I’ve been a Halo fan since CE (in other words, I’m really really old), and I must say that Infinite is by far the most hyped game to me that 343i has created. Halo 4 got people’s hopes up but once people started to realize what the MP was really like (basically CoD in space) it was quickly forgotten and rejected by huge quantities of people, Halo 5 didn’t receive anywhere close to the hype as far as MP was concerned but it had this really cool marketing campaign called Hunt the Truth… Unfortunately it was anything but Truth and so Halo 5 basically managed to hurt 343i reputation even further.
Fast forward to today, we already know Infinite has a good MP (if the flight was good why wouldn’t the actual game be?) and although we are definitely worried about the SP I think the likelihood of 343i somehow making a story as awful as Halo 5 is very unlikely… So basically I think Infinite will be the strongest title 343i has ever made, but does it compare to what Bungie managed to accomplish in years prior?
Even if the Campaign is the best Halo story ever written, even if MP is robust with like 20 great maps and a plethora of awesome new modes to have fun with, the reality is that to the vast majority of players (the millions of people the first month) it still doesn’t compete with what 3/Reach did. No Co-op Campaign and no forge at launch is a huge blow to Infinite and frankly it just goes to show you where 343i’s priorities lie, they believe graphics>basic features, whereas Bungie was the opposite more or less.
I know what everyone here will say “But Bluejay, excuse 1 and 2, oh and did you see those sick cosmetics?”
All I’ll say is that Infinite (and thus 343i) basically screwed the pooch and now instead of millions of new fans being blown away by Infinite at release they’ll just drown in disappointment. I want to be optimistic and say that everyone will come back but the sad reality is that first impressions are EVERYTHING to a game. Why do you think I haven’t bothered with Cyberpunk 2077? Because the game released in an unfinished state, I don’t care one iota how the game looks 5 years from now, I’ll just see it for what it once was instead of what it wants to be.
I’m not trying to dissuade the hype train, I firmly believe Infinite will be a great Halo game after a year or so, and many Halo fans will probably agree with me, its just bittersweet because all us fans will be playing it to death but we’ll just have to accept that our friends won’t be there with us in our journey. You’ll be chatting with old friends from 3/Reach (maybe 4) about the good ole times, then you’ll invite them to play the Campaign with you and they’ll say “wait a second, Infinite has Co-op?” and it’ll all come full circle.
Just going to state, I personally hate halo 3, any ammount of lag leads to it being unplayable in MP. It story is fun but that is only part of the gameplay.
Also remember co-op and forge are coming not at launch. Halo 3 MP wasn’t great at launch it was great once the MCC game along and turned it into the primary game.
Halo 3 was by far the pinnacle of the series
Was it perfect? no, but it was a game that you could jump on with some mates and just thrash about, or could jump in and get super competative and sweaty
What it was (IMO) is the perfect balance between a competative game and a casual game
You could do both
It had its issues netcoding network bullet spread etc etc, but it represents the apex of what halo is, and sadly its been downhill since then
I hope Infinte is the reveasal of fortunes so many fans have been waiting for
So the only thing you list that Halo 3/Reach have over Infinite is no co-op or forge at launch? Is that it? I must admit, I expected you to cite a lot more issues with the game than simply a couple of features missing at launch. What happens when 343 inevitably add those to the game? Then this entire argument you’re presenting is absolutely null. I don’t get it. Especially considering Infinite’s core gameplay absolutely blows Halo 3 and (particularly) Reach away.
Love halo 3 but let’s be real.
It had the worst net code.
It had easily the worst story in the franchise. Literally made no sense at multiple junctures.
Truth was senile out of nowhere appeared to know halo was a weapon and had no real plan in place.
As for first impressions the beta was one of the least balanced experiences of my life.
I think we need to put aside our nostalgia and be more willing to accept the now.
Infinite is shaping up to be a better gamdespite the obvious flaws it also has.
As longs as it can deliver in the narrative front.
I’m not saying Halo 3’s story was perfect, Halo 2 is my personal favorite, but I’d still consider it leagues better than Guardians. Art is subjective and I’m not saying people can’t enjoy it, but a lot of stuff for Guardians’ story came real close to objectively bad.
While execution was anything but stellar the internal logic and motivations of most characters and their dialogue and impact on plot all made far more sense than halo 3s.
I love halo 3 but going back to it with the intention of critical literary analysis shows its by far the weakest narrative in the franchise.
Sure halo 5 had its fair share of silliness and straight up jarring moments but it is still better written than halo 3.
I played the guardians campaign once and honestly I dont want to play it ever again.
