Don't ship it if it's not ready

Games Halo 5: Guardians
1

Anything good takes time to get right.

343 Please don’t rush it. Business strategies dictate when you ship the game. As a Halo fan, a gamer, appreciator of art and just a person wanting games to have a more meaningful impact on our modern culture, please do not rush making games.

Quality will always diminish with shorter and shorter production cycles, and I say why ship a game if it’s not good?

What do I mean by good? Without me saying, I can bet everyone can know what a good thing is when they see it. You can understand by looking historically at what has been created. A good thing will always be good, a bad thing will always be bad.

Good things are remembered and played to this day, hence we call things classic. Bad things are remembered for being very bad. Everything else in between are more or less lost in time.

Halo Reach and Halo 4 where rushed IMO, and suffered as a result. Missing features aren’t exactly a nail in the coffin for any game. However Halo has a legacy. Design philosophies are easily compromised when you’re wanting to innovate.

So if you’re going to innovate, make sure you’re taking time to get it right, without sacrificing the parts that make Halo fun!

If we’re not having fun, we’re not playing it. If we’re not playing it, we’re not buying it. Look at what happened to Fable, that universe had such potential…

You can’t sacrifice story for gameplay, vice versa. The game has to be fun, challenging, structured, intelligent. There needs to be a high level of authenticity with the character portrayals, if not at least with the portrayal of spartans. They’re super soldiers, not just soldiers… Show us what super means! What does it mean to command? (RTS?) What does it mean to lead? (co-op?) What does it mean to survive? (adapt?)

http://youtu.be/QoIXUKTYxyM?t=3m1s

Where’s the horror of war?

http://youtu.be/6NDsfNKsDKk?t=20s

Where’s the fragility of technology?
Mortality, transhumanism, crisis’ of identity, morality, contrast to all the themes? This universe deserves more depth, exploring what it means to be human.

http://youtu.be/Z68pz-C3owI

Rant worth acknowledging?

2

Well, the team has grown since 4, not to mention they started work on 5 just before 4’s release as well. By this point, they know what’s up.

3

Not really 343I’s call it’s Microsoft’s.
I’m sure, well hoping, 343 is trying to go for gold this go around and listen to your/many a fan’s plea.

4

> Not really 343I’s call it’s Microsoft’s.
> I’m sure, well hoping, 343 is trying to go for gold this go around and listen to your/many a fan’s plea.

More or less this, plus the fact that if you tell a developer only release a game when it’s ready, it’ll never be released, or at least released in a timely manner.

If the game was like say Warframe or Minecraft, where it started out to be an open beta, and then went from beta directly into full out release as soon as they felt it was ready. THEN I could see that happening, but where as Halo 5 isn’t, and Halo 5 isn’t on the PC (A lot easier for a Open beta that can be patched at any time of day they damn well feel like), and is on the Xbox, I really don’t see them taking your advice and releasing the game when they feel it’s ready. they’ll release it when Microsoft tells them to publish it.

5

343 doesn’t have control over the time table. MS does.

That said, you can’t spend forever just polishing a game. Parts will be broken. Some stuff won’t be working right but as imperfect as it is, you have to ship it. If you don’t, at the very least, player interest will disappear and sales will diminish.