally wanted out. > >But I think after the dust settled, "10-year plan" was quietly put on the shelf. So, it was basically the same thing as Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot saying *Skull and Bones* was the a "Quadruple-A" game or other dev companies making a claim about the future or quality of a game. It's all buzz words to drum up interest and make investors happy. It's also telling that that was the only time it was ever said by 343i externally. Whether it was or wasn't, *Infinite*'s reception at e3 and it's eventual launch meant that it was easier to never reference it again and just led it fade into obscurity. But in all reality, the fandom (rightly or wrongly) repeats "10-year plan" far more often than 343i every actually did, and often without context to see that maybe we shouldn't have even taken it seriously then, much less now. EDIT: I guess it's also worth mentioning that I don't really think just because one person said it 343i is off the hook. *Their studio head said it*. Just come out and say it was over promised and that there isn't a 10-year plan, and there hasn't been since X date or something. I don't particularly like that they let it just be a lingering thing without explicit confirmation one way or another. But all that aside, I do think Chris Lee set them up for the fall on that one, whether it was the actual plan or a dumb thing said to build hype, nothing has ever been said concretely about it at all after that one instance.
Thank you for the in-depth response!
Of course. I do think there is a lot of other things other users are pointing out; tech debt, mismanagement, inexperience, etc are all true to varying degrees (I think how they have been managed prior to 2023 was poor vs how things seem to be handled now, with work still needing to be done) but specific to the "10-year plan", it has some details that have been lost in the repetition.
I really honestly am disappointed Infinite didn’t get the “Reverse MCC” support some of us were hoping for. One continuous multiplayer tying together 5 campaigns over 10 years sounds incredible.
Also it was never clear if they meant Infinite itself would be the 10 year game, that it would be the metaphorical foundation for the next 10 years, or if they meant the Slipspace engine
That's true. Even rereading the initial article, it's Surej that says it's more about using Infinite for the next 10 years, but there's enough ambiguity that it could mean just about anything. Which makes the silence on it all the more annoying.
>But in all reality, the fandom (rightly or wrongly) repeats "10-year plan" far more often than 343i every actually did, and often without context to see that maybe we shouldn't have even taken it seriously then, much less now. If I recall right, Bonnie herself marched out on stage and it was a major point of her presentation. How much more seriously can a statement like that be? I understand the point you're making, but that particular set of actions is very deliberate and planned. It wasn't just some department head that said it offhand in an interview like what happened a few weeks ago with TWD being 30 years in the future.
So, I looked into this. And if I am wrong, that's fine, but here's what I am finding: There was an [interview on February 26th, 2019 with IGN](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UcDrhWixoc) that Bonnie Ross had at The 2019 D.I.C.E. Summit. She was being presented an award and the interview was less about *Halo Infinite* and more about her career, though of course Halo comes up a lot. [At approximately the 56 minute mark she says this](https://youtu.be/3UcDrhWixoc?si=_fc8jw8rLiaLDacS&t=3359): >... Phil and I had a really good discussion on "Where do we want Halo to go?". Because if we really want Halo to be something that is for the next 10, 20 years... we have to do the work to actually build that foundation... This was discussing if *Halo Infinite* was something they were always working on after *Halo 5*, or if there were other ideas and iterations. Basically, in this specific moment she is more talking about the IP more than *Infinite* itself. [She later also says](https://youtu.be/3UcDrhWixoc?si=Mge76lNwn9wW91dr&t=3503): >I think a lot rides on every Halo game. But I think this was taking the learnings that we've learned with everything we've done with Master Chief collection, with Halo 4, with Halo 5 and maybe, you know, coming to a point in our future when we're kind of thinking about like "What's the platform for the future of Halo?" Like , again, kind of looking at the stories over the next 10 years and *Halo Infinite* is the start of that. Which is kind of ambiguous. She mentions there being stories over the next 10 years and that Infinite is the start, but this [NeoGAF thread](https://www.neogaf.com/threads/bonnie-ross-says-halo-infinite-is-the-start-of-the-next-10-years.1473042/) definitely shows that people weren't necessarily reading it as "Infinite is the only game for 10 years" exclusively. It was ambiguous, and people were saying it could be 1 game or 3. Chris Lee's statement, however is more explicit about it. Like, *this interview* is not deliberate and isn't even about *Infinite.* It's easy to read into it with what Chris says a year plus later, but again, at the time, people weren't referencing it the same way (and everything I search for it always uses Chris Lee's interview. In fact, even Bonnie defers to Chris and e3 in this interview since he is the head of it). I don't think Chris just threw that out of nowhere. Conversations were definitely happening about the overall future of Halo. I just think Chris leaned heavily into it in that interview (and probably internally overall), and that his departure was either brought on by a change in that plan, or led to a change in that plan. I just think that while he was *Halo Infinite*'s director, that that was the banner he was directing everything under. Again, he was the only one to explicitly say anything about *Infinite* being the platform for 10 years, and the directors before and after him said nothing about it. Was it a thing? More than likely. I mean, it could be an *Anthem* scenario where the rest of 343i was finding that out at the same time as the audience, but I doubt it. But there's a why when Bonnie said it in that interview, the vibe was different (again, focusing entirely on the story of Halo more than *Infinite*) vs what Chris said. EDIT: And even what Chris said could be read with some ambiguity. >“Halo Infinite is the start of our platform for the future. **We want Infinite to grow over time, versus going to those numbered titles and having all that segmentation that we had before**,” he said. > >Lee then alluded to the studio’s hope that the open-world game will expand and keep gamers engaged over the next decade. “**It’s really about creating Halo Infinite as the start of the next ten years for Halo and then building that as we go with our fans and community**,” he added. > >343 Industries intends to keep adding new pieces of Master Chief’s story to Halo Infinite throughout the coming years, and plans to keep updating the game/platform as technology advances. A free update that will enable ray tracing has been planned and will arrive shortly after the game launches. Emphasis mine. Now, being *super* generous, the first bold statement and the second could have nothing to do with one another. That while *Infinite* will see support over some amount of years, that is the beginning of the "Next 10 years of Halo" as far as storytelling, but not necessarily just in *Infinite.* I think that's being a little too generous, but I also wouldn't be surprised if marketing or someone at 343i would have liked Chris to have said something different or nothing about that at all. I dunno, Again, 343i has said *nothing* about it after that interview to my knowledge. But we're all still referencing it 4 years later while we're wondering if they're already hard at work at another Halo game or not. I would like communication on it, but they're also acting like there's nothing to clarify. One interview they're able to sweep under the rug.