Still might before infinite just because I don’t think I bothered to do it on heroic but I digress.
But as a story it managed to give many more characters as much screen time as the arbiter in 3 if not more.
Most lines had some sense to it.
Remember when miranda was asked to set waypoints for her squads and instead she cocked a magnum and said “to war”? Haha
Truth went from evil religious zealot mastermind to crazy old man.
The unsc put all humanity’s/galaxy’s life on a hunch a soldier had about his AI that was in the clutches of the flood even though she was having a breakdown.
Pretty much everything in halo 3 fails to hold up to scrutiny without major auxiliary additions, even the opening luck speech makes little to know real sense when you stop to think.
Halo 5 essentially told a more logical version of the same story but people hated the idea of it and the execution failed to support the much larger cast but much of the hate was based on change not being liked by people.
By no means am I saying halo 5 was a great story or sequel and I hated the level design but I will die on a hill that it made more sense than halo 3 ever did.
Respectfully, I disagree. Even at its core, the plot of Guardians was just uninspired and bad. In the end, it was the story of AI believing they were better suited to run things than their human counterparts. A plot point that has been beat to death in various other sci-if properties. Sure, genocidal aliens weren’t anything new but the religious zeal of them was something I’d never seen before and gave the covenant a unique identity. Not to mention the flood as well. I thought Halo 3, while not being perfect, tied up those stories rather well.
More specifically though, there are many character motivations that just don’t line up on Guardians. When Chief decides to go AWOL, he’s told another team is being prepped to deal with Cortana and he has no follow up questions? He just got confirmation she’s alive and he doesn’t even try to learn more about what’s going on? Clearly they know more than him and he just goes it alone anyway. That makes zero sense.
Then the first time Locke and Chief meet and fight, he tells Chief “this is your one chance to come in peacefully.” But next time they meet he approaches Chief with guns down saying he doesn’t want to fight. He didn’t learn anything new about Chief between those encounters and there’s no logical reason he’d try to be even more peaceful than he was before. Apart from not wanting to get beat again, that’s all it could be.
Then there’s the Warden Eternal, who told Locke blue team was permitted to pass but Osiris wasn’t. But then when blue team is on genesis, all of a sudden he has a problem with them? It makes no sense he would just let them go peacefully at first then radically change his mind once they got there.
Also, the cast just feels bloated throughout the whole thing. I love blue team from the books, I really do. But they did zero to impact the story. If you took out Fred, Kelly, and Linda, Chief would ultimately follow the same exact path through the plot. Having characters that simply don’t matter is flat out bad writing. And the same can be said mostly for Osiris too.
On top of that, they had characters and plot lines built up like Jul and the Janus key that we’re just dropped right away. Playing Halo 4 and Guardians back to back, it’s painfully apparent that they decided to completely restructure where the plot was going and Guardians to me feels like its story is held together with glue and duct tape to force it to work.
I was with you until paragraph 3. I get that first impressions are indeed important, but they’re not everything for everyone like you’re acting they are. There’s been countless games that have had bad launches and saw success later. If mp and sp are good, it’s not like it’s going to fail and no one will play it just because online co-op and forge aren’t there at launch. It’ll be a thorn in its side for sure and it would of course be way better if they were there at launch, not arguing that, but I think you’re blowing things out of proportion.
For context, I think everyone can agree that this game obviously had development issues throughout its cycle. You have the right to be mad that the game will be missing two features at launch considering how long it was in development. But as far as criticizing their priorities during their year of crunch following the delay to get the game out, do you really think it would’ve been wise to opt for online co-op and forge over fixed visuals? Look back at the 2020 demo and remember all the fan backlash, negative press, memes making fun of the game, and how quickly and vastly the hype died down for the game. Many people thought it was going to flop. Personally if we had to choose between good graphics or co-op/forge at launch I would choose the latter like you, but it’s clear what was more important for the reception of the game overall. Fast forward to now, all that negativity from last year has been reversed after people felt how fun the gameplay was during the flights and saw how much better the game looked in the campaign trailers. If they really did have such a black and white decision to make at the studio as graphics vs co-op/forge for launch, I really think they made the right call even if it wasn’t the one I would have chosen for myself.
The situation between Halo and Cyberpunk is COMPLETELY different. Cyberpunk didn’t have such a fiasco because 2 features were missing at launch but being added in a few months later. It had a fiasco because it was missing a lot of features that they said would be there, the visuals were way worse than they showed, and the game was completely broken through and through, and they’re STILL working on these issues to this day. They straight up lied about so many things and the game was not what was promised. The fact that CDPR had such a good reputation and trust from the community that they were using to bank on makes everything even worse. I get that even if it eventually turns out to be the game they first promised, you don’t want to play it based on principle, but if you can’t distinguish that absolute disaster of gaming history to Halo not having 2 features at launch that are being added later, I really don’t know what else to tell you.
