343i is Halo's studio - it won't change and here's why

Games Halo Infinite
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I get it. We’re all ticked off. Even me.

But let’s be real. Remember when Jason Schrier cracked the lid on everything going on at MS and 343i? About the contractors and such? Remember how they hired in some Bungie alumni to figure out the engine that they still struggled with? Remember how the game’s course changed with Joseph Staten as a lead of sorts?

Yeah so that would just happen again.

Folks the issue isn’t 343i, even though 343i is plagued with issues - it’s also upper management. But there is yet more.

They’d have to teach an entire new studio, AN ENTIRE NEW STUDIO, about how Halo’s busted engine works - and if you think they can just… swap engines? They can’t. They literally, cannot. There’s so much that can’t carry over - code doesn’t plug and play into other engines. It just does not work like that.

And like. 343i was made, literally, for making Halo products. BY. Microsoft. Do y’all think they just waddled up and asked if they could develop Halo?

No! No, they didn’t. How many people working at 343i have actually been there from the start that aren’t upper management? Less than 10%, I can guarantee y’all that. Most people don’t work at one studio for ten plus years. It just… doesn’t happen.

I get it. You’re mad at 343i (when really you should be tiffed at Microsoft) - and I GET it. But what some of y’all are asking for doesn’t make a lick of sense. if not 343i, then who?

Bungie? Sony literally owns them now.

Saber Interactive? They’re busy doing what they always do - polishing other studios’ products for release.

There aren’t any other options. Other studios are too busy to be tied up in Halo’s multimedia mess - you do need to remember, 343i is larger than a game studio and handles a lot with various different divisions. Their name is on basically every Halo product. There’s a reason for that.

Y’all don’t know what exactly you’re asking for. As grim as it is, 343i is at this moment our best bet. I don’t like that any more than you do.

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I do think you could effectively get a new studio by ending the constant contractor turnover and cutting out chunks of problematic management, but if the powers that be actually cared to do that they would have done it already.

As far as switching devs and engines is concerned is still an option I’d prefer despite the obvious pitfalls of effectively starting from scratch on a better optimized existing engine. Because honestly for my part there is nothing to lose.

The franchise is effectively dead to me outside of MCC and MCC mod support so at this point I’m open to just about anything to shake up the status quo. Could some other hypothetical Halo game with a new engine and dev be an even bigger disaster than it is right now? Sure, it could be, but then my only response is so what? Going from a game I have no interest in playing to another game I have no interest in playing makes no difference. Something meaningful has to change one way or another.

Now do I expect anything meaningful to change one way or another? No, I honestly don’t, as long as there are whales to farm, I expect Halo to continue to limp along as it has during basically the majority of 343’s tenure.

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I made a similar topic on this awhile ago, before things got stupid. https://forums.halowaypoint.com/t/why-343i-cant-be-removed-from-halo/516954/44

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Infinity ward could knock out a new halo in one year and still be better than infinite.

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Problem is, Infinity ward has their own games to make.

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They’re literally busy making CoD and also no, they can’t. They do not understand Halo or what constitutes it.

Aside from gambling on a new studio, engine, developers, management handling new heads, marketing, and the fallout from, “We destroyed the last studio that failed, you’re next if you fail” - yeah no that’s not feasible and you know it.

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I don’t know…money talks. If higher ups think they can make more money, anything is possible I think.

I’m not saying something is going to happen anytime soon, it definitely won’t! but would it shock me to hear that the next Halo game will be made by x developer by Microsoft? No, it wouldn’t.

Never is a long time people.

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Change needs to happen. Going “its too complicated/hard to change” is effectively saying halo is dead.

343 has botched halo for over a decade. They aren’t going to get better. They’ve proven as such.

343 has a job to make halo products, and its failed at this job. I’m pretty sure any studio would absolutely love to take the reins of one of gaming’s most cherished franchises with some investment from microsoft.

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It’s been dead ever since Halo 2 came out.

Never mind Infinite’s incredible sales lol. 81mil copies.

They literally have gotten better, or, did you not play 4 and 5?

You’re serious? Have you seen, outside looking in, what working on Halo looks like? The only news Halo ever gets these days is…

1: Hype for a release.
2: Fans literally sending death threats they’re so mad.

I wouldn’t want to work on Halo. In an age of doxxing, I would NOT want to work on Halo.

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We all know you hate @KCD0DGER, but she has a point to some degree.

Halo is in a bad state right now, but I hardly believe firing 343 is the answer. This #Fire343 trend feels like a knee-jerk reaction to the constant fumbles over the years and not a helpful solution to our problems.

Will there need to be a shake-up at the management? Absolutely, but firing them isn’t going to get us the Halo game we want any faster and we as a community need to stop pretending it will.

All of our problems could be solved if 343 simply talked more and stopped leaving us in the dark on development.

