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

Games Halo Infinite
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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.

73

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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75

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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80

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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82

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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84

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.

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Ya I was aware of this.
It still failed to really explain his logic imo but it was a good first step.
However I didn’t think it was applicable to this thread.
That being due to the fact we are discussing first Impressions.
over a decade of not having any reason for this can hardly count. :joy:
I do believe I mentioned “auxiliary content” in my post prior to or post the one quoted.

I hope we get more on this later because he very well could have been caught in the blast had the arbiter not stopped 05 firing.
There’s no reason for truth to know what the gravemind had planned.
or for him to expect the, up to that point successful, tartarus to fail.
Especially when the demon was on high charity.

Here it is from post #9 of the thread for simplicity.

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Do you think people would be ok with playing Halo Infinite on half a screen? Apparently they would.

No, I don’t. ANY game running that poorly, people shouldn’t be ok with. But if the single addition of splitscreen tanks your game’s performance that bad badly, then the game had more problems that the devs realized.

All I’m saying is that it wasn’t too long ago when 30fps was considered state of the art. It wasn’t unplayable then, and sacrificing it for a splitscreen option isn’t horrible. And if it’s just SS for campaign, I could care less about my frames.

I’ll say it one more time: Split screen is not about performance. Split screeners’ enjoyment of the game does not come from framerate and resolution, it comes from experiencing the game with their friends and family in the same room, at the same time. If lowered performance is preventing them from having fun despite being in arm’s length of their buddy, then they should just stick to online co-op.