Halo 3 will always be #1 (the importance of first impressions)

Games Halo Infinite
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I can’t even say it’s their ego. Bungie had an ego. 343 is more timid, like a sad puppy lol. If I had to guess, someone in the higher ups is dictating what is actually going on with halo, either someone at 343 or at microsoft, possibly even both. All I know is that they don’t think a traditional halo would work in todays market and that’s tragic. Buuuut…

What is more worrying to me is the state of the fanbase. 343 is removing said features because most of the long time halo fans are gone. They’ve been replaced by the reach and 343 generation of halo fans that is either ok or used to these features not existing in the games to begin with. Its antiquity to them and totally justifiable when they are left out. Forge, elites, dual wield, co op campaign are all expendable to 343 because of this. It’s just not the same franchise anymore.

I too, am hyped for infinite. I’m hoping this will be the best campaign we get in years. And the gameplay (despite me loving classic gameplay more than anything) looks solid, balanced, and more importantly, fun. The art style is great too. But when you look at all these great things we just mentioned, every single one has a drawback. Awesome campaign? Can’t play it with friends. Awesome multiplayer? Monetized to shit. Best art style since halo 3? Ruined by awful, uninspired cosmetics like fractured armors/armor effects. We just can’t win with 343.

And it’s not just 343 either! Bungie sold their souls away to activision and payed the ultimate price. Destiny will never be what they wanted it to be. Battlefield 6 is the worst battlefield experience to date. Another example of trying to fix what isn’t broken. Assassins creed isn’t even about assassins anymore. Cyberpunks launch was a nightmare, do people still play that game?

So many once great developers and their series’ are now such garbage that I wonder if it’s actually me that is starting to go crazy.

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71

Halo CE were the best regarding mystery and awe. Had several dreams regarding being on Alpha Halo, even dreamt up a weapon in hand, eerily similar to the red stalker rifle for Halo Infinite. Having it in hand standing by the crashed pelican with sniper rifle in the dirt trail bheind it with my warthog and some marines to the right of me… When games makes you DREAM about them, then you hit the nail on the head something good!
Gameplaywise it was its own beast with deadly physics and such. The multiplayer were kinda limiting but addicting IMHO. I did not attend LAN parties but couch cooped alot with cousins of mine.

Halo 2 aaaall the way story arch wise.
Halo 3 story arch was kinda butchered compared to Halo 2.
Gameplaywise when it comes to character animations like LOVELY Flood infection procedures, a.i Halo 3 takes the cake.

Regarding the baffling story element decicions to Halo 3

1: The most vocal toxicteers laid alot of pressure on that ARBITER IS BADZ! So Bungie lessened the important role he had

2: This might ruffle some feathers buuuut. Thanks to mr Marty himself… well thats why Sgt. Avery Johnson went out with a bang. I think Staten refused the idea. But I think Marty said it would make a bigger, emotional impact if he died. Got right in that sirs…
BUT could argue if that should have been avoided and bypass major character deaths with something just as impactful.

I like Halo Reach… buuut thanks to the STUBBORNESS and yes, disrespect at least some at the top with Bungie had with expanding the universe and let fans and fanwriters help them with deepen the Halo lore, universe and such, well. I wish Bungie adapted Eric Nylunds book to game as close as possible.
For Halos sakle! The encouraged and helped him of all things.
Same for Halo Wars that was CLOSE to never be.
The lack of support for Halo Wars back in the day makes me boil a little
Bungie was like overprotective parents, didnt really let Halo grow with the help of fans and such, widen their vision, inspire them as much as Bungie inspired the fans to write such marvels of some novels. Talk about covering your child in kevlar so no nasty fans will ruin their Halo canon/ lore bible.

I do think Halo Reach besides that have one of the best astethics, art, graphics, even to this day.

Halo 4 had a VERY promising story arch. Master Chief is his OWN character we only loan to play and imagine we are him when we manage his role in hte games. He should NOT be a robotic one hit liner machine but also not a total emotional Hamlet character either. Seems Halo 4, Halo 5 to some degree and Halo Infinite at the very least gives him the personality of both worlds. A dutyful, cold headed soldier with some funnyquirky lines and comment while also be a soft, human and understanding person on the insoide.