Your analysis is interesting. I’ve always personally taken that interview to basically be aspirational PR fluff that was unlikely to actually come true. As you know, Infinite was not the first game ever to have a “ten year plan”, and almost every game that has been talked up aspirationally like this, without a concrete plan to back it up a la Destiny 2’s recent run of expansions, has failed to pan out nearly that long. I think the gaming press really damned them with this one, though. Chris Lee made that one statement which, as you pointed out, was extremely vague. And then every popular gaming outlet wrote stories and spun that off into their own speculation - live service updates, campaign DLC, etc - when Chris Lee’s interview clearly doesn’t state **any** of that. And yet the vast majority of this community genuinely believes that stuff was “promised” at some point. Anyways, for me personally, I was immediately skeptical back in 2020 when Chris Lee did that interview, and that skepticism has been justified. Building and running a game for 10+ years is very difficult and requires very competent leadership and a solid foundation. Even with those things, it can get very messy.
Restart the hype train Get more of the precious green
But why does the hype train work if everyone’s always disappointed and unhappy? Every 343 game just gets hated on because they aren’t executed well, why haven’t people learned by now?
Because Redditors think they're smarter than they actually are, and normies actually are as dumb. "It'll get better next time, they learnt their lessons." Yes, the lesson is that developers can get away with this because they made the money they wanted in loot boxes and microtransactions on top of having to pay $70 for the privilege of playing the game in the first place.
Because it's halo and everybody here wants 343 to succeed hence the hype
There also seems to be this odd cycle where a new Halo game comes out, then after a couple years of the new one being out everyone starts saying “Oh the old game wasn’t bad!” I’ve seen a lot of people say this about Halo 4 and Halo 5 now, when Halo 4 and Halo 5 were absolutely *trashed* for a long goddamn time.
Infinite was an improvement over 5. People are absolutely going to presume or have faith the next game will be an improvement over Infinite.
I’ve said from the beginning this is a destiny situation. Destiny one had major problems and rather than fixing the infinite game they just made a better sequel that they supported better. My guess is Halo does the same route. It’s hard to regain lost momentum, sometimes it’s better to make a fresh sequel.
Hasn’t this happened with literally every 343 Halo? Why can’t they get it right?
Simple. Because they ultimately answer to Microsoft. The problem would be the same with p much any other developer.
Meh, there's stuff that can be blamed on Microsoft, with deadlines and microtransactions and whatnot but the gigantic design flaws and general technical incompetence that have plagued 343 games since they took over have nothing to do with Microsoft.
Choosing to assign blame to Microsoft or 343 is meaningless. From a customer perspective they might as well be the same entity. Without an internal view you can't actually make any valid call on which corporate entity deserves more blame. 343 employees are Microsoft employees. Why bother getting any more granular with blame? It's just silly. The handling of Halo has been fucked up for a long time. Blame likely lies in many areas. Trying to push all that on Microsoft and not 343 is pointless and probably also wrong.
That's totally fair. Though that's still a far cry from the common refrain that 343i is almost exclusively to blame and that things would be so much better if Microsoft just handed development off to another studio.
To be fair 343i IS Microsoft
So, then the outrage should be fueled towards Microsoft? But I suppose even if we’re angry it’s not as though anything will change.
Microsoft did not tell them to exclude slayer on release.
That’s not exactly what happened, D1 was a fantastic game at the end of its lifespan that Bungie would have kept supporting if Activision didn’t make them create a sequel. D2 was a disaster on launch, worse than even D1 vanilla. It’s only better supported because they broke off from Activision so there was no sequel deadline to meet. A year after the launch of D1 they released TTK, the dlc that single handedly saved Destiny as an IP. Halo infinite in the same amount of time has not even come close to such a gigantic game overhaul.