I guess the point that I’m trying to get across is that I understand where you’re coming from about first impressions and honestly that sucks for you in terms of the extent of the importance you hold to them because you’re missing out on a ton that way in my opinion, but not nearly as many people feel as strongly about it as you do.
the entire point is that first impressions are more valuable to a game than anything.
It won’t matter that they add these things after launch, what matters is what the game is day 1 (or even say day 7) because the vast majority of players will be there close to launch, so even if the game comes out with the best forge in Halo history, impeccable Co-op play, it doesn’t matter as much because all those gamers (that could’ve became long term fans) are already gone and playing other games.
You can diss Halo 3/Reach to the moon and back, but they were complete games at launch. This is not even the tip of the iceberg either, it won’t have firefight at launch, will it have theater mode? Will they even finish the actual story on December 8th? Again dude, its not that the game won’t be good, its the game will be a shell of itself at release and won’t become great until many months/years down the line.
Also, I don’t put Halo CE/2 in this conversation because I don’t believe they were as impressive content wise as 3/Reach were.
People like to pretend that graphics are what matters in gaming, and yet if you look at almost any of the most popular games (Fortnite, CoD, Apex, Battlefield, etc.) it becomes clear that graphics by themselves aren’t really that significant, especially for MP games. Now if its a SP only game then sure maybe its what matters most (plenty of titles that were successful even without amazing visuals, but I’ll concede this point)
Using your logic do you believe they should have dropped support for OG XB1/XB1S/XB1X? Because clearly those titles held Infinite back to some degree. Of you won’t say that, because features matter above all else.
I don’t know about that mate, I’ve watched a lot of Infinite reviews/impression videos on YT, one thing that kind of sticks out is that you’ll hear people say repeatedly that “I enjoyed Halo 4/5 for a few months, then moved on” and it starts to sink in that maybe its a bit more important than it should be.
I also want to note that this won’t impact my enjoyment of the game that much, I’m not a huge forger, I don’t have tons of IRL friends to play with in Campaign, but I imagine this will be massive disappointment for reviewers and fans alike.
You are entitled to your opinion. That said I’m gonna look at what you’ve said and show you the difference in thought process between us as to better show my argument. I will number my points to the corresponding paragraphs in your reply for ease of discourse. And before I start I reiterate that I was not a fan of halo 5. Tone is hard to convey so ill preface with this is by no means ill willed.
If the plot is bad due to trope-ism most of halo is a bad story. Also to say 5 is no more than a terminator/2001 story misses much of, if not most of the subtitlty. The story is about the domain and in the time of the story we only know of 2 characters (besides maybe john) who can access the domain. Those being Cortana and the Didact, cortana literally using the didacts own words is no coincidence. The covenant had not used ancilla and often hated forerunner ancilla because of their autonomy, it was clear why in H5G, why they were right. The unsc already put most of the governing of the universe in the hands of AI they didn’t rebel because they thought suddenly they were better than us. We designed them to be superior and they chose a chance at immortality.
the same immortality the prophets preached, made to be truth.
But also it was AI fighting for a chance to live/survive exactly what we humanity fought for in the bungie games.
but now oni are the prophets retaining control at all costs.
The flood are tropes in themselves, examples: the vang, alien, tyranids 40k, hell they were reworks of a marathon 2 enemy.
Religious zeal in scfi also is a tope, its in frank Herbert’s stuff, c.s. Lewis or even star trek. The ring world and its death star qualities also nothing new for the record.
Doesn’t make it bad though.
As for halo3 tying loose ends well thats opinion, I can’t say I agree. But that’s its own conversation.
Chief has never asked questions, except of cortana. “Spartans were trained to take the initiative”- silent storm.
His approach was always act first questions later
Eg: “giving the covenant back their bomb.”
“Sir, finishing this fight.” - halo 2.
He didn’t ask question when he had visions in halo 3 so why would he hesitate in halo 5? Its the exact same motivation as 3.
Except it is continuing on from halo 4 where he went awol to do what he believed was needed to be done, despite infinity and command having their own plans of action.
Chief’s biggest character motivation in the series has been/is keeping his promises to cortana, he saw a chance to get her back so he chose to take it, as he had in the past…
Blue team have followed John even when they don’t think his plan is right.
But John has always picked his gut over chain of command its his unique trait in many respects, he makes his own luck, he was due to run out.