The gameplay of Halo 4 and 5 wre adequate. Not fond of fighting Prometheans but their concept is neat, their aesthetics.
Halo 4 and 5 were kinda opposite of each other. But not totally black and white.
Halo 4: Great, promising story arch beginning. Love the version of Cortana and her dynamic relationship with John. The Didact had potential buuut. Well books explain all after his death… H4 had also too codifyed Multiplayer, loadouts etc, no microtransaction were a plus though.

Halo 5 had worse story arch presentation. I dont hate fireteam Osiris, but their introduction should have been expanded, maybe a few missions with them BEFORE killing of Jul, which also were a travesty. WE should have done that in-game. Big points for trying to introduce Blue team though even if their introduction form book to game could have been done much more respectful of their characters. Also big pints for having us travel to Sanghelios and meet the Arbiter again.

The multiplayer was great, though too much movement options and ravenous microtransactions. And dont get me started on all those wacky armors, even though they are in-lore explained with that different armor manufacturers MIIIIGHT have something to do with going so wildly over board with certain designs, even if their intent might have been otherwise.
I love how 343 and fans now try to expand, clarify lore, canon aspects of the franchise along with book writers. Some kinks here and there but better than Bungie IMHO.
THATS top notch! Make sense of every singel lore and canon detail but at the same time let there be mystry and real danger too.

The problem is that when TOO much lore/ canon details regarding characters and such are left for the books, odd mini games, toys. Instead of smoothly introducing them in related games ( before/ after ) and from there delegate their prescence too books and other media, entertainement.

Now, this is my take on it all. Could write more but… well, wall of text and all that.

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Well, here’s the funny thing about that. I have been upfront and clear that I’m estimating and guessing at how much content we’ve seen. I don’t know, so I’m not going to make a factual claim. You, on the other hand, made a factual claim that Halo 3 has “some of the most balanced sandbox in the series”.

One claim demands evidence, the other does not.

Cortana musing out loud about the Installation’s architecture is a dialogue narrative following the exploration and discovery of just what Halo is. Is it obvious that the cave isn’t natural? Yes, but it also points out that it’s not a natural cave system and will likely lead somewhere. See, you’re keen to quote the first half, but not the rest which is more important. “This cave is not a natural formation. Someone built it, so it must lead somewhere.”

As for John’s line on Cairo Station, it’s cheesy but applicable. What’s the reason he’s leaving the station? To give the Covenant back their bomb. And he does.

Ah, the infamous and Chief Brostan-hated line. “I thought you’d be taller.” This speaks to just how massive John-117’s legend became in the UNSC. Told everywhere and known by everyone, he became a veritable Giant among Spartans. Setting an expectation that he stood 15 feet tall (chill, it’s metaphorical) and crushed Covenant with his pinky finger. But he’s only 7’3"? Thought he’d be taller.

None of these, absolutely NONE of them even remotely compare to a situation in which a base is about to be massively hit by Covenant, squadron leaders are standing by for a Rally Point and the only answer they get is… “to war”. No -BLAM!- Miranda. That is, objectively, a terrible line.

I am serious, yes. And no, what I’m talking about is the lighting, which ruins a lot of models by making them look like plastic.

Y’know, that claim is really ridiculous when I’m quoting you talking about the art style. “Halo 3 set the bar for what all subsequent halo titles should look like and reach followed suit.” Your words exactly. Regardless I touched on many ways in which Halo Reach did not follow in Halo 3’s style, from artwork to gameplay. So… yeah. Gaslighting doesn’t really work on a forum where everything is there to see.

This is going to be excessively tedious, unproductive, and thoroughly unenjoyable. You have a good 'un.

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I’m an old halo player too and the list is basically CE=3>2>Reach>>4>>>5. I’m glad parts of infinite are more like 3, but it needs to supersede 3 in all aspects as it has 14 years on it.

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74

I highly doubt 343 knocked out Forge and co-op because of ‘graphics’ as a competitor for attention. In fact, from listening to their posts and when they talk to us in reviews about the state of the game currently, it all seems to boil down more to balance issues they need to iron out.

Personally, I’d rather have a well ironed Forge and co-op than a buggy or unbalanced mess because everyone wanted to have their cake and eat it too on day 1.

Also, Forge didn’t come into play until Halo 3, so by that logic Bungie made a mistake for 2 games before finally getting it right? Co-op was also couch only until Xbox Live was realized, so I guess outside of couch play, Microsoft just wasn’t fast enough lol.

