yeah but that’s clearly wrong, given like… whatever other shooters are out there, aren’t doing too great.
we get it you like new vegas
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I will always pick up a horror game and get engrossed. Love the genre in books films and games. Nothing hits me like feeling uneasy in your own home peering through the bottom of a beer bottle while hiding under a cushion!
However when it comes to Halo - it’s a great game. I have loved it since I was a teen back in the 2000s…. Some. People like sports games some like shooters. Most will bond with what they know.
You are right in saying that new players/younger players might like something different…. I have a daughter/nephews and nieces - students that I work with who are living examples of what you say.
The problem is;;; halo is old now and it has its own fan base. This game wasn’t built for its fans - Microsoft/Xbox/343 want to take over the world but like most dictators they have forgot about what matters.
The loyal fan!
This game failed not due to arena shooters being outdated… which I’m not denying. It failed due to bad game design. I don’t think it has a purpose, it’s based on challenges rather than persona. Then the campaign is a bit like part 1 of a trilogy but they haven’t told us it’s going to be a trilogy?!?
We are floating about in space /apparently for 6 months/ but it could be for longer.
Even live service games should have a beginning middle and end… 343 forgot this and broke the rules of the gods
Aristotle will be tutting in his grave
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Here’s what I’d like. Enough customizability in forge to simulate those other types to some degree.
This isn’t really looking at things exactly right. Splitgate’s jump in popularity was from portal trick tik-toks, not the actual pvp, and Doom 2016’s multiplayer was a bare-bones afterthought to the singleplayer. Of course they never truly took off.
As for the top 10? What else is anyone putting out? Recent shooters are a flop and not as many new games are coming out as more and more devs lean into live service. Nobody has put out anything to pull large amounts of players from the games that work and actively put out content.
I’m not saying Halo doesn’t need to adapt to the market, but you can’t say there isn’t a market for arena shooters when they only one to be trying (and flopping) is 343. We would be seeing infinite retain A LOT more of those numbers if it actually had content.
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hell in CE Aniversery the first halo game343 worked on you needed to grenade jump to get to skulls
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He literally just explained it in his post.
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It’s way more simple than that. The game is just bad and has a studio with a 15 year long catastrophic track record behind it.
The genre does not matter one bit, look at Elden Ring for example. Everything but casual (ok, maybe compared to Demon Souls or Sekiro) but ratings and numbers through the roof.
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343 is to blame for the failure of Infinite, we don’t need to shift the blame onto a vague discussion of how relevant arena shooters are
Halo would be fine today if Infinite launched content complete.
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The reason for Doom 4’s multiplayer being a flop was because it was more like Halo than Quake.
Doom16’s MP isn’t more like Halo, it’s clearly quake-inspired with loadouts.
343 is responsible for the failure of Halo Infinite. Not a change in trend.
Look at Halo MCC. It’s still holding strong because it full of good content to keep people playing.
Now look back at Halo Infinite. Hardly any reason to keep playing. You’re looking for the next Apex or Fortnite and that’s why people are downvoting you. They see right through that.
There’s a very good reason this community is apprehensive towards a BR.
At least the type take up all the devs attention and resources like Warzone.
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nah I don’t buy that argument. Had Halo not been a ‘live service’ and instead shipped with loads of maps and modes then the game would be healthy I feel at least in terms of a lot Halo fans. People that just love to play these games. Even releasing Forge later would not have hurt to such an extent
The trouble is it’s clearly obvious there isn’t much on the bone and people don’t like being taken for fools
Halo if done absolutely right could be an absolute asset for MS but they’ve not stayed true to it and outright changed it back and forth destroying any chance it might have had. They should have realised that you can’t simply redefine aspects so that it essentially becomes something else but they persevered doing just that and it’s diminished what a true force Halo could still have been
The truth is it all started with Bungie and Reach likely out of the same fear that they needed to be relevant and that required change. 343 has continued to run with this when in fact that simply gets us to where we are now
A shame as Halo deserves better
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While I agree that the age of the arena shooter is over (I personally think that that ended with the release of CoD 4 in 2007) I do not think that that is what is causing Halo’s issues now. Firstly, Halo isn’t really an arena shooter. Sure, it shares some obvious similarities, but it also differentiates itself in some massive ways. Halo is more of a genre itself. A bridge between arena shooters and arcade shooters. It set a lot of industry standards that games like CoD and Battlefield used in the early 2010s to become extremely popular. Standards that also started the downfall of the arena shooter genre. Things like regenerating health, a 2 weapon carry limit, and controller focused gameplay.
Long story short; Destiny took the community from Halo. CoD/Fortnite took the casual player base from Halo. Halo never had a big enough competitive community to support an entire game. Fortnite out Forges Forge. There is nothing that Halo Infinite offers currently that other games in the industry are not doing better. Gameplay is subjective, and even though I prefer Halo’s gameplay to all of those other games, that is clearly not the case for the vast majority of gamers.
That’s not even bringing up the blunder that was the Xbox One launch. When an entire generation of gamers play on a platform that does not offer Halo to begin with, when a F2P version comes out, why do they care?
