343i Has Shown Their True Colors

Games Halo 5: Guardians
1

343i aren’t a company full of people who love Halo and want to see it go on.

When you need to apologize for the first two games you make, and then your third game has all the issues stated below and think it’s fine, you’ve shown how much you “love” what you make.

  • False advertisement of the story.
  • The story that completely invalidates Halo 4 (Halsey’s revenge, Cortana’s death, Chief’s mental state).
  • Lack of the Master Chief who this new trilogy was meant to focus on him becoming a more human character.
  • The ridiculous handling of fan reaction to Cortana being the villian using Obi-Wan Kenobi’s “From a certain point of view” fallacy.
  • The completely unexplained replacement of Mike Colters voice acting after having so much hype built up around having HIM in a Halo game.
  • Lack of option to turn off Fireteam reviving.
  • Trying to replace Big Team Battle with Warzone, then making basic maps in a less than a month in Forge when the fan outcry was at it’s loudest.
  • The matchmaking having nothing but Ranked.
  • A broken ranking system.
  • Social playlists being proven to just be Ranked Playlists with the icons turned off.
  • Complete imbalance of traditional Halo weaponry thanks to ADS (No matter how hard you shout “SMART-LINK!” it serves the same purpose; increased accuracy)
  • An increased focus on trying to make Halo multiplayer less Halo and some hybrid of every other shooter in the market, even moreso than Halo 4 tried to cater to CoD fans.
  • A watered down customization selection with only 3 options making it the fewest amount of options when compared to every game prior which ranged from 4-10 customization options.
  • Every single customization item hidden behind a RNG that thanks to the disgraceful amount of armour “variations” and weapon skins, teases you into paying microtransactions to get the armour you want.
  • The current marketing of Mythic REQ packs to try and maximize microtransaction profits.
  • Forced updates that brick an Xbox One’s hard drive.
  • Big Team Battle treated as DLC when there’s no excuse it couldn’t be in the game at launch.
  • Grifball treated as DLC when there’s no excuse it couldn’t be in the game at launch.
  • Infection treated as DLC when there’s no excuse it couldn’t be in the game at launch.
  • Oddball treated as DLC when there’s no excuse it couldn’t be in the game at launch.
  • Firefight being implemented under the Warzone branding and no custom game endurance variation.
  • Lack of Elites in multiplayer, despite how long the fanbase has been screaming for them.
  • An Xbox Live account embarrasingly constantly being online so that people can have even the slightest form of a top ranked file browser for 9 months.
  • Multiplayer being online only.
  • Theater mode having lag.
  • Forge not being ready for the one year early launch date so it get’s treated as DLC.
  • The fans who say you’re a toxic hater for having these issues.

And the strange part? Forge is at a level I could never have imagined 9 years ago, and 343 don’t put any focus on what the community does with it.
All I have left to do in Halo 5 is get all the Intel files, beat the campaign on Mythic since Legendary is a wak in the park and an insult to those who want a challenge, then it’s getting uninstalled.

When Halo Wars 2 launches, I’ll wait until the price drops severly before getting it, if not I’l just watch the story on YouTube.
Halo 6? Just release the game and put this story and franchise out of it’s misery.

2

Even with all that it still has, by far, the best MP in the series in my opinion.

3

I think 343i have made substantial improvements to Halo 5 since launch and it’s a very good game right now.

I don’t know what you mean with ‘showing their true colours’. Are you trying to say they’re not trying to make Halo the best it can be? If so, I disagree 100%.

4

Pretty much all your points are completely valid, however I think a great deal of them are a result of Microsoft directly intervening in the development process and forcing 343’s hand to make profits, as is typical of them.

5

> 2533274818733838;1:
> - Oddball treated as DLC when there’s no excuse it couldn’t be in the game at launch.

It is Assault not Oddball, even though it can easily be added as well.

6

> 2533274806711091;3:
> I think 343i have made substantial improvements to Halo 5 since launch and it’s a very good game right now.
>
> I don’t know what you mean with ‘showing their true colours’. Are you trying to say they’re not trying to make Halo the best it can be? If so, I disagree 100%.

Vast improvements? Sure, if you can consider putting in basic content that’s expected of a Halo game at launch… I’m very happy that 343i is giving us post-launch content for free, and while some of it has been good or even great, I’m not going to pretend that a lot of it is just stuff that we needed 10 months ago.

And sure, 343i are trying to make Halo the best that it can be (except for the story, which was absolutely horrible), but the main issue is that they have shown over and over again that they don’t understand what makes Halo so unique and special. In fact, many of the changes they’ve made ruin the Halo feeling :

  • Lack of armour customization
  • Pizza AR skin
  • Armour like Seeker and Jumpmaster that make you go “wtf” when you see it
  • Armour being covered in white/coloured paint that you can’t change/coloured undersuits
  • Replacing every single varied and interesting human type or architecture with bland white prefab buildings
  • No playable Elites
  • “Blue team don’t have strong personalities”
  • Removing most of the social aspects of the game
  • Requiring online play for everything
  • The whole darn campaign
  • Locking everything, including emblems, behind a frustrating RNG system
  • Quickly creating Warzone Firefight instead of classic Firefight while taking out all of the custom game abilities we had in Reach
  • Bringing in BTB maps two months into the game, with only Forge maps, and then acting like they’ve done something amazing for the community
  • Replacing Jeff Steitzer as the announcer
  • Releasing a game with 5 whole game modes, rather than the couple dozen expected from a Halo gameI could go on, but a lot of these changes really make me scratch my head, wondering what on Earth 343i was thinking… If their idea of “the best Halo” leads to stuff like Halo 4 and Halo 5, then I think they need to re-evaluate their idea of Halo. I don’t know what they thought would happen after Halo 5 was released, but a huge success is not what happened.

That being said, I do understand that 343i is making a huge effort to listen to us and our feedback, and I appreciate those efforts. The Community Feedback Program is fantastic idea, but now they need to actually implement that feedback.