I’ve seen a few posts here so far that go into this subject from one specific angle or another, but no post has addressed the elephant in the room - whether or not this has any long-term viability as a game, and very importantly: Why people who like playing Halo Multiplayer wouldn’t just go back to playing The Master Chief Collection forever.
I have to say, personally, i play a few games of Infinite here and there now, but i’m not really having very much fun. Every time i start to have fun, i end up frustrated for one reason or another. And ultimately it just leads me to quitting and booting up The Master Chief Collection to play online there. So you need to understand, Microsoft, that not only do you need to provide people a reason to keep playing this game, within the context of itself. You need to provide people a reason to not just go and play the, so far, much better Master Chief Collection (And no, trying to make the MCC worse over time somehow isn’t going to help you just in case you were thinking that).
The key complaints seem to be the following:
- Every problem here is going to alienate your player base.
- The Progression System is an absolute grind/joke.
- Store Items are preposterously expensive for what they actually are.
- Rewards for Progression are a joke/locked behind paid passes.
Let’s have a look at each one of them, step by step.
1. Every problem here is going to alienate your player base.
This could easily not be a point at all, and it could easily be the last sentence of each of the other points. This is the meta-point, and i thought i’d include it first because it’s the most important. You have to understand that an online game needs a wealth of players to function. You need a backbone of as many people playing, not paying - just playing - in order to create a suitable environment where you may begin to find paying players. What you cannot do is go in hard with a plan to squeeze as much money out of people as possible for any semblance of reward that isn’t behind an absolutely mountainous grind, in the hopes that the free players will stick around just because something is free. There are a lot of free things that people don’t do. Just making something free is not enough.
If you alienate the free players, then what happens is you devalue the entire point of paying for things, because who will they be showing off their expensive item to? Other payers? No. The entire point of buying some cosmetic item is to stand out from the crowd. If the crowd has left your game because they are either being insulted by design, or feel like rats on an unrewarding treadmill, then as they drain away, so too will anyone likely to buy things. Because there is literally no point whatsoever in purchasing cosmetic items in a dead or dying game.
2. The Progression System is an absolute grind/joke.
As it currently exists, the progression system is an absolute joke. It’s insulting. As someone who has spent a very, very long time playing games of literally almost every genre that feature any kind of progression system, and often times execute the system in a manner that makes their games highly addictive, let me tell you this:
Progression systems exist to stimulate dopamine and assure the player that they are making progress for doing the things that make the game fun.
Progress. For doing things. That make. The game. Fun.
Fun.
What is fun? Killing streaks are fun. Hook-shotting around a building into an empowered melee strike is fun. Mowing down 3 people with a vehicle in one go is fun. Being the driver that expertly avoids enemy fire to deliver the flag-bearer back to base is fun. All of these tricks and feats that Halo has had a badge-system to track since the beginning are there to officiate and legitimately track the crazy fun things you are doing. So why is this fun not adding to the amount of exp you can get?
Why is the progression system not synergized to reward fun? Why is the current message of the progression system literally “Just BE in the game. You don’t even have to win. Just EXIST.” - this is not fun. This is insulting. This does not encourage anyone to do anything other than take the time a match gives them to grind other things that will in fact net them rewards.
What you reward, you encourage to reoccur. If you are currently rewarding mere participation and challenges-grinding but not actual prowess or game objective tackling. Then you are encouraging people to grind challenges and merely participate, and all of the people who do wild -Yoink!- that make the games actually fun will eventually leave.
That is the most important feature of a progression system. It doesn’t even have to give tangible or direct rewards. The reward is making progress and being able to display your progress. People want to know that the time they are spending on something is improving their situation in some capacity - the opposite of this is literally what the human emotion of despair exists to warn you of - that you are caught in a trap that is wasting your time and life.
Now, i understand that you understand that the MCC has a perfectly serviceable reward system. And i understand as well that this system is not designed to make money. I get that. But the answer is not to just take the existing working system, and make it way, way less rewarding in order to attempt people to get so frustrated with it they say “f-ck it, let me get my wallet”. Because it isn’t going to work that way. At all. They’re going to say “f-ck it, let me boot up the MCC”.
Your fatal problem here is that you’ve tied the ‘dopamine-dispenser’ of progression/leveling up directly with the gear-rewards you wish to withhold for moneymaking reasons. You need to either disentangle these two things, or make it so you get these rewards only after certain milestones, but make the leveling part easier. Because that little ‘ping - you leveled up, good job’ thing is what keeps people playing one more game, over and over.