Personally, while I love to have fun in Forge from time to time and I do have friends waiting to play Infinite with me, we’ll survive for a few months. The game’s not going anywhere and will even be better by the time the parts get added.

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You are just saying they are more incompetent than I was, if you seriously believe it took them an entire year just for balance changes/bugfixing then that’s even worse.

That is a horrible argument, even if you used this logic it doesn’t change the fact that 343i were incapable of releasing a finished product after 6 years.

I’m probably even more hyped than you are, I will also be ok with the wait, WE are not the ones that will drop it and move on to other titles. Infinite will be swarming with new players the first month, what will their impression be? Even if you think the MP is enough the fact remains that Forge/Co-op would’ve made retaining more fans much easier.

Edit: the whole point of the thread is that 343i have yet to release a full fledged product, and that Halo 3 will always remain #1 in terms of content and scope.

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I’m not saying anything, I’m just saying that the lack of co-op and Forge at launch is not just because of bad graphics. The state of the game graphics wise is only part of the reason it got delayed and right about the time it was shown to us, Joe Staten came onboard to work on Infinite. As it stands, the game was going to be shipped that Holiday season and there was no mention of a lack of those two parts until Joe joined.

6 Years? Yeah, sure we haven’t had a Halo game outside of Halo Wars 2 for 6 years, but they sure as heck weren’t working on Infinite for 6 years lol. More like 3.

I dunno, I can’t speak for them, but I mean, if they’ve never played Halo before and are just joining now, what makes you think they’re gonna bellyache about a lack of co-op as if they’d had a Halo experience before? I’m sure they’ll be bummed they can’t play with friends from the get go, but some might even come from games where they normally only play solo. Though it is very likely that a co-op at launch would make it easier to retain attention.

However, I don’t understand why you’re blaming 343 for the lack of co-op, if I were a betting gal, I’d put my money on the fact that Staten’s arrival to the company to help out might have had something to do with co-op being delayed. Forge though, might just be they realized it wasn’t ready or wanted to put a little more polish on it. Because as I said before, there was no mention I could find of co-op being delayed until after Staten joined. Bit coincidental, but it could just be that, coincidence. I can only theorize.

Yeah, 343 has made some pretty bad calls, Halo 4 left a bad taste because of the MP being too CoD like, Halo 5 had a rough story that a lot of people didn’t care for, so Infinite has to make a good impression or else the fans are going to be more than just a little disappointed. BUT, co-op isn’t necessary for the game to function and neither is Forge.

Are both a lot of fun? Without a doubt.

Will the game run without them for a few months? Absolutely.

Is it a bummer neither is ready yet? Sure, if those are the only modes you play in.

Edit: moving forward, 343 has to play their cards right, they’ve made a lot of mistakes and yeah, some of them burned some people the wrong way. Bungie has made many mistakes before I’d imagine, heck, they make a LOT of mistakes now on their current game. But I won’t discredit the amazing job they did with previous Halo’s.

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wtf were they doing? Snorting coke?

(343i are professionals, they’ve been working on it for 6 years, this would be like me saying Halo 5 had 6 months of development, just laughable)

They won’t. They won’t know what they’re missing in that case. Many will end up leaving though regardless.

No Staten was sent in to finish production. He is known as a ‘closer’ of sorts. Blaming Staten tells me you don’t know what you are talking about… I’ll just move on before I hurt your feelings lol.

Its ok to be excited for Infinite, everybody is, but its releasing unfinished and instead of 343i trying to blow newcomers minds they often do the minimum and that is unfortunate for Halo fans. We’ll just have to hope and pray that Infinite doesn’t just end up being forgotten like 4/5 were.

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Well for one, a part of the team was working on Halo Wars 2, also, they were working on their engine, so, yeah, definitely not 6 years of development.

Co-op being a few months late to the party and Forge half a year isn’t gonna change that. They might come back when they drop, but you can’t force people to cling to something that can’t hold their attention (which means that if they like it, they like it, if they don’t, they don’t.). If co-op and Forge is the make or break deal for people, then you’re talking about people like Dr. Disrespect who only plays one thing and that’s it. Everything else doesn’t exist. And that’s fine if they’re only interested in one thing or another, but I mean, they will eventually be added. They’re not being removed indefinitely.

I never claimed to know what I was talking about? I don’t know squat about game development and what goes down behind the scenes, but I’m not the only one lol. I only speculate based on what I hear and what I keep hearing is that part of the down time without a main line Halo title was spent on working on the engine that they technically wanted to work on before Halo 5 was released.

