As the title says, 343 are absolutely terrible at launching games. Halo 5 was a big disaster, with next to no content; MCC was even worse, not only could you not unlock anything, the game itself literally did not work.
Now, seven years later from Halo 5, Halo Infinite is taking the exact same direction. I didn’t make this forum to troll on 343 (well, maybe a little bit) I made it to say that while they’re terrible at launching games, they are good at making a finished product. MCC was in shambles, look at it now. It has an actual progression system and you can actually play it.
I’m not saying that it’s ok to just make a game with no content. All I’m saying is that unlike other game companies like EA, Activision, and the fallen Bungie, 343 actually care enough about their game to fix it. They may get it completely wrong at first, but at least we can praise them for listening to fan feedback and doing something about it.
Agree or disagree, I just wanted to give a little praise instead of criticism.
(also I’d like to say that I am wrong about a few things I’ve said as people have said down below)
Halo Infinite and Halo MCC have had some pretty poor matchmaking issues on launch. MCC was beyond abysmal so Infinite is actually a step above that. Expect more from Microsoft’s flagship multiplayer, but it is what it is. It will be fixed and I will still play it.
I would agree if this was their first Halo game. But they made H4, H5, and MCC. This is their 4th Halo game and they still have to clue what they are doing. As of right now Infinite is a downgrade to H5. Never was shot around corners and beatdowns didn’t register. Infinite is unplayable some games and 343 has learned nothing from past experiences. I will not give them the benefit of the doubt here, they had years to make this game and failed once again.
The sad reality is that even if Infinite became the best Halo game in Halo history, it doesn’t mean much because the vast majority of its players will never get to experience peak Halo.
Now you might be optimistic and just assume that tons of players will come back, but what people are forgetting is that other games are going to come out and the other big shooters on the market are still releasing content all the time so Infinite is far behind other games and the gap could just grow with time.
You have to convince players not just to play your game, but you have to convince them to drop others in favor of your experience. The Activision/Blizzard deal just rendered Halo even less relevant to MS and to Xbox, who’s to say that a Starcraft FPS couldn’t drastically outperform Halo? Who’s to say that Overwatch 2 won’t blow it out of the proverbial water?
I think Halo Infinite is the game we should’ve gotten 10 years ago honestly. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to realize what made Halo popular so to me (as a fan) Infinite is a too little too late type of thing.
Edit: No reason they couldn’t have just went this direction with 4/5. Even as far as F2P goes it isn’t like F2P was unheard of back in 2015. They are very late to an overcrowded market and competing with games that have years worth of content already.
No they aren’t. They’re good at fixing their games just enough to keep at a few dedicated Halo fans around. Halo 5 was at certain times very fun to play, and it became the best multiplayer Halo had had so far. But think about how absurd that it wasn’t in the first place. It was released almost a decade after Halo 3. The technology capabilities alone should have just made it good. But 343 somehow ruined a game that could have been great from the start, and eventually released something that at least a few players were willing to play. Even 343 will admit they didn’t finish polishing the game, that’s why they tried to really push the point that they’ve been working on Infinite for six years. I am incredibly hopeful that this game ends up getting fixed, and in the correct ways. But I don’t think it’s very realistic, still. ESPECIALLY if they handle it in the same way they handled Halo 5. Can’t speak much for MCC though.
but they didn’t make MCC they outsourced each game to a different company for porting to the X1, then 343 tied them together, that’s why it was so broken at launch
That might not be the case with this new model because their main focus seems to be about how much cash can they grab, and we shouldn’t have to wait for years to get a finished product.
343 has had over a decade, and at this point, it’s nothing but asinine leadership, period. Seriously, how many years does it need to be for a developer to get their act together? I have no more tolerance for multi-billion dollar companies that are soaking up millions from the player base but aren’t really giving anything in return that can’t even get their act together and is taking advantage of the player base because of their incompetence to get them by.
Former OW player here. OW 2 won’t blow Halo out of the water with its PvP as it is basically an OW 1 upgrade that all owners of OW 1 will get for free. The only thing that will be payed for currently OW players will be the new story mode. That is the only thing OW 2 has shown that looks like fun to most OW players as not many people like the new multiplayer changes. Blizzard has failed to show us why a live service game like OW needs a sequel and instead has only proven that OW 2 will be a glorified expansion pass.
