How are they putting competitive first? If anything they are killing competitive by not adjusting it. The whole tight sbmm came from their research that players (like you and me) stay with a game longer when matches are more competitive and not blow out city, aka social back in the day, though their system still sucks lol.
Halo was meant to be a social game with some competitive elements. What 343 is doing now is flipping that around.
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We live in a time where we need “everything” to be new or the game is dead…
Halo 2 - Never had forge, Never had a custom game bowser, Never had customization, Never had a live service but the game lasted until that servers were shut down… Never had a progression system…The game was fun, the community, the social playlist and ranked made the game run to life. The maps were amazing…
If Halo Infinite had better original type style maps, no network issues and has what it has today this game is just as good as Halo 2. Damn you guys need new armor daily. new maps every week, new everything just PLAY THE GAME WITH YOUR FRIENDS. HAVE FUN. CONTENT CREATORS ARE KILLING THIS GAME…
Forge it’s cool but majority of the player base doesn’t make maps
Online Co-op is cool but majority of the player base doesn’t play it…
You guys are demanding 343 to release stuff just to release it then get bored within hours and complain… Yes this game has problems but those problems aren’t killing the game… again we live in the content era everyone wants something new. I get it’s a live service game but when have you ever seen a game that was for 20 years never a live service and try something new and be success from the start… they are learning…
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This is probably true as well. Anyone who lived during Arena Shooter era during the 90’s probably knows about this. How people wanted true arena shooters back, which generally meant making the same old game over and over, but they ended up being just a very loud minority because when they were made, they tended to not sell well. Most new players unfortantly moved on, and those who wanted the “good ol’ days” unfortunately were slowly leaving the scene, so it became a somewhat dying market.
I’m curious just how well the MCC is actually making in a sense. If it’s not making the money Microsoft expects of them, it’s possible that’s could be a reason why they wanted to try and re-invent it to not attract new audiences. To try and bring new life so it could actually keep going.
Think you’re on the wrong post. This post is purely about how 343 has abandoned Halo’s core identity in the pursuit of hyper focusing on being competitive.
343 like many other developers have fallen into the hole of chasing trends instead of staying true to what made the franchise great in the first place.
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Actually Halo 2 Vista (2007, PC) had better then Forge, it had the HEK (Halo Editing Kit), it also had a custom game browser and dedicated servers, not to mention community dedicated servers. Oh wait, so did Halo CE PC (2003) and Custom Edition (2004). Plus all the custom maps and mods … which is why it was a lot more fun to play Halo on the PC. Heck even via Xbox Connect and X-Link Kai we had our own dedicated servers and custom maps for the original Xbox Halos (predating Xbox Live). BTW, Halo 2 did have customization, you could choose your colors, your logo, and your species (biped).
I think the issue started from back in 2012: at the time we were all complaining about Bungie had taken the 1-50 ranking system out of Halo with Reach.
So 343 took the reigns and doubled down on making Halo competitive again to satisfy the fans that were missing the H2&3 glory pro team days.
Setting up the HCS scene and pushing for competitive Halo. Unfortunately it seems who ever took control especially in Infinite wasn’t so keen on us making friends. They prefer us to be enemies!
We need to use non violent silent protest and strangle them at the source. Like Sketch said back last November. This is the way until it becomes non profitable.
I’ll play the game as I want there to be another game. But I’ll never touch the shop and not pay for another battle pass.
I am wondering where ranked FFA is though as my friends don’t play any more.
But no.
Competitive halo is a biproduct of being a fun game.
Harve openly stated many times it was a party game design goal.
Max has stated he never intended to design a Competitive game
Fun was the goal and max took that and tried to remove frustration to Competitive grew naturaly from a fun social and accesible game later becoming more modular allowed for growth in social and competitive equally.
The fact is 343i took community aspects in house and lost a large part of the base in doing so by catering poorly to a small part of the base and not focusing on the general player of halo.
Smash, quake, halo all proofs of this being the case.
Focus on fun and the community will make a pro community and rule set organically without wasting dev time.
Its a fumdimental misstep by 343i.
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I mean yeah there is a competitive side to Halo but it has always been dwarfed by the social side, most of my times spend on Halo games has been customer games or if I am playing MM then it would be BTB, Fiesta or Swat,
So trying to focus the game on a competitive standpoint is a little bit silly when this isa tiny fraction of players
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a part
It was not what sold Halo CE.
