A Logical And Peaceful Critique of 343
I wish to start off this post by saying that I love halo, and not a single part of me wants it to die.
Please Read the Entire Post with An Open Mind Prior to Commenting
Feel Free to Have your Own Opinion
Halo is dead; it is dying, very slowly, however. Halo has been dying since the release of Halo 4. I am not here to hate, or bash on 343 except where some simple criticism is founded. There will be no foul language in this post, no need to put a silly yoink here, even though this is the forum for a mature rated game… But I digress…
My love for Halo started with 3; it is, to this very day, my favorite halo game, and one of my favorite games of all time. I started out a casual player who liked customs. I really enjoyed reach, it still felt very halo to me. I started to get “competitive” in 4, but quickly realized that the game was lackluster, and not competitive at all. I became enveloped in the competitive community (from here on out referred to simply and only as the “Halo community”) and returned to play halo 3 competitively, which was difficult as at that time it was dying itself, though it still felt more alive than halo 4.
Now on to my main points. I wish only to say that 343 Industries has made some very serious missteps that need to be addressed here and now. They have split this community, degraded the quality of this franchise, and hurt a huge number of fans, myself included.
343’s first job were to handle Reach post Bungie (for the record, I am nowhere near a Bungie “fanboy”). Although Reach did begin a schism in the Halo community, it was not the true split. It may appear understandable that 343 would try to make the game appeal more to original Halo members, but with the Title Update they actually hurt Reach. They made people upset—people who were playing Reach ACTUALLY LIKED IT. Yes, many hardcore halo players from 2 and 3 didn’t like it as much, but the halo community as a whole did. The TU was the first misstep they took.
The second job was Halo CE: Anniversary. 343 Industries again dropped the ball. They created some very nice remakes of classic maps, but failed to gain traction, and actually disappointed many fans when they released an HD campaign remake, with no multiplayer treatment, other than Reach DLC. Reach was the farthest thing away from the Halo CE gameplay, and not giving it its own multiplayer servers/remake was an oversight of the community. These two were minor mess ups, and not a huge deal at first.
Then Halo 4. I won’t spend too much time hating on this game, but let me be candid and logical here. The FACTS tell us this game did not perform well. It sold around 250 million the first week, a little more than Reach did (which in turn, had sold a little more than 3 had), and received commercial review scores that were very positive. The Halo community, however, hated the game. Sprint? loadouts? Killstreaks? Absurdly quick TTK? This game went directly against what the Halo community wanted. Halo has always been about skill, teamwork and map control. This has been explained before, but the fact the matter is, this game was so out of touch with the Halo community it died. Fast. Within months, Reach, the game’s predecessor had more players playing it. Within months the daily peak population was around 20,000, a few months later, 10,000. That’s shameful and pathetic considering that Halo 3 was the top xbox 360 game for years, and had a million players a year after launch. Some people liked Halo 4, although I don’t know why, but the FACT is, the game was a flop. It wasn’t even up par with Halo 3 on quality. Halo 3 had forge, theater and file browser. Halo 4 had a recycled forge from reach with shadows (very cool shadows I will say), a file browser (To launch at a way later date) and no campaign scoring, theater, or skulls. The lack of Community care and quality was appaling.
Part Two: Halo Spartan Assault is next. This game was well received, except for the fact that it cost $15 AND had microtransactions. Such greed for such a simple casual product? And for what? To rack in a little more money? Doubt it, people hate that stuff: premium and freemium don’t’ go together.
Halo: The MCC. Then, finally, FINALLY I thought everything was going to work out for me. Dedicated Servers??? Halo CE Online (I did start with three, but I loved 1)! Dedicated Servers? Halo 3 Online??? Dedicated Servers!!! 60 FPS! All Campaign Maps! All Multiplayer maps from halos 1-3 (nobody cared for 4…just saying truthfully). And a beta key! Awesome…except not. While it is understandable that such a massive undertaking might have some bugs, especially unforeseen ones and it may take a week or two to be ironed out, it was completely unacceptable that I paid 60 dollars for a game that didn’t work for FOUR months. 343 lied when they said it was “mostly fixed” and “getting better” at various points. It was not fixed until March 1st, and was broke the entire time before that. The truth of the matter is, the issue was so severe that 343 had to have known. Maybe they didn’t know the servers were buggy…Are you telling me you guys NEVER tested them??? Because they hardly worked at all, and simple testing would have revealed that. Are you honestly going to tell me that the User Interface “bugs”, or just not being done, was not known? The fact that, when a multiplayer game was over, the roster would not go away sometimes, and you had to restart the game? That games didn’t even work? That campaigns didn’t save? That Forge maps didn’t always save? That clicking through the menus in any way not perfectly in the base way would cause some weird glitch? Of course they knew, but they thought they could fix it. And now I get to the point that made me want to write this.
