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> I think people’s expectations for how much content they should get in a free game is a little unreasonable. Obviously everyone would love it if you could play everything Halo Infinite has to offer without paying a dime, but that’s not realistic.
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> It’s too early to say whether the campaign will justify full price, but considering the expanded scale I don’t think it’s a forgone conclusion that it won’t. I’ve played plenty of 10-15 hour single player only games that have satisfied me enough to justify paying $60, provided Halo Infinite can do that I’ll be happy. If you’re planning on buying the campaign, we know that there will be some customisation items associated with that, so for the same ‘value’ you payed for reach you’ll still get some options. Forge will be added later at no extra cost, and seems to be a much richer and more advanced tool than it was back in Reach times.
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> If you consider the base game with reach, and three map packs in total across the games life you would pay around $95 for the total package. If you purchase the Halo Infinite campaign, and two-three battle passes you’re spending the same amount of money for likely a larger campaign and at least as many, likely more customisation options than reach, and a more in depth forge tool and whatever further updates the game gets. You’ll also have access to the free fracture event armours. All of that doesn’t take into account inflation, that $95 you paid for reach content today is worth more like $110-$115. Even better, a new player can just jump in and play in the entire MP suite of Halo Infinite completely for free, and they can even unlock some cool armour along the way through the fracture events.
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> I get not liking the new model, some people would prefer to just pay a lump sum and get access to a chunk of content and be done with it. But I think it’s a bit disingenuous to say that 343’s approach to the Battle Pass system is somehow greedy, or lacking value.
I think it’s naive to say that any approach to a battle pass system isn’t inherently greedy.
I’m not sure how anyone is not seeing this as what it is: a huge cash grab.
Think about it. Halo fans will all buy the campaign, and fork up the $60, even though it’s only technically getting them the campaign and not MP. A whole new slew of players might join and fiddle with the multiplayer, but if what we’re seeing about the battle pass contents is correct, then most players won’t be interested in multiplayer without buying the battle pass. From those new players, microsoft will get battle pass money, then particularly if some cosmetics are tied only to the campaign, they’ll get people to buy the campaign just for the cosmetics.
Once they’ve established this paradigm where the campaign alone is worth $60, they’ll offer another campaign of similar length next holiday, for another $60. Then they can milk halo nerds like me for $60 every year for the next decade without having to develop a new engine/relying on the assets they create now, and they’ll also be able to pull in $5, 10, 15 or whatever it is for the battlepass every 3 months.
They make a lot more money, but what does a dedicated Halo fan get? They still have to pay $60 for a campaign just like before, only now it doesn’t actually come right off the bat with co-op or forge, and I won’t be surprised if someone unwilling to buy battle passes (like myself,) will have less customization options than were available in reach.
as a very visual person myself, I always liked customizing my character in any game I play and it’s getting harder and harder to do for free, or for the base price of the game. $60 doesn’t get you a game anymore, it gets you a 5-hour campaign with a poorly constructed multiplayer optimized around a paid season pass. BUT. I’d much rather have a battle pass than lootboxes or Req packs… which isn’t much of a compromise now that I think about it.