Hey everybody, most of us here are up pretty late, eh? 4:18 AM at the moment of me typing this right now. Anyways, I woke up about an hour ago and am pretty bored. Why not make another thread for people to read? Well let’s get to it I’m just going to sort of wing it on this one, no hours of planning this time.
I think that 343 really does care about us and about Halo. It can be hard to see that sometimes, especially when your favorite character doesn’t make it into the game or there’s additions you don’t like, whatever your reason may be. Being a Triple-A studio can be a pretty cold practice because there’s a lot of pressure to not only succeed but make a game that’s going to sell millions of copies. Halo is pretty much expected to sell Xboxes. In the midst of all this chaos with video games in the recent years, we’ve seen many companies throw out little dog treats to us. Like look at Bungie with Destiny. They apologized to their fans by giving them the option to buy $20 DLC and then you’ve got little things that every company does or says like: “We are so grateful for your support. Here’s a free weapon skin!”
Now these little “dog treats” that game developers keep throwing us aren’t really bad things. I mean, sure, I’ll take a free Dog Tag in Battlefield 4. It’s better than nothing I guess but all it feels like is a special pat on the back and a “Good boy!”. Should game developers have to completely bend over to what their fans/consumers want? No, it’s not right for gamers to make huge demands for no reason other than “I bought your game and loved it, now you owe me”. But when I see game companies like Activision saying how much they care about making the best quality game for the fans, I can’t help but feel like I’m being lied to. I’m not saying that the game is going to be really bad but it’s clear to me that they’re not giving it their all, at least not in our best interests.
Let me dive into that some more to make it really clear. CoD comes out yearly so it feels like the project is never massive and ambitious from the beginning. It also comes out on next gen and last gen consoles. What this tells me is that they could have made a superior game but they’d rather keep it dumbed down to increase sales. They also never have a proper beta, which is nitpicky to some but I feel it’s very important in this day and age. Any beta released by CoD and even Destiny has been nothing more than a glorified demo, in my opinion. No dedicated servers either and you know that they have the money to do it, they just don’t want to spend any extra cash on making the player’s experience with the game more enjoyable. Think about that, they won’t spend the money to reduce lag in their game that is mostly played online by millions of people. To top it all off, they throw out a season pass that costs like $50, almost as much as the game itself. Their goal is to make money, like any company, but it’s hurting the gamers more than they’d like to admit. I can never take games like CoD as if it were made entirely for me, as a gamer, because of the reasons above. Arkham Knight came with like 6 different DLCs on launch day and one is even exclusive to the PS4. Why should I buy it on day one? I’m better off waiting for the whole package to get bundled up and put on sale for a week so I can save myself a lot of money.
Let’s take a look at 2 other game companies that, in my opinion, practice their craft much better. The Coalition (Gears of War 4) has come out and said that they are entirely focused on making Gears 4 a true Gears game. They accept that their sales won’t be as good but they feel the trade off is worth it. Gears will never reach CoD numbers and that’s perfectly fine because its the underdog. Gears 4 releases Holiday 2016 and they are going to have a beta in spring earlier that year. It’s clear that they care about making the best possible game that people can play for years, not just for a single year until the next installment comes out. The game is being built to stand the test of time. CoD is designed to keep your attention with dog treats and DLC juuust long enough for the next game to come out.
Then we have 343 and Halo 5. They have taken our feedback from Halo 4 and it’s clear that they are on the right track. Halo 5’s multiplayer is completely reworked with the fans in mind. A giant campaign that’s non-linear shows that they care about the campaign experience. The game had a properly timed beta which shows that they care about the quality of the game. All DLC is completely free. If you buy the base game, you get everything that’s usable in the game. People that aren’t even diehard Halo fans will be excited to boot up the game 6 months after it comes out because they can check out the new free stuff. The community is no longer split apart by map packs and the game has been completely designed around its new features. This shows that 343 cares about making things work. Shoehorning an Exo suit into your game is a gimmick. What 343 has done is art and careful design. Bringing Blue Team into the game, Warzone, Arena, these few examples, among many, prove that 343 cares about making Halo 5 the best that it can be for years to come.
It proves that they care about the player’s experience with the game. Who wants to pay for map packs just so they can play with their friends? Who wants to play a game that hasn’t even been properly tested? What you do want is to have fun with your friends, drive a cool Mech around and blow -Yoink- up while not being bombarded with microtransactions and DLC every time you start up the game. You want to play a story that is engaging and easy to play with friends. Wanna play as that character? Go for it, pick him. No hoops to jump through, no having to be the third person to join to play as your favorite character. You want to play a balanced game that harkens back to the old days of traditional Arena combat without having someone call in a Chopper Gunner after he camped in a patch of grass for the whole game.
