I hope you all will take the time to sit through the convoluted analogy I am about to make. I do home repair for a nonprofit. I often work on houses that are either old, or they simply weren’t built right when they were constructed, which caused huge structural problems down the line. The houses were thrown together without much of a plan or know-how and the repairs the homeowners made over the years were either inadequate, or they simply failed to address the source of the issue.
Occasionally, I enter a house that’s so bad, floors and walls so rotted, that every step feels precarious. I start thinking “Is it going to be worth putting new vinyl on this rotted out subflooring?” “Is it going to be worth replacing this sheetrock when the entire wall wobbles?” “Is it worth doing anything that doesn’t involve gutting and rebuilding this entire part of the house the way it’s supposed to be built?” “Is it worth doing anything when I know the homeowners will not take care of it?”
What does this have to do with Halo Infinite? Well, I get a similar feeling when playing it. I don’t trust that anything I do, whether it’s custom games, forge, or whatever, is going to last. Every time I load the game, I always feel like I’m seconds away from crashing. (I have an awesome PC, so it’s not my hardware.) I don’t trust that if I spend hours building a map, that some update isn’t going to break it down the line. I don’t trust that the foundations that Halo Infinite was built on, are at all stable. I don’t trust that anything meaningful will be fixed in a timely manner, if ever. There’s so much potential here…and the devs are clearly very talented people. But whoever’s in charge, they don’t know what to do and it shows. So why should I play? Why should I trust 343 when they say “we’re working on it.” or “we hear your concerns and we’re listening.”? History does not demonstrate this to be true.
I hope I am eventually proven wrong about the following statement, but I don’t see how Halo can make a meaningful comeback after this. Forge, like a lot of the Infinite releases, should have never been released in a “beta” form. You want to make memories, to make an impression on people? You should have released the full, functioning package at the same time, no crashes, no desync, a fully operational custom game/forge combo. That’s how you make an impression. Doing it piecemeal like this…well, you wear people out. This “release it now, we’ll fix it later” mentality is a detriment to the player experience. Instead of being fun, the attempt to enjoy a game with friends ends up being an exercise in frustration.