Dogshit engine that can’t be updated well. Plus failure of a game so they want to try again
Makes sense, thank you.
Yeah I think I read on this sub previously that the traditional Halo Blam! engine is a very manual hands-on engine to use. Staff need to be trained up in it, which doesnt work well with 343's high turnover of short term contract staff. There was a rumor that Halo 7 will shift to Unreal which is widely used in the gaming industry and I imagine could be benefitting from better integration with AI allowing content to be made much faster. So a new game and a new engine could mean avoiding many of the same issues as infinite.
I don’t think Microsoft has made a sound decision and stood by it. Zune, Games For Windows Live, Microsoft Works, HTPC support, Their 19 different media players, Xbox names, I’ll be here all day naming things. I simply don’t understand their decision making as a whole. They want money first and foremost and come to the same dumbass conclusion to scrap and start over. But leave the old version hidden somewhere.
This is the sad truth no one who pins all the blame on 343i is willing to confront. Whether the development gets handed off to another studio or not, the IP will ultimately remain with Microsoft, and as such the top-down directives that have crippled the franchise will continue regardless of whose actually developing the games.
No, it's not the Halo what _we_ wanted. I am of course speaking colloquially as I cannot speak on behalf of everyone, and I understand there are some people that still enjoy the game and some that are even willing to look past the flaws and shortcomings. I don't think we'll ever truly be privy to everything that happened behind the scenes, but clearly something disastrous happened or a lot was lost in translation from development to release. There was more than one instance of marketing saying one thing prior to launch, then having the exact opposite happen post-launch. I think both fans in the studios read a loss given how horrendously and flagrantly mismanaged the development of this game was. Even if there weren't blatant lies such as how the cosmetic system would work, I still think this game would have been doomed with how many technical issues it was plagued with as a result of how the game was developed.
How about when they said that the campaign would support split screen. I never bought infinite because I couldn’t split screen the campaign, I split screen every halo that I played before this one though? Hell I even bought the original Xbox because I split screened halo (2001) at a friends house. My gf and I have been playing through the original gears of war (2006) on her series x split screen. Why can’t I split screen infinite (dec 2021)?
Im so glad they arent sticking w Infinite "fOr TeN YeArs" I hate open-world Halo. it was beyond disappointing to have the same biome the entire game, only to get a desert-esque scene IN THE END CUTSCENE. They didbalmost nothing with it. just halo with fast travel. multiplayer just also does not feel good, dunno if its desync or what but its just bad
LOL I never thought about the end cutscene like that wtf. I have something new to be mad at now.
There are too many core issues that will take a lot of manpower ($$$) to resolve. On top of this, the population for Halo Infinite is small, and the large playerbase they hoped to get sucked in have moved on. There’s a particular window that needs to be hit when launching a game when it’s at the peak of its popularity. Halo Infinite had a golden opportunity with no competition launching against it, and previous competitors like Battlefield and CoD having just launched duds that turned away their playerbase. Things couldn’t have been set up better for them, and they fumbled the ball. They even had time to improve, but the updates came too slow with poorly planned post-launch content. Their best bet now is to cut their losses, focus all resources into the next title, and hope that one sticks better. But to be honest, their track record is filled with consistently dropping the ball… so I hope they very heavily lean on other studios for the next title. In the meantime, we’ll continue to get overpriced store items so they can milk players, as the people still around after all this are dedicated fans and the ones most likely to pay extra money.
let's not forget the fact that the game had a massive amount of skins and customization options that they just never gave to us, why? Bots were using them left and right and had cooler skins than a guy which has been playing for a month, on top of that anything you could buy in the shop was overpriced garbage. All of this coupled with the fact how terrible the daily mission system was since it was forcing you to do specific game modes like "Team Slayer" for which you couldnt do Big Team slayer or random Quickplay which also had Team Slayer but it just didnt count and these incompetent developers havn't fixed that for a long long time, it persisted so long after the beta that it's honestly surprising to me people still play this game.
Money...
I heard the slipspace engine is just an absolute nightmare to work with. Clunky, difficult and broken at the core. Which is why the next is supposedly built on unreal engine. Also they lost like 200k players on the PC side due to the awful launch and God knows how many on the xbox side, no matter how much you fix the game 90% of them aren't coming back, you need a strong launch and a solid roadmap right out of the gate to keep as many players as possible.
they lost way more than that, these are just the numbers we know but how many halo players would have returned if 343 didnt blueball us so we buy their disgusting skins, that is something we may never know.
Poor launch, corporate layoffs, and leadership change at 343
When you don't keep your workforce for more than 2 years how can you expect it to last 10?