He also knows oni keep secrets he was once the biggest of those secrets but as he found out on Requiem the unsc has moved on from 117, for better or worse.
Locke and osiris iterate more than once they don’t really want to do the assignment and while I agree they are poorly executed, I said so previously, it is out of respect for chief. Is it well executed? No.
But makes as much sense as John pulling a gun on the arbiter and then the subsequent hesitation to pull the trigger.
Its not like him to not finish an elite is it?
Also he clearly learned nothing from that time an evil light bulb almost tricked him into wiping out the galaxy and let his guard down long enough to get Johnson killed.
Makes no sense.
He attacks them after the need for reclaimers is over and he is afraid how he might impact or harm cortana.
He is clearly loyal to her.
Not that unusual imo.
I agree.
Blue team were enough osiris were overkill.
But despite that everyone said or did as much as arbiter in 3.
So what does that say about halo3 with a considerably smaller cast of players?
Yes Blue team just tagged along but they did so because of their history.
It wasn’t well executed but the motivation was logical, as were osiris’
As was arbiter who I believe had more dialogue in H5G than he did in halo 3.
Halsey had a job, palmer and lasky were as important as lord hood was.
we had exuberant witness be as useful as 343 was.
And multiple characters that were as affectual as miranda and Johnson, then there’s sloan and Roland that both had plot progression.
Were any of these stand out character arcs, not particularly no, but they were as good as any arcs we saw in 3.
No character development happened there either after all.
Again I agree
but they did have a through line for cortanas arc and John. Also the same criticism is true of halo 2 and 3 lets be honest here.
The big difference?
there was no reason as to why truth suddenly was a totally different character 2 to 3.
With him seemingly going back and forth from knowing the truth and believing in the great journey at random.
And as much as I’d love to give you the janus key point.
It feels like saying why didn’t halo 4 cover alpha nines story after odst?
Spartan ops was a side story and as much as I hated escalation and believe Reed to be a terrible writer in general.
the janus arc was to be a spartan ops season 2 story not halo5.
The didacts speech at the end of halo 4 was about the mantle and return of the forerunner’s influence on the galaxy and while it wasn’t a literal 1:1.
Halo 5 did infact involve the mantle being taken and a froerunner force taking the galaxy from humanity.
To add to this point, another game that blew its first impressions right out the gate but apparently had a redemption arc later in its lifespan is No Man’s Sky. Unfortunately the game didn’t have the kind of resurgence it needed to find its way back into relevancy.
Also with regards to Infinite, it’s pretty embarrassing that it didn’t learn from Halo 5’s mistakes of not including Forge or splitscreen/local co-op at launch. And while Infinite is slightly better for promising splitscreen at a later date instead of cutting it out completely, it would have still been nice to see the bar raised instead of just being met in this instance (and by “the bar” I’m referring specifically to Halo 5, because when you consider games like Halo 3, Reach, and 4, the bar is actually much higher when it comes to launch content)
I feel like you didn’t even read what I wrote regarding the graphics point. You’re right, I guess the immense amount of negativity surrounding the game last year because of that demo was pretend. Everyone was actually feeling the opposite.
I don’t think they should’ve dropped the last gen, no, because they clearly showed they can still make a good looking game and the majority of people are happy now. Those are two different scenarios, your comparison doesn’t make sense.
I also don’t understand this interview point. At the end of the day, the majority of people are still really pumped for the game in general. Obviously no co-op/forge is a drawback, but again you’re blowing it out of proportion.
I guess we just disagree. We’ll have to just wait and see what happens when the game is out.
While I understand where you’re coming from regarding Forge and Co-op note being there at release, I the first impression that is more important is having the game work. I.e. no game breaking bugs.
Cyperpunk didn’t flop on release because it was missing content, it flopped because it didn’t work.
Slow? It plays pretty dang fast, especially on a competitive level. I understand that most of the community is now coming from halo 5 now with all the crazy abilities so it will seem slow.
First impressions are important, but they aren’t the be all, end all. Fortnite didn’t launch with a battle royale mode, Minecraft slowly gained in popularity over a number of years, Rainbow Six seige hit its highest concurrent player count on steam four years after it released. There are plenty of examples of games that have sustained and built in popularity over time, Sea of Thieves, No Man’s Sky, Terraria, PubG, the list goes on.
At the end of the day though, it doesn’t really matter what the wider gaming market thinks about Halo, especially with the campaign. So long as I enjoy it, and when Co-op comes out me and my buddies enjoy it, that’s what matters. I don’t really care if any streamers are playing it or if it’s top of the steam charts.