343 and Microsoft is the new EA

Games Halo Infinite
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“Free to play”, “only cosmetic”…. This is the crap I don’t like hearing. Yall too use to the Fortnite era.

Cosmetics use to be something to go after and earn. Something that is embedded in a lot of games. (If it’s cosmetic or not making your character “your character” is a fun thing to do. Even in a mp). No one is saying there can’t be some monetization, some form of a store, but they need balance.

Halo isn’t Fortnite, and even if it is free shouldn’t be treated like this. It’s like people have lost sense of how games use to be. Quality over F2P.

We understand it’s free, we are just sick of monetization and money schemes

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The fact that they paywalled color customization, limiting our freedom to express for marginal profits makes me not want to either support or play the game. Don’t get me wrong, I want Infinite to succeed and love the gameplay, it’s just not so much of a step up enough to justify investing time or money in that game when MCC is just more fun (in terms of variety, map, gamemodes, forge, customs browser) and less expensive if you want the full experice, spartan customization included. If they want to charge that damn much and strip away color customization, at the least they should finish the game. 343 please give us back our colors and scrap the core system

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Yah, but Halo Reach having cosmetics and a shop was a definite win, don’t think there are many people who didn’t enjoy that system. It added a lot to my experience. Also MCC, I paid for one time and they managed to add a tonne of cosmetic items, something I quite enjoyed although I preferred how Reach did it with a shop rather than MCC’s season tiers, but still enhanced my experience.

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Nah, they are trying to strike gold and rake in easy money from cosmetics that can be easily pumped out regularly. Halo generally sells tens of millions of copies, the campaign only needed to sell 8.5 million copies to start making profit if it’s true that the game cost $500m to produce…

They still could have sold me armour and certain items too, their options are practically endless when it comes to stuff they can sell. But locking down all player creativity is just lame. The outline system is supposed to enable expression… well all you see are clones of eachother.

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While the decisions behind Halo Infinite are highly questionable, they are certainly nowhere near what EA is.

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Used the word “bud” you gonna call us kid next? maybe friendo? shove off you sod, maybe actually have an argument instead of just insults.

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He made a very vague statement, if you can even call it that. Didn’t explain or elaborate further. Made absolutely zero sense. So I said enjoy using that argument.

Did you feel the word bud was a bit too harsh ? I’ll be sure to tone down the vulgarity on these forums going forward :clown_face:

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Bud, buddy, pal, kid. The true gamer words. Hurts more than anything. LOL

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I don’t like microtransactions at all but I’ve learned to tolerate them. They can charge any price they want. I don’t care about the price because I wouldn’t give them penny for this stuff. I don’t see it as a good value proposition.

I see people say “oh it’s free to play now tho” but it’s really not. I didn’t get the campaign for free. That cost 60 dollars and it’s my favorite part of the overall package. I got a free to play business model in my 60 dollar game and I hate that. If this wasn’t Halo returning to form, I would have never let this game even touch my harddrive. I am less likely to spend money on microsoft products from now on because I intensely dislike this business model. From now on, any time I see microsoft is involved I will learn every single aspect of the business model to determine if I’m going to even waste time on the game.

To be completely fair, I’m glad the days of buying map packs are over and communities aren’t getting split based on whether or not they dropped 10 dollars to get 4 maps and new maps are more available to play on.
That’s Awesome and I love that and, that is thanks to microtransactions.

I am frustrated that there is very little I can earn as someone who won’t buy the battlepass. I can only think of 1 thing that is obtainable and has piqued my interest which is the helmet at lvl 90 something.
It feels like stuff I’ve gotten in the past has been ripped out of the game and put on sale.
I am okay just rocking the default look though. I don’t need weapon skins, armor, or whatever else and while I like customizing my character, it’s not worth paying for.

That’s not where the problems end though. Cheaters are more common, people screw their team over to pursue these stupid challenges, some of these cosmetics look out of universe, there is no more team colors and instead we have this stupid -Yoink!- highlight around character that simultaneously makes everyone more visible than they should be but also makes it more difficult to distinguish between friend or foe. This is all thanks to this free to play nonsense.

PS: I want to clarify that I do enjoy this game quite a bit, but I really just needed to vent my frustrations with what is happening to the franchise that I love and that’s why this post is overly negative.

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You’re talking to someone who didn’t lol.

It featured a steadily increasing steep grind and limited your daily acquisition of credits to 200k. I speak from experience when I suggest that Reach is the game that taught me how to enjoy games without the need to grind.

Infinite isn’t much better currently, but it does feature a steady 1000xp every level and allows you to continue to earn after you’ve hit your weekly challenge cap.

I’m merely speculating when I say this, but MCC is most likely a title that was was designed to break even at best financially, and bank hard on Halo 5’s Req system to make up the difference. This is important because it really just cannot be done this way in Halo Infinite for financial reasons, and you need to understand why.

The MCC was supposed to be a one and done deal. Launch the game, support it though a few months into Halo 5’s release and then be done. The package we now have was never supposed to be the package we now have. Two complete additional titles, 8 seasons of unlockable content with additional content to unlock, additional painstaking remasters, inclusions to existing sandboxes and games, forge overhaul, PC support, with support and bug fixes 7 years after the title launched officially. Halo 5 was supported for 2 years by comparison.

Even with the new pricing structure on PC, I find it incredibly difficult to believe that the overarching cost to turn this game from an unplayable mediocre cocoon at launch into the stunning butterfly it is now was covered by MCC sales alone. The peak player count on PC wouldn’t have even generated $1mil in sales.