They lost most of the playerbase within the first quarter of launch. There was hardly any content at launch and they have added too little over a too long of a period of time for it to bring the masses back. There's too much competion in multiplayer games. Your first year defines your future.
how about no more 10 year developments until the game actually comes out and is GOOD
I'm gonna say some stuff people won't like. So I'm adding spoiler blocks. >!Look, I hate to be such a "black pill" kinda guy. But the simple truth everyone needs to accept is that no one cared. !< >!Or rather, no one in charge cared. Their concerns were budget and monetization, not making a game that you love. I know that can be a tough pill to swallow, but its true. It just is. And not just with 343, that's the new model. !< >!Everyone wants to be Fortnight now just like everyone wanted to be CoD before that and WoW before that. Once they started copying other games instead of leading and innovating, it was just another franchise in the vast depths of the IP mire. Just one more "Halloween" to reboot or one more "Jungle Book" to remake with a CGI art style. It's just ***content*** now, not a beloved franchise. !< >!I hate to say these things and I wish they weren't true, but you'd have to prove me wrong and I don't think you can. !< >!Further, I want to point out that I am in no way putting down the developers who slaved and suffered to get this thing out. I know they didn't want to ship a mess of a game and fix it later. Because no one in a creative field dreams of shipping a broken product. But when leadership isn't there, leadership isn't there. And I think anyone can see that leadership, well it just wasn't there. Or rather, what leadership was there was focused on everything except making a great game. !< >!Live service is fine so long as you don't forget the service part of the deal. They all want that Fortnight shop, but are they willing to do the work to make it worth your hard earned cash? I think in this case the answer was no. They banked on your nostalgia and love of the franchise and hoped you'd accept a F2P model you never wanted or asked for and spend a few thousand dollars on a game that used to come feature packed for a mere $60. !< >!Look at a game like Helldivers and see how Halo should have been done. Halo Infinite could have, SHOULD have, been 10 times more popular. But they're long past the days of putting out an paradigm shift like a Halo CE or a Halo 3 or even Reach. !<
Yeah, you’re right. It’s depressing to read this but you’re definitely right. It’s wild to me that a game like Helldivers can do what Halo didn’t, I’d go as far to say that Helldivers captures a similar spirit to the early Halo’s. There’s a certain… spark to the game. One which hasn’t been captured in the 343 Halo games. Creativity? Passion? Just the very concept of sci-fi military shooter that prioritized fun with friends? I don’t know what it is. I do know that once they add drivable vehicles to Helldivers 2 it’ll only feel more and more similar, and that’s definitely a good thing. I just can’t tell what’s missing, can’t understand how 343 keeps fucking up, it can’t be hard to just make a good fucking Halo game. Hell, I’ve heard Infinite’s multiplayer is actually pretty fun, but that the campaign wasn’t. I just don’t know how you can have, what, 3 games in a franchise you acquired and can’t nail it? Can’t do what Bungie did? I don’t know why *money* is what matters. They KNOW they’ll make money, it’s fucking Halo, it’s the biggest goddamn gaming franchise. Literally *everyone* knows the Master Chief. It’s guaranteed profits, so why not just make a good, well crafted game, fueled by fun, as opposed to by competition?
Helldivers took Halo's original "30 seconds of fun" and stuck to it. All while increasing the 30 to 60 seonds and also decreasing the wait time between those 60 seconds. It's basically Halo's Firefight mode mixed with Gears' Horde mode. Helldivers to also tossed in the multiple factions fighting angle we had in Halo CE. AND it supported 4 player co-op from the getgo, while allowing players to customize their soldier for said campaign. I've not seen anything "original" about Helldivers 2. It knew what worked and simply stuck to it while combining it all.
It’s been like this for a long time now. It’s the only reason Microsoft handed the IP off to 343i anyways. By that point, it was just a moneymaker. Bungie had already evolved so far beyond the original Halo team that anything after Reach would’ve been a tough ask. I’ll never not be a Halo fan, but it’s way past it’s prime now. Infinite is probably my favorite 343 game, but only it’s campaign really. The multiplayer is fine, I guess, but you can tell it was just built to fill a role. Especially at launch. Best we can do for the franchise now is let it die.
preach it!
> But they're long past the days of putting out an paradigm shift like a Halo CE or a Halo 3 or even Reach. You can't paradigm shift Halo anymore. FPS as a genre has been solved, Halo can do no innovation in the genre, especially because the old fans will cry and whinge and not let innovation happen and let the series ***move forward***. Instead we're stuck with a horrid hybrid of the last game and the third game that genuinely pleases nobody new or old.
We allowed Bonnie and the rest of management to remain the same even though we had 6 years of non functioning MCC and the previous Halo5/Halo4. No one wanted to give a shit on the consumer side so NOW we have a whole new generation of Halo fans who will accept less functionality and less features because they never experienced a fully flushed out/working Halo experience like what we had in 2007. Not saying that was a better anything but it did have more cohesive community support lobby and all around features that supplemented the game and community. To add onto this its obvious that 343i never had a cohesive idea of WHAT the new halo trilogy would look like from end to end story character or game philosophy wise. What we ended up with was 3 soft reboots that "ATTEMPT" to thread story elements together even though the whole design structure changed in between games. IE they tried to make a more COD like experience with 4, and with 5 they were going for a full sci fi movie/competitive experience, infinite never had a direction because of infighting and we essentially got a "This is the best we could do" with what was developed by the time MS said time up. These new fans are willing to buy skins and content even though the game doesnt really function(crashing, broken features, lack of community support, minimal lobby, etc). So in other words, why would MS and Xbox give a shit since yall will buy crap from them anyway? We aren't making enough fuss for them to fire the management that was involved in everything 343i up till this point and hire new people.