Regardless… Infinite is far too late into a market full of good games.
Competitive FPS wise CoD, Starcraft (Starcraft 4 hype lol), Overwatch and some other possibilities put Halo into a bind competitive FPS wise. I think Halo pros will end up leaving long term but maybe I’m a bit pessimistic here.
Casually CoD kind of just blows Infinite out of the water, and considering the fact that Gamepass probably works in CoD’s favor not the opposite way around (Because tons of people with Gamepass will give CoD a shot, whereas before it was paid only to my knowledge) I think Halo is going to struggle long term.
None of this means that they can’t end up creating a great game for a core demographic consistenting of Halo fans, just that I seriously question if it’ll rebound or if the bleeding will continue til there is nothing left besides diehard fans.
Just my opinion, but Infinite is what brought me back to Halo. After I played the multiplayer when it came out, I went back and played all of the campaigns in the MCC and Halo 5 before playing Infinite’s campaign just so I knew what was going on. Like I said, that was just my experience, but it was also new at the time and OW is starving for any type of content.
Outside of the US you can not not play either halo 5 or mcc because the population is so low that you can only get games on the west US servers.
If that’s the direction that halo infinite is going then expect to have the worst experience of any free to play game currently available because the US halo player base alone is not enough to fund the type of content and support that every other game is getting.
If 343 don’t change their attitude fast and be more transparent with what they are doing or what is on their roadmap then we will be once again thanking 343i for doing nothing more than killing off halo one game at a time.
All of these things were there on day 1 of Halo 5. Sure it released without forge and btb but forge came in December. Not like what we have now with the 9 month wait for infinite. The moment forge came out there was no content argument unless you count the unreleased dev maps.
And btb is bad in halo infinite so it’s not like we actually got a real btb this time around.
However, to play Devils Advocate, Halo 5 was a lot more stable at launch. I don’t remember Warzone breaking for a few months and the first update did follow on quite quick; don’t think it was half a year. It does not fill people with confidence and you’re not going to be eagerly awaiting new content if the game breaks each update. I think with Battlefield V there was a succession of bad updates after the US expansion which effectively led EA to stop updating it with new content. IMO I never noticed and we’re not talking Breakthrough going down for a few month either. 343 could be in the same situation due to whatever is up with the games engine.
People have however said they like the gameplay and art style unlike 5. So, hopefully people will drift back with new content. I mean I will be bullying my friends into doing co op legendary.
It doesn’t matter what the state of your game is after 7 years. Yes, I’m still playing MCC, from time to time I’m still forging in H5, but I’m also a hardcore fan. I highly doubt that anyone else outside our bubble goes back and recognizes the amount of work.
First impressions always matter. Your playerbase is almost always at peak on launch. Of course it will drop, but you have to make sure that number slows down, you have to to avoid unnecessary mistakes.
I’m not going to point out every missing feature, it already has been mentioned like 1000 times.
But things like a broken, clunky U.I., killing off every single social feature - how can stuff like this get approved? F2P Games with less than 25 employees do a better job in this regard.
And the worst thing of all is that 343 tends to go even backwards sometimes.
I’m talking about the matchmaking: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
The Match Composer is literally perfect in MCC, why would you not just implement a similiar system into Infinite?
The really said (after adding slayer) that adding 1 gamemode is not easy and the UI wasn’t designed for it.
Um yeah, but why? Why would you design your UI around 3 gamemodes? Who did expect that this would go well?
This has nothing to do with “hating” on 343, but at the end of the day, excuses don’t matter. When customers are not pleased, they’ll look for alternatives.
It’s almost as if some of us said “give them a minute to come off of holiday and they’ll get to work”.
I’ll be the first to say we’ve been duped multiple times and it doesn’t make sense to trust someone that had betrayed your trust more than once, but we had to give them that chance after seeing the direction they were taking Halo in when they first showed us Infinite.
They haven’t just been idly sitting. They’ve been reading about our issues, taking what we’ve said into consideration and are now working on things to make the experience better. This stuff won’t be fixed in a short amount of time, but it’s coming.
Actual nonsense. They’ve taken blowback every time new information about $hitfinite came out, and they still went ahead with a worse system than anyone predicted. They didn’t listen at all, or if they did, they didn’t act on any of it until they saw the game start to struggle.
Oh, and it’s broken too. Bad game by a bad studio.