It stands to reason that something else was keeping this game alive, and it wasn’t generous charitable intentions by 343. Most likely Halo 5’s Req system generated more than enough revenue to cover both its cost and MCC’s and then some.

Infinite is a product made by a business that has to try and sell enough product to cover its massive budget. A $60 copy of a game is not going to do this, so a F2P multiplayer model was adopted. Unfortunately this means optional cosmetics are limited in scope, but the multiplayer experience itself is unrestricted to everyone. I understand that it’s disappointing that 95% of cosmetic unlocks are now locked behind a paywall, but I find it difficult to believe that a majority of players play this title exclusively for the dress up portion of the game.

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It’s more of a Canadian thing :grin:

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Reach kept me playing. Reach gave players who enjoy the grind a reason to show off their armour that took them months maybe more than a year to earn. That was awesome.

Infinite sounds like it holds your hand, like it does throughout the entire campaign that I played. If it’s anything like MCC theres no challenge to unlocking anything. The rewards are meh cos the challenge doesnt exist. Oh you completed the battle pass? Cool man. Enjoy those rewards that you cant customise, that everybody else also unlocked just as easy as you did…

$500m = the campaign had to sell 8.5 million copies to make profit. Halo games generally sell around 10-20 million copies easily. So no. Its just greed. Never forget it.

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And the campaign most likely didn’t even come close to 8.5mil copies sold my man. Apparently there’s less than 100k players on currently across both PC and Xbox. At best this game only sold 120k copies based on player counts from launch, at worst only a fraction of that.

In all honesty as time goes on and player counts are revealed and publicized I just don’t buy the “copies sold” statements anymore. It’s a braggadocios claim meant to drum up bravado and acclaim for shareholders rather than make specific statements that tell a different truth.

There’s barely 11mil players active in the top 10 most played games currently my guy. If you don’t trust 3rd party population sites, then just look at Steam’s publicly available stats, there’s not even 5mil active players on that platform, and it’s the most popular PC storefront which regularly publishes its data.

Greed may have something to do with overall sales, but campaign sales alone would never cover that cost even if the first day beta population (peak population numbers so far) all purchased the campaign.

Reach kept me playing too, but it wasn’t the grind that kept me playing. 07/07/2011 I maxed out my 200k credits at 2:26am and continued to play the for the next 21 hours and 34 minutes earning nothing. After that I realized the credit grind wasn’t worth the effort, but the game was still fun. When I put the grind to the side, I had so much more fun with it.

Some players embraced the grind, but as I pointed out it wasn’t a well made system by any stretch with caps and limitations as well as steadily elongated progression stretches as you did continue playing.

Besides showing off unlocks, you could only equip so much at once. There are some armor choices you never saw, others you saw too much of. I think it was less about what was unlocked overall and just what players wanted to equip or didn’t want to equip.

I haven’t played campaign (because I didn’t purchase the campaign) so I have nothing to go off of here.

I wouldn’t say Infinite holds your hand though, at least in relation to the unlock system (that I assumed we were talking about). I’d say it was pretty grindy, and less so but pretty grindy still.

Could you explain this further?

There wasn’t any challenge to unlocking anything in Reach either, just time. There hasn’t been any challenge to unlocking anything since Halo 3.

You can customize with them though, I’m a bit confused by your statements if I’m being honest.

In all honesty, I don’t see how this justifies your appreciation for Reach’s progression system when everyone follows the exact same progression path with identical unlocks too. Reach was incredibly linear even with the perception of choice.

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I’ve just seen the stats for the active players. Even the total population on steam seems low. Xbox has 100 million users and Halo is one of the flagship titles. It’s strange… I’m wierded out rn these numbers don’t make sense. I’m sure the daily/weekly/monthly number of players is much higher like a million maybe but still.

I mean I cant speak for everyone, you’re right other people just want it all now. But I enjoyed it. I need something to keep me playing. I would even support Infinite and grab a battlepass because I enjoy having stuff to do, but not while the customisation system is so locked down. I could ignore the cat ears and overpriced extras if I was allowed to have my own emblem and colours I always use. Who knows if/when my colours will ever appear… I really don’t appreciate player creativity being removed. It’s a horrible trend to allow to continue.

I feel like the game is pandering to a wider audience and has been dumbed down. So you have sniper glare when the sniper already has tracers. You have area scans and enemy pings. Timers and weapons placed in boxes on the wall that reveal its cooldown. The campaign has area scan, magic ammo boxes, and your objective usually glows bright yellow. Outlined enemies are way easier to spot than shaded enemies. I could go on and on but I just don’t like the gamey feeing, much preffered the cinematic feel of the previous campaigns and the raw multiplyer.

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Yeah but it showed dedication. If you love halo and you’re gonna be playing anyway, you get rewarded. I much prefer that I could stop playing reach and come back a month later and keep going. I don’t like all the FOMO tactics games use nowdays to keep you playing.

You can’t choose your colours. They are even locked to certain armours so the amount of variety you see in games is miserable. I don’t even play, just see clips and I notice it, it’s embarrassing.

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Original Post: Click at your own discretion

Summary

Yep, they can truly and utterly f*** off.

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Definitely not for this broken piece of **** of a game. Adding 20$ for cosmetic in store, people should be for cash cows for buying that.

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They are not close, they have beaten EA.

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Original post: click at your discretion

Summary

You should know that those challenges are rigged. Goodluck eating 343/MS BullS***.

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Literally what I said. TF?