During the holiday “community stream”, lead designer Jerry Hook apologized for what he claimed was a mistake with marketing, He said items advertised in a free event should all be earnable by playing, and not in the store. He claimed this was something they would fix.
Well the new Tenrai event came out. There are a few new things in the free event pass. But once again, the marketing (for the last iteration of Tenrai and this one) shows a TON of stuff that is not earnable by playing- much of which is in the store. There’s at least one video breaking this down- I saw a couple people post it on r/Halo in the last couple of days, but the mods there removed them.
Regardless of your thoughts on MTX, the store, customization etc, this presents a lack of follow-through and contradiction coming from within 343/Xbox/Microsoft which I really hope will get cleared up soon with some much needed clear and direct communication. But also, I think a lot of folks didn’t even notice. Did you?
I’ll share a link to that video in here if I can find it again.
On 343’s YouTube page if you watch the holiday 2021 community stream, skip to the 26 minute mark, that’s when they talk about events. They did improve the event battle pass and playing through it with the improvements to the challenge system was not bad, but they absolutely did not follow through with the ‘if its in the marketing, it will be earnable’ statement…
Yeah I just saw @Aristocus brought this up in another thread. Here is the breakdown video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUmobHttppI
It’s bizarre to me that there’s actually a lot of people going “so what if they lied, it’s free/don’t buy it/etc”
Maybe they don’t remember how Halo used to have a strong community which affected the game design and visa-versa, making the franchise as strong as it has been for 20 years. It’s a loss for all of us if being alienated from the Halo Devs as the Halo Community becomes so normalized that people get made fun/talked down to/etc of it they bring up legitimate criticisms.
Hot take title. They did in fact make improvements to the Tenrai event, but it needs to be stressed that when they talked about putting store items in the pass, they were specifically referring to items used in advertising cycles, not every single piece of store content.
Therefore, the premise of your argument is factually incorrect. They followed their promise exactly and no further, which was a little disappointing but ultimately an objective improvement over the previous content model.
If you watch the video linked a couple comments up, this is actually about items used in advertising cycles, not every piece of store content. You didn’t have to assume I didn’t know what I was talking about just 'cause you didn’t know what I was talking about.
Here’s the thing, in all honesty the ad only showed off like 7 levels of earnable gear, the ad also claims that there is premium gear as well. Showing off a combination of both seems acceptable if you ask me.
It would be one thing to show off all 30 tiers in the trailer and have them be completely unrepresentative of the final product, or show off premium gear without the notion there would be premium gear. But neither of these aspects materialized into what we were shown or given.
To my knowledge there is premium gear now earnable in event itself and the original ad is really a moot point unless someone files some sort of legal case with it or brings it up as a historical/chronological example with context.
This isn’t about a legal thing or my opinions of the store. Yes he said it was an error with marketing, but that wasn’t all he said.
What I’m saying is that the end result is not consistent with what he said. Trying to further deflect from this true fact by saying “oh well the marketing is different now” just plain ignores the contradiction and lack of follow through this post is about.
If you say “we want the event to be free, and for all the stuff we show off for the free event to be earnable” (Jerry Hook explicitly said this, though I am paraphrasing. It’s half an hour into the community stream, and at the beginning of the video I linked above) but then you don’t make everything shown from marketing earnable: that’s still a lack of follow-through- even if you change the wording on your marketing in the process.
Tenrai will appear a total of six times. I don’t know why they only show three dates in the game. Maybe they haven’t pinned down the exact dates of future appearances yet.
Either way, you’ll definitely be able to complete it. It’s one tier per specially marked weekly challenge.
1st appearance had 7 of these challenges. This week there were 10. So some people are at stage 17 of 30.
With 4 more appearances to come you should be fine.
I haven’t seen a video breakdown, but from the stream I was assuming the shop items they’d mistakenly used in the promotional images (which implied they would be free) would now be included in the modified event pass
They replaced consumables after tier 10 with cosmetics, including a new helmet I think.
Are you saying they didn’t include everything from the original promotional material? That’s a shame as I thought they would.
It doesn’t mean they couldn’t put new unseen stuff in the shop though.
I haven’t read everything, sorry if I’ve misunderstood.