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That’s Nice 
It’s still a big part of Halo CE, although a bit more community driven till Halo 2. But that still doesn’t change that Halo had a competitive side.
Edit: I didn’t miss the point, the point just wasn’t relevant.
There are a few major components to this that makes this extra painful.
- They Lied to us (This one’s kind of obvious. They said split screen would be in Halo Infinite, that was a lie because now it won’t. They didn’t just say that they would TRY to make it work, they said it WOULD work.)
- They tried to keep this lie under the radar for as long as they could. The fact that they refused to tell us up front at the BEGINNING whether they were sure they could put in split screen or not was evidence of a refusal to communicate.
- The fact that they did not work in split screen means that they were just too incompetent to put in this kind of feature.
Even in the most charitable perspective you would have to blame almost half of Halo Infinite’s limitations on the need to accommodate the old Xbox One hardware. But having to accommodate Xbox One’s old hardware was still an active choice that 343 made, which was yet another indicator of poor decision making. They should have released this game as an Xbox Series/PC exclusive, the improved hardware would have allowed them to do at least more stuff.
This is why every time I put in feedback for 343 on Halo Waypoint, I try to make my feedback as explicit, as simplistic, and as comprehensive as possible. Because 343 is incapable of complex thought beyond what they think could bring them as much money as possible.
The fact that they think that Halo is at its core a “Competitive” game means they don’t know what IP they’re working with. Bungie knew it. Bungie designed Halo to be a social game, a party game. Competitive modes were a side feature right up to Halo Reach where it reached the mainstream video game market.
At this point, I’m just rambling. I still play MCC to keep up with the amount of “spartan” points to deal with the BS that is the exchange, but man. I can only pray to God that Halo is handed over to a studio with similar thought processes of 2000s-era Bungie. Maybe that just doesn’t exist, who knows.
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Okay, I understood what @Danlight6999 said.
343 is trying to focus more on the comp aspect of Halo rather than it’s roots. Just look at how much attention HCS got over the actually game. I think they were using this event as a fallback in order to keep this game somewhat alive after launch.
And for the record, I feel like I should apologize to you @Danlight6999 for the other day. I was out of line and was pretty rude to you over nothing. I’m sorry.
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https://twitter.com/ChiefCanuck/status/834842559935451137?t=cyd0WeTSpFeaD-Bm0qhnTA&s=19
Whelp, this didn’t age well. I just pray to God and just about every deity in the multiverse that people will be able to spread this around and hold 343’s feet to the fire.
They’re the ones that decided to make Halo Infinite Xbox One compatible with splitscreen co-op, it’s their responsibility to figure it out.
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Halo’s strength came from being competitive despite not being really designed for it. It was competitive for a couch multiplier experience, it was competitive for a party game, sure. Halo was at its best when it was most at home socially, this makes the competitive scene that much stronger, that much more interesting. Halo as a competitive shooter right out of the gate is as weak as the formula can be.
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Well said! I’ve been calling HINfintie the Smash Ultimate of the Halo series. After all, the joke of Master Chief getting in, while silly sounding, would’ve made sense for that game if this iteration of Halo’s gear/sandbox was a “known” thing at the time.
People keep saying Persona 5’s joker was an odd addition but change some animations,character models and you got a smash character with bouncy jumps, grapple hook recovery, A GUN and instead of a persona demon charging up you charge and pop an Overshield to denote the power buff.
Also i know some devs have been pretty vocal about some early development goals & internal mission statements claiming that they wanted to make a shooter that nintendo would be happy with, or rather “proud of”, being another phrase i saw thrown around.
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I agree.
Halos strength came from being a rock solid party game hiding as an fps and refined to lower annoyance in 2 and 3 creating more modularity and varience in the sanbox with the competitive aspects being built by the community and devs focused purely on is it fun reach onward balance and competitiveness be that players wanting to win or comps being designed for kn house rather than built by us out of the fun that was there. Its a diametric shift to think about halo as a conpetive dna shooter instead of the grand social experiment that it was prior.
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If it wasn’t competitive I wouldn’t be playing. I have been playing since Halo 2 with my cousins and we were always competitive. That’s what keeps us coming back and to have fun. We can do the dumbest or craziest stuff just to win.
because they probably make a metric boatload of money off of the tournaments and sponsorships from twitch. gotta love the power of greed.
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Its always been both, but its clear 343 care for the comp seen far more.