The Halo 4 Campaign was good. I enjoyed it. However, the problems concerning multiplayer are… well concerning. There are the already over addressed latency/server issues. There are challenges like Deposed which can’t be completed in an honest manner. Randomly generated or not is shouldn’t happen. Many challenges arn’t giving XP when they ARE completed. Many maps arn’t being played much because people simply don’t like them. Leading to playing Solace ALOT as well as a few others. 343 is working on many of the same problems over a week past launch. A true skill system is to be implemented AFTER launch. The theater which became quite a hit in halo 3 is severely lacking in features previous games had.
Honesty, my current mentality is to stop playing for a while and wait to see if these issues are addressed and to see if seemingly standard features are added back. The game just feels unfinished. Like a work in progress. Im a student on a college budget and i don’t enjoy feeling like i purchased such an unpolished game. It seems Microsoft is worried about similar reactions and thus implementing a feature to literally pay players for the number of hours they spend playing. What kind of a message does all of this send? I was wondering if other gamers are having similar feelings?
Just for the record, no game is ever “Finished” there are these things called deadlines that developers and their employers set to keep the development time in a reasonable amount of time, so it doesn’t turn into Duke Nuk’em Forever.
It’s like giving a gear head unlimited funding, and tell him to build a the fastest, most powerful, badA vehicle on Earth, and keep it that way as long as he lives. Or a PC gamer who has unlimited funding, and is always keeping his/her computer top of the line. Every time new hardware comes out, they change it.
For Developers, this is the same way, they’ll keep developing the game as long as they can, until it’s perfect in their eyes.
Yes the game feels lacking of a few things, but guess what, all games have that, some more than others, most people ignore it or don’t notice, others notice it either complain or understand why.
343i did say that they will be using title updates to add to the game as time goes buy. But as far as I know, that could be limited in what can be done, they may or not be able to add more vehicles and weapons, they may or may not be able to add new armor or game types, all we can do is wait.
> For Developers, this is the same way, they’ll keep developing the game as long as they can, until it’s perfect in their eyes.
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> Yes the game feels lacking of a few things, but guess what, all games have that, some more than others, most people ignore it or don’t notice, others notice it either complain or understand why.
Everything you said could be true, but as consumers we never know the details, but when we get the product, we can feel what went into the product and how much time it took them to do it.
Halo 4 felt like a 2 year project. One year for the campaign and then one year for everything else. As far as I know, all past Halo games took 3 years to make, so 1.5 for singleplayer and 1.5 for everything else. Not to mention that almost all the past Halos also had public betas, but this one did not and look at all the glitches and bugs.
It’s an unfinished game, whichever way you look at it, we all love the campaign, no doubt about it! But we can all feel that the multiplayer/Forge/custom games is severely lacking.
> > For Developers, this is the same way, they’ll keep developing the game as long as they can, until it’s perfect in their eyes.
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> > Yes the game feels lacking of a few things, but guess what, all games have that, some more than others, most people ignore it or don’t notice, others notice it either complain or understand why.
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> Everything you said could be true, but as consumers we never know the details, but when we get the product, we can feel what went into the product and how much time it took them to do it.
>
> Halo 4 felt like a 2 year project. One year for the campaign and then one year for everything else. As far as I know, all past Halo games took 3 years to make, so 1.5 for singleplayer and 1.5 for everything else. Not to mention that almost all the past Halos also had public betas, but this one did not and look at all the glitches and bugs.
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> It’s an unfinished game, whichever way you look at it, we all love the campaign, no doubt about it! But we can all feel that the multiplayer/Forge/custom games is severely lacking.
Halo 4 was a 4+ year project, but like you pointed out, your average consumer thinks slapping together a AAA video game with high end looking graphics for a 7+ old pile of Junk, can be done in under a year. There is a lot of work that went on to make the game what it is today, and it’s not like most games where they take a game engine and add stuff to it. All of Halo’s engine is the same engine as the last game’s, but it’s torn apart, line of code by line of code, and rebuilt from the ground up. Not many people realize how many lines of code goes into a video game like Halo.
The number of lines of code minecraft has, a simple game, has around 4815162342 lines.
If I was to print out Halo 4’s game coding, I would most likely have enough pages to come up to my knee. But that’s best guess.
Yes in the marketing world deadlines are a reality. But as a player, the campaign took 7 hours to clear. The replay value and what fans come back for is multiplayer. Offering hours and hours of replayability. Yet that is what is hampered the most. FPS campaigns will be short. I’m fine with that and im working on legendary difficulty now. But multiplayer feels a bit more unfinished than the average games left lacking a few things category mentioned above. With the way the online community works, launch is key. Look at all the MMO’s that bit the dust due to a poor launch. From a priority standpoint, if im 343, i make certain that i have the multiplayer ready for the masses with all its features as an absolute priority number 1. Especially if your altering the game in a big way for the first time. It has to feel good and run smooth to allow gamers to make the transition. I mean i don’t pay 60$ for less than 10 hours of gameplay and i know other gamers feel the same way. The frustration is going to build due to a lack of polish and mar the games online launch. As a new company you have to be ready. 343 just didn’t do that. With other FPS games out right now (everyone knows the other title i’d rather not bring up) that are working fine, i don’t know that gamers will be overly patient. I am a bit disappointed. But i hope it all comes together with a solid online community in the end. But once again, that’s an if i’ve already paid for.