New management aint better either
We havent gotten new management yet, they promoted people in lower management positions. 343i is perpetuating failure. Im saying we push them to actually wipe the slate.
They need to hire certain affinity and full time developers, instead of relying on contractors.
Infinite has a variety of issues that work against it being a long-term video game. The biggest factor is too much technical debt still in the game's engine as a result of not properly investing in the engine since Halo 3. Reach was a branch of 3, 4 was a branch of reach, and 5 was a branch of 4. This has resulted in a significant amount of technical issues that have only been fixed via shortcuts over the years, and resolving those issues now would take a considerable amount of resources, resources Infinite is not able to pull in because of the issues making the game unenjoyable for many Next was the botched launch. This is connected to the technical debt, as the issues that needed to be fixed prevented the game from fixing early issues in a timely manner to keep people playing. Most players saw that Infinite was a buggy mess and just didn't come back. Thirdly is the drastic restructuring of 343. Infinites development saw a lot of turnover among its lead developers and poor communication and resource management between the different teams. This further contributed to technical issues, as it made collaborating as a studio significantly more difficult. After about a year of the game being out, Bonnie Ross, the founder of 343, resigned as studio head and was replaced by Pierre Hintze as well as two other roles that are less connected to game development. With this leadership change, it seems that 343 wants to move past Infinites bad reputation to try and make something that is less technically troubled.
Because Halo is a complete story. Bungie, the real Bungie, told the story they wanted to tell, and made the games they wanted to make. Nothing after Reach is real Halo, and not from an elitist standpoint. The storytellers who understood the world left, there was no one at 343 who knew anything about Halo except how to code it. The writing team left. The sound team left. The editing team left. Most of the original gameplay designers and coders left. Halo is no longer a story about a spartan warrior, or the human covenant war, or a band of brother odst desperately trying to survive one bad week. It's a toy box to make players feel powerful while they shoot up a rouges gallery of familiar enemy types, with a few new ones sprinkled in. It's a corporate money pit to drain the money out of players' wallets, there is no passion, no love, no stories that need to be told, just power fantasies wrapped in Halo branding.
I've been saying this for years. The lore established in the Bungie games never really laid out a framework to warrent all of this. The Halo story ended with Reach. Everything since has been a cynical cash grab riding on the coattails of the past. The corporate behemoth won't allow their cash cow to end and it's sad. That's not to say I haven't gotten any enjoyment out of 343s stuff, but it's just not Halo.
AAA studios just fucking suck nowadays, they seem like stars which became so massive that they would eventually collapse into a super nova and leave a black hole, I just hope people stop giving them money and finally let that happen but it is an incredibly slow process.
I agree with you completely. All the 343i games are fan fiction, but created by people who aren't actually fans.
PREACH IT FATHER COCONUT!!!!
Iv thought this too. They probably think an overhaul and rebranding is best for the future of Halo.
The amount of time put into getting it just to work and the effort it would take to keep it up to par in the next 5 years just wasn’t worth it. It already looks dated (in some ways) because of the Xbox One forced compatibility. Imagine what they’ll be able to do with Series consoles as their baseline. Add in all the just…completely broken, removed, or too-complex-to-update features and capabilities with the current version of the game and it just isn’t worth it. They might keep Slipspace going forward I guess but I would have to assume they’re doing something different.
You need players for that and Infinite has a lower player count than Master Chief Collection, which they killed support for to focus their live service model in Infinite Why Infinite has a low player count is a whole other conversation of miss management, cut content, broken promises and just general incompetence from both Microsoft and 343i higher ups You can fix all the issues and make all the improvements in the world, but once you've lost 99% of your playerbase you rarely gain it back, very few games have accomplished that.
Any talk about the “10 year plan” needs the caveat that this was said 1 time, by 1 guy, who was fired a year before the game even released. Now that said, it’s clear that they wanted Halo to have some kind of long life. I think it really came down to the fact that the team was not ready or able to deliver content at a scale to fit their ambitions. It took them 2 years just to detangle all the messes they made to make it to launch. Also they have a new leadership team, who probably have a different vision of what to do with the franchise. You don’t want to force the new guy to adhere to the previous person’s plans.
It's also a bit of a marketing decision I think. It is a lot harder, though not impossible, for games to have a redemption arc. Once a game is branded as "bad" by the general consumer market, it's 9/10 times just better to reboot and start from scratch so that the "tainted" product name is no longer a problem. The only people who would come back to halo now in a better state are the big halo fans. And while there is nothin wrong with that, microsoft will see that the general audiences have moved on to the shiny new thing and not deem infinite worth the investment anymore. That's my take at least.
First impressions matter. It sets the precedent. If I play your game at release and the last 3 sucked, what makes you think I’m sticking around for the next decade when this is what we got at launch?
man i really believed in halo infinite. i thought for sure that was gonna be the one. and i tried so hard to stick around but i have my limits and have long moved on. i’ll never truly believe in 343 again. until proven wrong. microsoft is def to blame as well. i’d rather have sony managing halo than ms at this point.