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“We destroyed the last studio that failed” That’s a really dramatic way to phrase “A studio was shut down after a decade if middling at best performance and mismanagement.” A studio shutting down is hardly unprecedented in the industry, if anything it happens too often to studios that didn’t deserve it.

Again, what is the worst outcome supposed to be for the actual playerbase? Wow, we went from one sub par barren title to another?

As I noted, I don’t have any actual expectations of change on that level and that is the problem. Some serious changes are needed one way or another. You are not giving anyone options outside of swallow garbage or quit entirely.

Its one thing to say “I don’t think X change is likely to happen” and “things are not going to change”

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Trust me, I know.

If I recall correctly, MCC was released on PC in 2019. Unless, we’re rewriting history.

No argument here - and they wanted to launch it in 2020. Wild, right? But what studio would reasonably want this? I don’t think this is on purpose anymore.

That’s just it. I’m genuinely not sure this is 343i’s fault anymore. I don’t think any studio can operate with MS as a boss when it comes to Halo.

And… They do flow, constantly. No matter what fans complain about. Every single time.

Okay, what’s the engine? I need a title of a game here. Because as far as I can see, Payday runs on UE4 and I’m not familiar with Overkill’s work.

I am going to let you know now, that the remake of Demon’s Souls was very polarizing for its fans.

With all due respect that’s pretty funny. Infinite is at zero risk of getting Anthem’d.

1: It is not a new IP.
2: It is not THAT broken.
3: it is not THAT barren.
4: It is not THAT clunky.
5: It is not blatantly ripping off Destiny so hard that if you change words, it’s Destiny.

It’s not in that kind of danger in the slightest.

Bingo - and if anything it’s the chairs above 343i that need re-assessing more than anything else. Not that 343i’s upper management doesn’t need to be cleaned out a bit - because I don’t think Kiki Wolfkill has ever once understood what Halo is about. Yet, there she is.

I feel like we’d be right here again so why advocate for actually zero change at further expense? Tell me you realize how silly that is…?

I’m just some chick at a keyboard. I’m not being paid to give anyone any ideas and I don’t have any, anyway. If you want my honest idea? “Get a life and do something else” is all I can say.

Well yeah.

It’s not gonna’ change.

If it was, it would’ve by now. It’s been ten years. You either stick around or start packing tbh.

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Neither does 343, I think that’s been made abundantly clear with the release of infinite. The franchise needs a consistent dev team that actually understands what made the previous games good. They’ve shown time and time again that they have a massive disconnect between what a vast majority of the community wants and what their management and competitive balancing teams want.

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I’m getting accused of providing no ideas here, but I’m not seeing any viable ones from others. Why don’t you start us off then?

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Long ago 343i should have moved away from being the main developer of the HALO games, to becoming the management center for the IP and its franchise.

Halo is too big an IP for any one company to carry or exploit, it’s the Star Wars of Xbox (or could have been if it weren’t for the last 10 years.) Instead we have the almost dead franchise .

The really ideal thing is that Microsoft allowed the rest of its developers to take the Halo universe and exploit it in their own way, an Obsidian RPG, an ODST CoD, a damn Halo Wars 3 or Halo Tactics, a Halo Destiny, etc… WHATEVER.

In this way, 343i would only be left with the main administrator to control aspects of the project such as narrative coherence, respect for the canon, and other things.

I only care about Halo because of its campaign and its universe, I’m here for the story, multiplayer PVP for me could disappear in favor of other types of games like Halo Destiny or a good RPG. But this is my opinion.

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“We went from one sub par barren title to another” is just the worst outcome, not the only possible outcome. Given that there has been no substantial change on 343’s end and in many regards things have actually gotten worse in the decade they’ve had at the helm, I’d rather take my chances with the unknown rather than the consistently sub par.

If you don’t want to work towards or suggest solutions that’s fine, I just don’t know what you expected to accomplish with this thread beyond stating “Better things aren’t possible”

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LOL

That is all.

I guess reread the OP.

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The sad truth is that its probably easier to create a new Halo game with Unreal Engine 5 than fixing the pieces of Halo Infinite.

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I do believe the situation can improve. Certain Affinity are speculated to be working on a BR mode (called Tatanka), if that comes out, and it is far more popular/beloved by the community then the regular offering, I could see a scenario where Certain Affinity become the main sustain team going forward. I highly highly doubt MS would just go and fire the hundreds of 343i employees currently on payroll, but I could see many of the current devs being relegated to Single-Player or what you, and MS ultimately downsizing 343i studios in favor of CA.

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Did the first time, read it again just for good measure, still steadfastly refused to entertain the notions that things can change or that another dev could have done better under the same circumstances.

Much of what you say could very well be true. It could be impossible to replicate the Halo experience to a satisfactory degree on a different engine, it could be that any dev team would have had the same engine struggles or frustrations with MS as a parent company, but we can never actually know until we actually see someone given the same opportunities.

At this point I don’t even care if 343 continues to limp along in its current state so long as someone else can take a crack at the franchise even as a spin off.