I hope 343 reacts to feedback more readily

Games Other Halo
1

Seriously. I was just thinking about Reach, how in the beta people gripped about certain things and Bungie barely took them seriously. It wasn’t until a year release, when 343 took the reins, that issues started getting resolved.

I hope that in Halo 4, 343 really brings the hammer down on issues that the public cries out on. Even if that means you have to ditch some game element that you really like and you felt like you spent a fair amount of time developing, it is better to take the feedback seriously and respond appropriately. Most gamers aren’t going to wait a year for stuff to get resolved.

I mean, I wouldn’t mind if sometime during the summer, 343 brought up a public beta and basically said “Tell us what you think” and responded appropriately.

And before people whine and say “Oh, but the COD fans will flood into the game, cry about it not being COD, and then the game will become COD”… I don’t recall anything like that in the beta feedback. The biggest points were that the two maps were bad (seriously, 343, if you get feedback that bad for your maps, I’d say just go ahead and scrap them before release), bloom was awful, movement speed was too slow, grenades were OP, and that AAs were bad. Other than the grenades, I think even now there’s still a lot of outrage among the most Halo of fanboys about those issues.

2

Nothing that has been done to Reach to try and improve it has effected how I play the game or made me better or worse and to me they should probably just leave Reach alone since everytime they do something people just keep complaining.

3

> Nothing that has been done to Reach to try and improve it has effected how I play the game or made me better or worse and to me they should probably just leave Reach alone since everytime they do something people just keep complaining.

I think of it like modeling… your first go around you’ll likely have large error, or complaints on the forum, but once you further adjust your model, you try to aim for “white noise”, which is random and unfocused error. In balancing and adjusting a game you strive for the same thing - if the complaints are random and unfocused, then you know you’ve taken care of all the major issues.

4

Agreed, they should probably ignore feedback like “buff the AR” or “nerf the utility weapon”. People don’t understand how essential it is for gameplay to have a utility weapon that can compete at all ranges depending on player skill.

5

> Agreed, they should probably ignore feedback like “buff the AR” or “nerf the utility weapon”. People don’t understand how essential it is for gameplay to have a utility weapon that can compete at all ranges depending on player skill.

Nerfing the utility weapon already happened with bloom. It solved nothing and made issues worse. That’s what I mean by reacting to feedback, the fanbase suggested something, they tried it out, but it didn’t work. Bungie was just too slow or stubborn to roll the change back.

Bungie gave us AAs, we tried it out, it was given mostly negative feedback (I’d say that sprint is pretty split in the player base though, if it came back or not I don’t think it would cause TOO many waves compared to the other AAs).

I hope the relationship with 343 has more of a back and forth. Popular ideas are tried and tested, if they fail they get canned. Their new innovations are tried and tested, if they fail they get canned.

6

> > Agreed, they should probably ignore feedback like “buff the AR” or “nerf the utility weapon”. People don’t understand how essential it is for gameplay to have a utility weapon that can compete at all ranges depending on player skill.
>
> Nerfing the utility weapon already happened with bloom. It solved nothing and made issues worse. That’s what I mean by reacting to feedback, the fanbase suggested something, they tried it out, but it didn’t work. Bungie was just too slow or stubborn to roll the change back.

Honestly, I like some of that stubbornness.
Every Halo game has come with its share of changes and its share of whining. Bungie listened, but if they had acted upon what the community wants every time, or even a majority of the time, I don’t think they would have experimented as much.

> Bungie gave us AAs, we tried it out, it was given mostly negative feedback (I’d say that sprint is pretty split in the player base though, if it came back or not I don’t think it would cause TOO many waves compared to the other AAs).

Honestly, I love the AAs, and most of the hatred for them is confined to the Waypoint forums (From my experience. I know that it is probably more widespread than that, but I don’t think the hatred is universal)

Personally, I believe that the armor abilities are poorly balanced, but not inherently bad. Example: Sprint in combination with long kill times makes it too easy for sprinters to break an engagement and survive. If the weapons did more damage, Sprint would be an ability that requires skill and circumstance to use effectively.

> I hope the relationship with 343 has more of a back and forth. Popular ideas are tried and tested, if they fail they get canned. Their new innovations are tried and tested, if they fail they get canned.

Given the confusion over TU changes and which playlist has them, I’d hazard that 343i should work on how they introduce the changes before they make it a policy.

7

> Sprint in combination with long kill times makes it too easy for sprinters to break an engagement and survive. If the weapons did more damage, Sprint would be an ability that requires skill and circumstance to use effectively.

Yeah, I could see that. I’m not really that against sprint, but I am against players easily escaping bad situations.

@ the other AAs: I’d like to see map flow balanced around either having or not having sprint. The map flow just feels wrong in Reach at least to me.