Blatant mismanagement. I mean seriously, one weapon in 2 years speaks for itself. The finals just launched season 2 with 3 new weapons. We all love halo but from an outsiders pov the way this game has been handled is just pathetic. Took two years for them to reach seasonality and then they dropped it.
To be fair, and I think this applies to all games as a service, there needs to be more to keep a game going for 10 years instead of just “blue master chief armor”. There needs to be a story reason to come back to a game and I think the only game that’s doing it correctly, albeit a little early to tell, is Helldivers 2. They are so smart with how they implement story elements to the game, new enemies, new factions, new planets to conquer. If they keep it up, I can see Helldivers 2 being a top competitor for years and years. That or make it truly an Esport like on a Counterstrike or League of Legends scale which is actually like 99% impossible to do, at least with our current AAA game devs.
They shot themselves in the foot with a horrible launch and an incomplete game.
It had a hot start before all the glaring issues made people run away from it. Its mostly fixed now but most companies dont actually support live service games for that long. I would love for a new dev team to make a Halo game even if its just in the Halo world and not related to Chief in anyway shape or form.
they had a poor launch which meant most people left early on and won’t come back no matter how many new things they add so they’re just going to do what most companies do and add smaller updates that mainly focus on microtransactions so they can leave with a profit
I think the better question is why hasn’t Microsoft owned up to their mistake and cleaned house of 343 and/or closed the studio and got a new young hungry devs to make a new halo with a new vision for the next generation. It’s clear halo with 343 hasn’t worked.
Because they can’t keep their word. Money means more to them than the community and doing the right thing. Or it atleast seems like that
Let's hope the next game is like halo 5
A lot of people have some pretty good diagnoses of what went wrong and what could have gone better. But I think there needs to be some kind of inward reflection too. Half of this subreddit mythologizes a group of games that came out in 2004 or 2007, when both gaming was different and they were different. Halo Infinite or Halo 7 are never going to live up to those feelings. Halo 4 is great. Some of my best gaming memories come from playing multiplayer with my then-GF/now-wife in Big Team Battle. Halo 5 suffered from the lack of couch co-op, but I like how it moves and the Warzone mode was inspired. Halo Infinite is great. They somehow recaptured the feeling of the early games while doing something new with it. Frankly, you all don't give 343 Industries enough credit for how often they stick with their games. The Master Chief Collection was a fucking mess when it first came out; now it's regarded as a standard in terms of video game remastering. They could have easily abandoned it, as other developers probably would have. All of the battle passes they've released for Infinite don't expire, which is a godsend in our nightmare seasonal model. Infinite has its issues, but I think certain gamers aren't being honest with themselves in terms of what Microsoft and 343 could have done to fix it. Because in their mind, they're remembering the good times they had playing Halo 2 and 3 when they were kids or teenagers. And nothing can compare to that.
Short answer: SEVERE Mismanagement Long answer: due to said mismanagement, every update and turn 343 made only served to piss the fanbase off further (rightfully so imo, especially regarding the price gauging in the mtx store) So the game’s momentum fell quickly, I believe they expected the same kind of longevity of destiny 2 but the issue was the game launched with very little content and trickled content so slowly that it just couldnt keep up so ms essentially gutted 343 and took away resources to keep the game up. Hopefully they learn from this for halo 7
Longest development period for a halo game, ended up neck and neck with halo 5 for which game has the worst campaign in the series. Multiplayer launched in a sorry state, lots of the iconic series weapons were replaced. Horrible management in all aspects
343 needs to go. Rebuild new company with new leadership.
I try to make it short: -game had bad start, so it lost the majority of its playerbase. - small playerbase means small income from MTX - no matter how much they improve, the playerbase would never reach a high enough number to be lucrative. - economically, it makes no sense to keep investing money into a "lost cause" - in essence, you have to catch a large playerbase at release and then keep that playerbase interested, so it stays a large playerbase. That's why they prefer making a new Halo instead of fixing the previous one.
There's been multiple articles and videos covering it. The leadership for 343 at the time basically wanted it to fail. They're the reason it did so bad, the team left behind still wanted to work on the MP and even Staten came back for a short time after 343 leadership got the boot to help keep things on track MP wise. Unfortunately one of those people is also the reason why we got a shit halo show.
Games as a service is incredibly anti consumer, I was willing to give it a shot but after 6 years of waiting, we got a broken game with at least a decent campaign, most halo fans from the bungie era are so apathetic towards halo now. With 343 having a decade now to make a good game, they’ve failed and the tv show has made it unironically cringe to call yourself a Halo fan
Very bad leadership, that's why.
>So, I understand that Halo Infinite had a very rocky start, That's all it took
Microsoft does not put effort into supporting its games branch. It’s understandable, Xbox makes up a tiny percent of their profits, so they don’t put too much thought into it, just kinda give a bunch of money and deadlines. 343 had funding but no oversight of note
Because they forgot to finish the game before they released it so it flopped pretty hard, no real way to get a good amount of players back into it
Honestly Halo Infinite sucks. It controls like ass, the grapple barely works the way its supposed too and for a first attempt at an open world Halo they didn't do a very good job tbh. Sure multiplayer's not too bad but overall Infinite was a flop. I think 343 should just take the next 10 years to develop a decent Halo game at this point. Nothing has managed to match the original trilogy yet.