3. Store Items are preposterously expensive for what they actually are.
Let’s just put this into perspective:
A new armor set in the store costs around £16 / $21.60 converted (2000 tokens)
A slightly modified Mongoose and Warthog with a blue skin is £13 / $17.55 converted (1500 tokens)
Let’s look at another popular free to play game which earns the owners more money than God: League of Legends.
A brand new skin in League of Legends will cost anywhere from £5/$5 to $18/$20 - with the more expensive skins being incredibly impressive, and usually involving entirely new animations, models, effects, thematic-reworks of the characters and even different voice-lines.
Each skin, at a minimum, gives a completely different character model, as well as brand new high-quality artwork on the loading screen.
Is a new Armor Suit that is barely different from the default, aside from perhaps the helmet, really worth what a game like League of Legends offers for your money? Given that the low end for an entirely different character model is about £5/$5…
The answer is no. These are Disneyworld prices you’re asking for in county fair. A -Yoink!- bumper and a blue spray on a Warthog that 99% of the time isn’t even going to be noticed by anyone is not worth £13/$17. It’s worth about £1.50 or $3 absolute max. Absolute. Max.
Anyone who pays that kind of money for so little is either legitimately stupid, stole mommies credit-card, or is so well-off that common sense abandoned them years ago.
These prices aren’t even remotely tempting. They are insulting. Half the time you can’t even see the other team’s armor because you’re either not looking at them and running in a different direction, or you’re shooting at them trying no to die, so their team-colored shield is glowing so much they’re just a big red/blue blob.
These prices are preposterous relative to what you actually get for them. And once again; these cosmetics that are far, far cooler and unique in the MCC, are FREE. All you have to do is pay the points you’ll get in droves for just playing through the campaign and playing matches normally.
What absolute nutjob would spend £18/$20 on something when you can look like a Techno-Greek Lion-God or a Gundam-Samurai in the MCC for FREE.
4. Rewards for Progression are a joke/locked behind paid passes.
I’ve already covered in point-1 how the progression system is alienating, and in point-2 what other games are doing with their stores, but let’s talk progression specifically compared to other games.
Now, League of Legends has a leveling and progression system. Every time you level up, you get a little capsule which usually contains a bit of free-to-play currency, maybe a character unlock token, and very very rarely a paid-item. This alone creates a desire to keep playing constantly and leveling up. The capsules aren’t random rewards, you know when you’re about to get one, and the paid-rewards are so rare that they really aren’t ever on your mind that you might get one.
But even without these capsules, you level up fairly regularly, even at the much higher levels. And there is no cap - you just keep going and going, and you get more exp based on playing the game well, not just simple participation.
At the end of each map, you also get a rank, which serves to show how well you actually played compared to the others in your team, and you can see the score of who did what, how much of it, and when. It’s a comprehensive breakdown. In Infinite what you get is a fairly dry and cold summary of your own feats, they contribute absolutely nothing to your leveling up, as we’ve discussed, and a summary of whatever your team/enemy did to compare with them is long gone, they aren’t even in the picture anymore. There’s not even room to say a thing to them.
In other games, leveling up skills is just part of the game - it offers nothing more than a means to track what you’ve done and how well you’ve been doing it. It’s not about unlocking gear necessarily, but if gear is unlocked that’s a great bonus.
Personally, i think there needs to be just as many free-unlock cosmetics as paid-cosmetics, and these need to be behind more than just a generic “I’ve played 60 million matches and max level” kind of grind.
You can even articulate progression into weapons and vehicles; allowing for people to level up weapon-skill and unlock skins (or get hefty discounts in the store) for reaching skill-based milestones. This doubles up as encouraging people to diversify the weapons they use in games, rather than just sticking to the assault-rifle melee-meta for absolutely everything.
In short, the progress needs to be much, much quicker to accrue, it needs to be more noticeable when you actually level up, and you need a greater diversity of ways in which you can level, and what you can level. People -Yoink!- love to fill bars, as long as they don’t feel like their is being wasted.
In conclusion
This may all come off a fair bit ranty and mean, but i genuinely want to like this game. I want to enjoy it because i enjoy Halo, and i want to see a next-gen Halo game become popular and enjoyed by even more people than it already is. But the way this is shaping out so far is not promising at all. It’s not good. Most of the time i’m playing this, i’m just thinking i’d rather go and play the MCC.
There are some great changes in this game. The Vehicles feel amazing to drive, many of the new weapons are interesting. The pistol, while not the Magnum, is a fantastic sidearm and solid addition when i was sure i’d hate it.
But the things and systems that get people to stick around aren’t there - they will drive people away, and an online game with hardly anyone playing it is dead.