Halo the MCC collection is DEAD. I played ten games in a row the last two hours, and EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM ENDED with at least two players quitting. Every game had serious betrayals, and load times were lengthy. This game is supposed to be a masterpiece, instead we have 10K populations spread across FOUR games…How do I know this? If you Pre Order Halo 5 Guardians You Hate Halo and Want It To Die (Halo Montage MCC Multiplayer) - YouTube You may have seen this vid, it proves how low the MCC playlists are. I encourage you to watch it all. And now, after seven years, I thought I’d be able to play the full Halo 3 experience, competitive multiplayer and thriving community, but oh no. 343 was so incompetent that it took them four months to have a game in its right state, that people abandoned this game. Do you blame them? I cannot even enjoy what I paid for, now that it is fixed.
And now, they continue to go about hyping up the next halo as if nothing went wrong. As if we want that. Preorders of that game are down. Halo 4 had more preorders than Halo 5 does (watch that video above) and that game flopped; what is going to happen to this franchise. Bonnie Ross, you say you want Halo to survive another thirty years? I’m sure you do, unfortunately your fans are not happy. You split this community when you made Halo 4. Bungie started it but you ripped it all the way open, and now you continue to try to make games that appeal to that “new” side of Halo. But what you don’t seem to understand is that it is that OLD SCHOOL player, game and passion that made Halo so popular. You cannot clone the causality of Call of Duty to win. That is why Halo 5 Preorders are lower than 4’s were. We all thought Halo 4 would be great, and it flopped. Truth be told, most of the Halo community is gone. The people on Waypoint are half and half old and new fans. But guess what? The new fans are not as populous as the old. You’ve lost money with your direction of the franchise and your screw ups. With Halo CE, Halo Reach TU, Halo Spartan Strike, Halo 4, Halo MCC, you have seriously and significantly messed up each and every time. This community is tired of their game being changed, and being ignored, and having broken things. The ENTIRE community abandoned Halo 4, called for no sprint, and yet you put it in again, confident that maybe you can still attract the casual and old school halo player.
343, my appeal and criticism is this. You have failed multiple times; you have been too greedy with your focus on the business of this game, whereas Bungie was simply making a game they loved. You have abandoned the community and failed to launch projects too many times. I can forgive you, but you need to take a look at yourselves, and understand, that you don’t know what this community and game is. You have tried to make it your own, and in doing so killed it. The Halo MCC should be the most played game on xbox live right now. Halo CE innovated the entire FPS genre, halo 2 did so for multiplayer. Halo 3 was so perfect. But your screw up messed that placeholder up, it’s not even in the top ten…. Take a seat back, and look to understand your community you have lost. Stop tryinig these cheap and uninnovative tactics, thruster, sprint, bullet magnetism, etc. STOP. Stop trying to change this community, and embrace it. Stop trying to alientate the old, keep the name brand and bring in new people. Stop. Because you have failed, and will continue to fail, if you don’t stop trying to milk this cow dry. Halo 1, 2 and 3 were the most unique games on the market, Halo 4 and 5 are bland and generic. Listen to what the community actually wants, embark on a quest to deliver, and stop this rehashed, generic gunplay. Please, 343. The records speak for themselves. Your “liberal” and “new” tactics have not work. Halo will not, will not, last 30 years as profitable as it once was, unless you allow yourself to make an actual Halo game.
If I do buy Halo 5, it will be used, for I have no more respect of you 343, to give unto thee my hard earned money.
One fan said it best.
Me personally? I’m not pre ordering bc I go off of company records. 343 released one failed halo with halo 4, and a broken halo with MCC. So I will probably wait a week and buy the game used. In my personal opinion 343 doesn’t derseve a dime from any of us, but that is just my opinion-by Get That T4ng
Another said it as well:
And since Halo is dying anyway (none of my friends play it anymore) you neglected forge and custom games (file browser), you were the seeds of GTA now they take all the fun because you 343lazies cant be bothered to put a file browser or even INNOVATE (yes its new territory for 343, not copying COD) with a custom games browser good luck and at least there is a classic mode in Halo 5 so I will get the standard edition, shame TRUTH is a -Yoinking!- stretched out piece of -Yoink- though-by DarryDannyDude
Yawn