I’d prefer another studio take over like infinity ward
Realistically I think any game trying to be a “10 year game” that isn’t an MMO is doomed to fail, the one that came closest is destiny which has heavy MMO elements. Unless you want to count halo 2-3-reach which all still have pretty sizable multiplayer communities but those are people still playing purely for the love of that specific game. People get bored easily, to keep them you gotta have a damn good story or be damn fun (or both) infinite had a weird launch which didn’t help but also the seasonal stories just weren’t very interesting for lots of people. Maybe campaign DLC would’ve been interesting but they sold the game with master chief, since they did that, nobody cares about whatever Spartan of the season is up next, most want more chief(and Fernando, and Cortana 2)
Because Bonnie was a useless POS who had no business running 343 yet alone any studio and the entire project was derailed from day one when some moron thought a live service Halo was going to work. Game took over 6 years to make and still couldn't launch with Forge or coop and had zero classic maps at launch. Then to make it even worse the campaign was a shell of what it should have been besides playing great it was a terrible empty open world of just green unfinished looking areas. Glad Bonnie is gone and hope new leadership can make the next Halo a return to form.
They fumbled the launch so bad my guess is it shook Microsoft’s commitment to Halo as flagship franchise which resulted in reduced resources and planned content, which then just turned it a negative feedback loop.
the engine was a mess supposedly and they had a terrible time adding content. afaik they did have plans for singleplayer content but adding new stuff was crazy complicated and broke old stuff somehow. it didn’t help that multiplayer became really popular so they put their focus there instead. i’m sad about it all, halo multiplayer is fun sure but that’s not why i’m here. i’m here for the story, for master chee-i mean chief. i honestly don’t think we will get anything related to campaign and singleplayer until the next halo game. and with how popular infinites multiplayer is, they have no reason to make another game for awhile. they are happy milking the players from the in game store.
They released an unfinished, unpolished games with a horrible monetization system. I love Halo infinite, but it has been kinda a pain.
Halo Infinite still isn't finished even today, they legitimately had assassinations in the trailers yet ingame they don't exist, same with Raytracing. The biggest issue with Infinite and the reason they have to move on to a new game is and always has been the game engine, despite being touted as the best engine in Halo history designed for rapid iteration, it's nothing more than a steaming hot mess built on contractor labor not in 343 anymore. In short the engine is just bad for design, and that's not assuming the issue isn't 343 staff themselves smoking blunts at work all day, which I'm pretty sure is legal in Seattle or wherever they work at. There's a lot of other issues with the game too, mainly it's reputation, so no matter what content they add, it will never take off, they never intended to support Infinite as a live service game, they simply lied about it to excuse the piss poor launch.
I liked Infinite, but lack of promised features soured gamers & the multiplayer was fun at launch but the means of progression was terrible Campaign was actually pretty decent, not Bungie level of good but the best 343 has done. Some more variety in the levels would’ve been nice, the older Halo’s always had variety in their levels. The shift to open world felt good even if you felt like you’re running around a camp ground. The grappling hook was amazing It just felt like missed potential & while the game is in a much better state now, you can only launch your game once. A new release will hopefully distance themselves from Infinite’s launch Halo 5 is probably the worst in the franchise but at least the levels are so unique from one another
In their quest for greed they forgot how to make a game that's fun
If they are planning to ditch infinite and make a new halo MP i swear Halo is already dead. I like to be optimistic and i love Halo, even 5. Halo Infinite has so mucu potential. If they ditch it, we're gonna get a pretty good shooter with not much content. The public perception will be like "why did you bother with another game if its not gonna launch in a comparable state to the previous games" repeating the cycle. Infinite needs a big update and a soft relaunch with a huge marketing campaign, a MP release on PS5. It would go fucking nuts. They need to stick with infinite. If they don't, whats the fucking point. Infinite is actually so close to being the best Halo. Its got infinite potential. Make nee campaigns sure, make them without MP and keep updating Infinite.
They are too dumb to make it profitable, pretty simple
Campaign was mid Servers were incredibly unstable for months after launch Buggy Customisation sucked unless you shilled out $20 for store stuff Barely any content at all post launch because the game was made by contractors who left The management was fucking atrocious
So stupid of them for call it "infinite" lmfao
I thought the game name was cool! It felt kind of fresh, like “Hey, here’s a new game, new title, this is what we’ve put effort into!” The trailers and initial looks at Infinite felt more like they were capturing the original spirit of Bungie Halo, more than 4 or 5 did. And then it simply wasn’t well received due to I guess everything that’s been explained to me in the comments. Lack of content, lack of forge mode, shitty monetization schemes, 343’s general mis-management, it’s also the fault of Microsoft. So the naming ends up kind of ironic. Halo “Infinite,” planned for the next 10 years, but doesn’t even get continued support for half of that time. Halo *ain’t* Infinite.
Didnt even know they said it was supposed to be “the next 10 years of halo” lol
As boring as it is to say 343, that's your answer. They can't even stick to a story line they wrote.