Regardless of how Infinite ends up being, it’s going to hold attention one way or another. It’s a Halo title and while there is a possibility it may not hit the way older fans like, newer fans will likely find something they like about it. Really, the only ones who seem to think it’s gonna fail are Playstation haters and people still upset about a small delay on two features.

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Graphics arent important if you like the game.
But most casuals just play for a short time until they hop into the next game.
And they (mostly kids) expect great visuals cause they had it in every game they grown up with.

Us oldies played games with colored pixels.
So for us every tiny improvement on the visuals is already more than we ever needed to have fun in games.

me personally, i would play Infinite with H3 graphics if the gameplay is good.
And i will dump the game without thinking twice, when the gameplay sucks.
#grapple shot #mapdesign #CoD

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Many people seriously underestimate this. The game needs to be fun from day one, if you have a family, a job and other hobbies, you won’t wait months for a game to maybe be enjoyable at some point. It doesn’t need to be perfect but the groundwork has to be there.
Reach,4 and 5 suffered from this.

Also: nice profile picture! Always nice to see other people from my “neighborhood”

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i added you on xbox neighbour

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Halo 3’s story worse than Halo 5? Lol, no.

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Yeah it comes down to, “What’s on the back of the box Day 1?” Co-op/MP is always something I check for because I like games that I can play with my friends when the come over. None of us like having to pass the controller around like it’s 1995. So I try to have “party games” and what not. Obviously we sometimes do take turns, but it always better play simultaneously.

343 is trying to attract new players. What if these new players, that may know nothing about Halo, see that it’s not split screen and decide to play something that is split screen like COD? Couch co-op is an objectively good feature that all games should strive to have because it simply makes the game more accessible.

I remember when Titanfall 1 came out and took the FPS genre by storm. Despite it looking like Halo with Mechs (it’s not Halo, but it is sci-fi space marines), two things I love, I never got it, because it was missing a key feature: An offline campaign. Basically I needed an internet connection to even play the game, which is completely unplayable now. I can still boot up TF2 and play the campaign even if it MP is getting DDoS’d to hell and back.

Missing features isn’t some kind of deal breaker, but it will affect population. If the game didn’t grab people from day one because of missing feature, why would they comeback in 90 days? Halo might be entirely off their radar by then.

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I can forgive omission of split-screen, in my opinion not only is SS complete trash to play, I also find it exceptional hard from a development POV. Like sure a Series X can probably run SS no problem at 60fps, but do I believe that a base Xbox One could play it at 30fps on splitscreen? highly doubtful. so I think that a mixture of the general shift (note I didn’t say ‘trend’, this will never revert assuming internet doesn’t shut off or something) towards online play and hardware limitations.

I’m not against SS exactly, but I consider that a hardware limitation issue whereas lack of online Co-op is just incompetence/laziness.

lack of forge is probably the most impactful though, because there are tons of new players that maybe for the first time could get to use a map maker/builder, it would differentiate itself from other games and just open the floodgates so to speak for newer fans.

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SS isn’t about performance. If SS players cared about that, slicing their screen in half isn’t doing them any favors. SS is a community feature. Screw around with your friends (or family members which is the important one here). To play H5 campaign together, my sister and I had to buy 2 separate xbox ones. That’s horrible from a consumer standpoint. And what I found out is that the level design of H5’s campaign is much more fun with 2 or more players. Halo is also an old game and many fans probably grew up on N64, original Xbox, or Dial-up. We’ve played much worse, dropping some frames isn’t a big deal especially if it only impacts a certain, optional feature of the game.

My thoughts exactly on Forge. I’m not a forger, only dabbled in it in Reach. But not having it at launch means Halo could lose the Leonardo DaVinci of Forge because it wasn’t their at launch, said player got bore of Infinite and moved on to another game, never to look back. And any cool ideas they may have had are lost.

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This. I see life in 360p anyways. Couldn’t see that 4K stuff even if I wanted to.

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Visuals do matter if the game is attempting realism. Also visuals in VR are pretty sick e.g. Half Life Alyx.

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Underrated post. I’m glad they addressed that too.

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you think people would be ok playing Halo Infinite at 15fps and about 720p or so?

Like I was saying if you are playing on Series consoles, then it’s probably not that big of a deal, but Jesus would it be horrid on last gen consoles.