> 2533274817408735;13:
> [snip]
There is a huge difference between following the development of a title and taking everything said therein at face value. Just because somebody doesn’t do the latter does not mean they should just stop informing themselves altogether.
For the record, I do have a background in software development, although not specifically in game development, this I openly admit. That being said, my work does involve a hefty amount of reusing and refurbishing old code to work in unintended ways, including running on newer and different harware, as well as making this very code run in different environments. (And I’m not talking the miniscule differences between Xbox and Windows here, I’m talking Windows vs Linux vs Mac, although the latter two are more similar than dissimilar when it comes to coding.) Even if that weren’t the case, everybody with a sufficiently high skill level in class-based programming can extrapolate from their field to at least make educated guesses on which statements seem plausible and which don’t. And that statement with the “11 engines” seemed highly dubious to me, which you have already admitted was paraphrasing.
I had already seen the August Update before (not the July Update though) and all it talks about is them having issues with memory restrictions. Now, this I can buy, especially trying to fit everything in such a way to run on the first XBone model, given that it was already hilariously outdated when it released, particularly with respects to RAM and especially considering what they were initially planning with it. (Kinect constantly running while watching TV, streaming services and gaming, probably at the same time with docked apps? Yeah, not gonna happen with 8Gig DDR3.)
However, Reach being such a huge issue made me raise my eyebrow back then just as much as it still does now, especially given that the MCC has already Halo 4 running inside it. You could have made the point that the jump from Halo 3 (or even ODST) to Reach added a huge amount of things that weren’t there before that now need to be loaded into RAM, but there really wasn’t that big of a technical upgrade to Halo 4 so that Reach couldn’t draw the majority of its resources from stuff that’s already there. Even if there had been a significant amount of stuff added to Halo 4, that doesn’t mean that they immediately throw out the old. There might be some renaming and relinking necessary, but that’s called optimization and is simly part of the process.
Again, I’m not saying that these are outright lies, but they do sound like exaggeration in some cases. Remember that 343 is still in the pre-release marketing phase for MCC, as the game has not yet completely launched on PC. Playing the sympathy card and stressing how hard it was to get all of this working is still a good deflection tactic in case something goes horribly wrong like it did with, well, with the Master Chief Collection. And I bet everybody there, developer or not, knows this and is doing everything to prepare for this possible eventuality.
Despite all this, I just want to clarify that I am not arguing in favor of Infinite or even H5G being added to the MCC, neither that it will, nor that it even should. Specifically with H5G, this might be highly unlikely, depending on how the legal progress on Microtransactions and Loot Boxes is going to turn out. In fact, given all its other shortcomings (missing splitscreen, horrible story, broken theater, etc.) I expect them to treat it the same way Bethesda is treating all the bad Elder Scrolls and Fallout spinoffs, omitting them from all game collections and re-releases and pretend they never existed. (And yes, I know H5G is not a spinoff; however since none of the future games will be numbered, nobody will notice if one title is missing, and depending how Infinite’s intro recaps the story, it won’t be needed.)