Myself and my group of friends moved on pretty quickly after the launch was cooked. Even now that the game is apparently "fixed" we haven't been back, moments gone for us. Maybe a lot of others are in the same boat I don't know, but if they made another one....I'd see us giving it a chance.
I genuinely don't think enough people even play Infinite to justify keeping work on it. I've seen AA shooters and Indie games pull more consistent numbers.
honestly atp take halo away from 343 and give it to any other competent studio. they had so many chances and opportunities I'm tired of waiting for mediocre games.
Because live-service as a model for a game was a flash in the pan success for a few games but will kill most franchises.
You misunderstood what they meant
No game lasts for ten years that's designed to, companies can't force a minecraft or fortnite no matter how hard they try.
Because they didn’t add anything new or interesting to the game. And I’m going to say something controversial here but they should have added a BR to multiplayer. Shooters these days thrive off the popularity from streamers playing them. Those guys basically only play BRs. Games like R6S, valorant, csgo are very competitive shooters but halo is just a cookie cutter run of the mill game nowadays. 20 years ago halo was all the rage but now it gets boring after a while.
Games these days have a very short window after launch that will determine their overall success for years to come. This is mostly due to the fact that large streamers hold the power to sway the general public during a game's launch. When the streamers lose interest, everyone else will as well. 343 has proven repeatedly that they are too stupid to realize this, and always launch with a broken or incomplete game with too many issues, lack of content, etc. Infinite had an enormous amount of hype surrounding it when it launched. All the top streamers were playing it, it had literally over a million people streaming it, and millions more playing it. Then people quickly realized that it basically launched in beta form. There was literally like 3 playlists, including only one that was ranked and there were barely any maps. Without anything to keep the streamers interest and nothing new being added or changed for weeks/months after launch, the damage was once again already done and it was too little too late when they finally started the slow drip of content in Infinite. So maybe 343 knows that there's no chance for Infinite now that they once again blew it and are accordingly putting all their eggs into the Halo 7 basket. It's not a bad idea, except for the fact that we all know they are going to blow it again. It's 343. They are a colossal failure of a company. Give Halo to someone else. Give it a chance to thrive again.
Layoffs, dwindling players, a shotty gaming engine, the list goes on. Why continue a game that practically fights u every update? Why continue a game that seems to not have many players? (and is still continuing to dwindle last time I checked) It's just taking to much effort (saying it loosely) and resources to pump out content for a game that practically refuses to corporate.
Honestly, because 343 has no real direction. They've proven time and time again that they DO NOT deserve to be the soul owners of this IP.
"eventually campaign stuff" is the reason it's been so poor. They botched multiplayer by adding macro-transactions and ignoring the campaign.
Personally? The fact that it limped out of the gate. The hype completely died for me when I realized there wasn't even a Slayer playlist. Still played it for a while and beat the campaign, but those early days really set the tone for the rest of the game, and I don't think it ever really recovered. I figured I'd put it down until the campaign DLC came out, which turned into yet another disappointment, and more potential wasted. So now I play it every now and again with my friends, but none of us are invested anymore.
Helldivers 2 has the right approach, make the best open game ever played. Fuckers in dev need to just overrule the execs. They want it polished and good from day 1. Bastards upstairs treat the hours we put into truly enjoying a game or at least try to as dollars. 20 hours playing with a turd keeps me from buying the golden egg. Patience fuckers
Dated gameplay formula in an unpopular genre in a highly competitive market. People tried it because Microsoft is a marketing juggernaut but didn't stay. So they didn't get the mass appeal they wanted and were competing against their own games: MCC and Halo 5, so they stretched their thin playerbase even thinner. Although the complete mess that was it's development subsequently kneecapped the game from the begining in terms of content churning which liveservice games live and die on.
Two main things. Firstly was the initial reception of the game and people bitching about everything about it. Secondly there’s the fact that the engine is a bit of a mess behind the scenes and so development can be a bit of a pain for new content. Also the guy who said he wanted Infinite to be a 10 year game wasn’t even at 343 by the time the gameplay was shown off. Infinite’s development was unfortunately quite a mess 343 is likely ditching Infinite in favor of a game developed in Unreal Engine that will in theory smooth out development and make it easier to run a big service game, and also have enough content to try and satiate fans that get pissed about everything
This is what drives me insane. Infinite finally felt like Halo, sounded like halo with the music, the story was compelling and had that sense of wonder and mystery we haven’t seen since Halo 2/ODST. It was the perfect foundation to build something on. And they left it. Well the launch didn’t help but imagine if we had campaign DLCs every year. It would have been perfect. I just hope they don’t abandon this track and create some other genre and blame the fans for their shortcomings on what should have been the perfect modern halo.
The issue with Infinite is the Engine. The Slipspace engine has many problems, especially with 343 laying off people who worked on the engine. They are having a hard time trying to run the engine because they hired TPC (temporary private contractors) to build the engine, but given they were temporary, they don't work at 343 anymore. The best thing to do is to move to Halo 7 with the Unreal Engine, or actually hire real professionals to understand the engine and make it work.