I am also one of those people that thought Halo 4 was decent, 343 didn’t have enough time from the previous release to completely screw up the base code. I liked the short series, Halo 4 Forward Unto Dawn, it was a good pregame release Idea. Halo 5 at least had a lot of varied environment maps.
Halo Infinite, I’m sure the graphics department wasn’t needed much, I did not expect the level of copy and paste I saw in this game, there were a few spots where I think they just copied from Destiny, but that’s what happens when the creative juice runs dry, start pinching from other works.
And yet here Halo is, 10 years later, having seen some of the largest expanses of the franchise as a whole. The lore has boomed - there’s a 487 page book that still doesn’t cover everything - with multiple projects and merchandise garnering visibility–
Oh, but you think the Matchmaking is stagnating or failing?
Poor metric. Always has been and always will be. There’s far more to Halo than Matchmaking alone.
270000+ players at launch to 6600+ current day on Steam alone. That’s a colossal fall. Naturally a drop off will always happen as a game ages, but not that sharp and not that quickly.
Anthem was open world too. Size doesn’t equate to success.
Quality is more important than size, but in fairness I haven’t read the books, so I’ll just take your word for it.
There needs to be interest for merchandise to matter. Look at Disney’s attempt at Star Wars for a good example. The Disney trilogy merchandise only succeeded in overfilling bargain bins, and causing headaches for retailers trying to get rid of the product. Granted Halo hasn’t hit that level quite yet.
Look up the Steam numbers. The game is designed in such a way that it’s pushing people away. Feeling like playing the game, or playing it with friends? Be prepared for having to deal with the game telling you how to play, and cross your fingers that your friends have compatible challenges if you guys care about progressing. And that’s not even mentioning the raging garbage fire that is the monetization.
And? Again, that shows to matchmaking. Which is not the only aspect of Halo, and not the only metric to it’s “success or failure”.
The Franchise, not the playspace.
We’re looking at completely different things, it very much seems. You seem to look only at Matchmaking, and when that slopes off the game (or worse, the franchise as a whole) is “dead”. I look at everything, and Halo is far from dead.
Just to chime in on this:
Encyclopedias to expand on the universes’ lore is all fine but if your main story cannot be comfortably fit into a game without needing exposition from multiple volumes, it’s just a failure of video game story telling.
That’s one of my massive problems with 343 era games: They keep doing the thing where they are telling the story off screen or not in the games themselves. I bet characters like Osiris would be much more loved if they were given the spotlight in at least 1 full campaign story set.
He’s from Halo Wars 2. I’m not against the Banished featuring in a mainline game but seriously, 343 just drops the ball hard in trying to continue their own story.
If Halo 4 was TFA, Halo 5 was TLJ and Infinite is ROS.