I, sadly, believe that Halo as a series has run its course. A combination of mismanagement by 343i and external factors have erased any influence that it used to have. I’ll always love the older games and hope that Infinite can correct course, but I just don’t see it happening.
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OP, the theory gets downvoted and mocked because its simply not true. The launch of Infinite proves that that the age of Halo and arena shooters are not over. The problem is that Infinite was handled by an incompetent dev team. I don’t give a damn if it was released early as a “beta.” You don’t drop a game with only ONE playlist, especially for ranked and then call it a day.
What happened to Team Duos? Team Snipers? Rumble pit? Where’s ranked slayer? Ranked swat? Ranked skirmish? Ranked Duos? Ranked anything other than a single playlist that mixed objectives with slayer modes when all I want to play is slayer?
Hell, where’s forge? Why was such a high popular feature that could also lead to players creating content for the game delayed? Why did that not get more focus to ensure it was ready for launch?
The matchmaking is bad, we don’t have lobbies anymore, we can’t vote for maps. I spend more time staring at loading screens than I do socializing in lobbies and playing matches. We have a stupid challenge system that encourages players to spam quit games ruining the experience for other players and turning every game into bot matches and customization is limited because the devs decided to make this game “free to play.” Having different armor sets and customization items being locked to specific armor types has literally made the customization worse than Halo 3…a game that came out 15 years ago.
So no, I don’t believe the age of arena shooters are over. I don’t believe people just want a Halo battle royal. The real problem is this game is just incomplete hot garbage. They wasted 5 years on a POS engine instead of just using something like the unreal engine or the unity engine and they could have spent that time on the GAME instead of throwing themselves into technical debt trying to upgrade Halo 5’s garbage engine.
343 is just incompetent and doesn’t deserve to be working on the Halo franchise. Microsoft is also to blame for allowing this crap to go on for 3 Halo games now. Their largest franchise is just a joke now because they didn’t step in after the disaster of Halo 4 and especially Halo 5. Halo 6 should have been made by a different studio.
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If Halo Infinite really was a Live service game then I think it could have been successful, but no content for several months is not a Live service game. If you lie to the gamers they will run away from it!
343 has lied about almost everthing about this game, and now they dont even have the people to develope new content. Season 3 will probably be in November/December and by that time player numbers will have dropped below 5.000 on Xbox on daily basis.
I also think most stuff in season 2 was ready on launch, at least the 2 maps.
For some reason Season 2 got delayed and after 6 months they will release 2 new maps for only one game mode per map.
People forget games quickly nowadays, there is so much else to play and Halo Infinite will just be another failure like Battlefield 2042.
I think Halo I is beyond saving now to be honest 2 new maps wont change anything. And its a very sad thing for Halo fans.
There are too many things that need to fixed and looking at the state of the game most things wont get fixed. And if they do there will be no players playing this game.
MS should just admit the failure and let some of their new teams create a new Halo game, maybe just for multiplayer in Unreal engine 5.
MS has bought Activision and Betsheda, why not let Betsheda devlope a Halo game for the fans.
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I think that a fundamental flaw in some of the Halo community’s thinking is that Ranked playlists are something that the player base at large care about. I don’t think that they are, and I think that 343i’s insistence of only having one proves that. They know the population numbers better than anyone, and have cited multiple times that the playlist selection is limited to ensure a healthy playlist population. The sad reality is that its a positive feedback loop. Less playlists result in less players, which results in less playlists. If they were to, right now, release 5 more ranked playlists, every single one of them would be broken instantly. There is just not enough people who want to play what is becoming a BRs only playlist.
And it’s not only Halo Infinites population numbers. They have data from every single Halo game on this, and I’m sure that the data is showing that multiple playlists is a bad idea. My biggest question is why this game did not release with a match composer system a la MCC. That would pretty much single handedly fix every single issue that the game is experiencing at the moment. All they would need to include is a toggle for ranked or not ranked.
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Very good post and summary.
It might have been clear to you but I just needed further and more explicit clarification.
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I mean look at what they did to assassinations. They took a fun, cool and MONETIZABLE feature of halo and removed them from MP AND campaign because it was “competitively viable” enough. But 343 already did everything they could have done to deal with that. Bungie already knew some players wouldn’t want to use them (yoinks and showstoppers), so you had to hold melee to activate them. 343 realized this wasn’t good enough since player were still fatfingering the button, so they let you just turn them off in the options menu and custom games settings. I think they were removed in ranked as well.
They said they want to bring them back later, but implemented different. Whatever that means.
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Not sure I agree to be honest.
Battle royales are by far the most popular right now, granted. But I don’t think there’s a shortage of people enjoying and looking for good arena shooters.
Does the annual release of COD count? It does, right? Even though the recent releases have been a bit bleh; there’s always good fun to be had in a shooter with that sort of pace versus the more methodical BR.
Infinite on the other hand is just a bit of a mess. I think that’s the real problem here.
Lack of maps, lack of updates, transactions are predatory, poor net code, non-stop desync issues, interfering with core game modes (tactical slayer…what’s tactical about manglers?), the list goes on.
It’s eye opening when you realise how big 343 is as a team and just how much money they got to play around with.
Something is very, very wrong at 343.
Not with arena shooters.
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