I disagree.
Infinite is a 25% done halo game devoid of stats and the social features that made previous games popular.
343 seems to take pleasure pooping on the community.
It lost what made it originally popular to poorly chase trends.
Now theyve thrown in mtx and seasons for a live service game thats a mess devoid of content, anything but a live service.
Im sure its making money, but its the worst halo game released yet.
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It can be redeemed.
There’s only a few big issues.
And they are not impossible to fix.
The real problem is, how long will it take…
Desync.
Weapon balancing/ sandbox.
Actual rank fixes.
Better store, better prices and access to vaulted items.
Forge
I refuse to read the OP because the title is blatantly wrong. Halo Infinite is dead specifically because of poor decisions made by 343’s management and Microsoft’s executives who do not understand what they’re working with and only desire to milk a content cow. At launch 20 million downloads. This is (if you can ignore the bugs, the desync, the shot registration, the inability to find most matches on your local server, etc, etc, plus every other problem in the game…) quite literally the best Halo multiplayer we’ve ever had. That’s what makes everyone so especially angry. We could have had the ultimate experience. But instead, we have whatever this turned out to be.
Most people on my Xbox friends list (which I’ve accumulated over the course of 15 years, since I got Halo 3), jumped on to Infinite for the first week it came out. By the second week, half of them were gone. I promise you 95% of them were not trying out Halo for the first time. Your claim of “it died because it’s Halo” is completely invalid. It died because 343 as a company doesn’t care about making a good game. It died because Microsoft executives sentenced it to a microtransactional hell. Halo is struggling because the people who keep taking control of it, give absolutely zero -Yoink!-s about any person in the Halo fandom.
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“no mission select”
I was just playing Control and when I finished the game and learned about the after-game-content that’s offered though 2 arcade game kiosks within the game world… I took note of the fact that Control’s devs gave the player the ability to replay any of the game’s missions. At that moment I thought, “now why is it that Halo Infinite doesn’t have something like this?” Sure, I can keep playing around in Infinite’s open world map, driving/flying vehicles and killing enemies that spawn not-so-randomly wherever I go, but if I want to play through a specific mission that I enjoy, I have to start an entire new campaign and work my way up to that mission.
They shouldn’t have released this game until Campaign Co-op was ready to play. Co-op missions are part of the Halo experience. Microsoft really fusked up by doing this because now that the game has been out for 7 months there’s only going to be a minority of players who care enough to go back and replay the game simply because now 3 of their buddies can play also.
What Infinite really needed was an Open World Multiplayer mode, where the battles aren’t confined to an Arena. 343 could have created new Spartan Ops missions and they could have released updates that contain new objectives… or Firefight. -Yoink!-, they didn’t even bother getting Forge working before release. Took 'em 6 years to come out with a beta and what we actually got isn’t even tuned to run all that great. It’s like they intentionally made the game so it runs best on their Xbox SX.
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Can verify.
20 characters.
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Nah I think 343 killed it. Chad and Brad aren’t good candidates because to their own estimation they played it a couple of times. H2, H3 and Reach all held a strong population and games like Counterstrike, Siege, Valorant are hard games mechanically and keep an audience, yes they are all a certain archetype unlike Halo but it doesn’t take just knuckledraggers to make a game popular.
Halo under 343 has
- an identity crisis that spans its single player, its multi-media and its multiplayer.
- a severe lack of legacy content, or the legacy content is done incorrectly
- regression of base features and functionality
- poor build quality and execution compared to the past
- due to xbox and 343, a gutting of the various social features that built communities
343 does a horrible job appealing to the people that loved CE - Reach era Halo
343 does a horrible job competing with the base content and functionality of its competition and lose a potential new audience. They can’t do mtx well, the base gameplay isn’t fun due to heavy aim, matchmaking and networking and forgettable maps and ui. Longevity, engagement and QoL features suck.
TL;DR 343 did kill Halo
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Yes, COD4 in 2007 gave the answer for Halo franchise, easy, fun and a lot of unlocks to keep your motivation. But 343 didn’t change the formula a lot, Halo isn’t a first class game for most of modern players, you can call it AAA, but that doesn’t help it, it’s only in 21st place of most played game according to weekly Xbox Store data, for a Xbox first party F2P multiplayer game, it’s definitely a failure.
And, 343 could design a gun attachment or so on system for this game, but they put all efforts in aesthetic mtx.
Funny. My first reaction to Halo infinite was the same as two of your friends. Agree with all points. These moments are incomprehensible and annoying. You need to step over yourself just to get used to the mechanics. I disagree that arena-shooter is the issue. Doom, Unreal tournament are legends. In the case of Halo infinite, the implementation is terrible. 343 did everything badly. If you can’t do it yourself, learn from others. Broken, buggy, and cheat-infested, Warzone doesn’t lose that many players. Because a low entry threshold (money extraction) is provided. Killed - appeared again after 15 seconds, the kit is always with you. If you want more - go to the royal battle. And there is a pistol at the start, a gulag, which gives a chance, the allies can redeem. Everything is done for simplicity. A player’s mistake doesn’t cost much. In infinite, when you first enter, you suffer from everything: mechanics with shields, you shoot, but the enemy does not die, a bunch of incomprehensible weapons, you need one punch, then two, uncomfortable transport management, and then 4 horsemen of the apocalypse come into play: a loss of synchronization, sbmm, incomprehensible progression and lack of new content. As a result, only fans who still have faith in 343 remain in the game. But there is such an expression: the horse is dead. This horse is dead and it must be accepted. But the players hope that he will come to life, but he died. Let’s put new horseshoes on it! Guys, this won’t help. And let’s make a saddle different, more comfortable! It won’t work. Or maybe 343 you need to invite a specialist in horses? No. The horse is dead. Just need a new one. Let’s take another example. When they built the house, they made a bad foundation, as a result, everything in the house is crooked and cracked, the roof is in holes, the plaster is crumbling. Cosmetic repairs will not help here, you need to demolish the house and rebuild it, otherwise it will not work.
i guess halo is missing a hook. as mediocre as i think other games are, they atleast all have interesting hooks and lots of variations in gameplay
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No, 343 is the stake at the heart of halo. Halo is an aging brand yes, but it has a passionate and numerous core of people who have loved this franchise for 2 decades. "modern gamers’ may not find halo appealing, but halo players certainly did.
But 343 has repeatedly failed, ignored, and pissed off core halo players, for the entire decade they’ve been in control of the franchise. The only good press they’ve gotten in a decade was ‘we fixed this thing we broke’, oh, and i guess tossing some new things into MCC, a collection of games they didnt even make.
No one I know who used to play halo plays halo anymore. They for the most part didn’t even go to other shooter games, but did continue playing other games. They all came back when infinite launched and left not because it ‘didn’t play like a modern shooter’, but because the maps were boring, the modes were extremely limited, the campaign was boring and lacked co-op, the shop was predatory, desync made things unreliable, most the guns feels weak or useless.
Even if it never reached the heights it used to, Halo could have done pretty well if it had properly continued what had lead it to success before 343 took over. But instead its core playerbase will continue to be pushed away by 343’s decisions, until all that is left are 343 defenders trying to point fingers at anything that isn’t the company that’s never produced a success.
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Some fair points but I don’t buy it overall. Sure, even if 343i was the best dev around and we didn’t have any of these big issues present, the game still wouldn’t be as big as games like Fortnite, Apex, or CoD, but it would be in a way better state than it is now, and that is entirely 343i’s fault.
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You are naive to think those are the main issues.
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If it was made in the way it was in the past, it would have, by a minimum, millions of players just like Halo 3. The problem is that these issues 343 are causing are deal breaking. Nobody wants to play this crap. Not even die hard fans.
Passionate communities (albeit often small ones) form around games that are “too hard”, provided they are mechanically consistent and well designed. These types of games are phenomenal eSports fare, especially when their mechanics are easily understood but very difficult to master. I would argue that Halo traditionally very much fits that category- it’s pretty easy to see what a player is doing in Halo, but it can be very difficult to recreate a pro player’s success.
I love Infinite at its heart- The core gameplay feels oh-so-right in a way I honestly didn’t think 343i was capable of. But the technical issues, lack of map variety, and how slowly the game took off and continues to glacially move forward are what keeps it down.
The general jank of high ping, weird shot registration, rubber banding, et. al take the solid foundation of the gameplay and ruin it, way too often. The SBMM has plagued the experience making social playlists feel extremely sweaty pretty much since launch (I have heard this may be changing, thankfully). The monetization has obliterated fan goodwill. Content updates are too few and far between, they don’t tend to add very much exciting new stuff to the game, and they often break established things in the game (BR Jam, CSR jank), leading to more lack of confidence in 343 from fans. Especially when a “hotfix” can take literally weeks to drop for something as gamebreaking as the semiauto jam bug at the start of S2.
A well designed game doesn’t feel fun or fair when it’s plagued by technical hiccups. A “live service” game feels like a joke when it isn’t updated for months at a time, and whenever updates do come, they almost without exception bring with them more jank and bugs.
If Infinite was polished, more content complete, felt more consistent to play, and had a more regular and reliable cadence of cool content updates with maps and modes as well as cosmetics, it would be doing a lot better than it is. That isn’t to say that it would eclipse CoD, and I take your point about many players preferring that twitch shooter experience, but can you honestly say you don’t believe Infinite is the best version of itself it could be right now?
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Game is missing so much and just the setup itself is bad. Its def not because of Halo. There was 250k players to start lol
The game launched in a laughably bad state, developer has an equally bad track record and there are many alternatives.
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Oh, are we moving to the next phase? Where the problems are acknowledged, then explained away as inevitable.
“Of course 343 failed, they never had a chance to succeed, the genre is dead/the fans are toxic/there were UI issues that noone could have predicted”
Always some lame excuse, it couldn’t possibly that 343i managment pooped the bed again
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The problem with Halo Infinite or 343’s Halo in general is that they can’t seem to nail down what makes them unique. They keep trying to half and halfs and advertise to the broader audience without polishing down and displaying an actual functional product.
It’s like they’re trying to sell 2 flavours of icecream combined but the product they’re selling isn’t even ice cream, it’s just a melted mess.
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20 million people came to check out Halo’s return to form, about 90-93% of them left because it was buggy, unfinished, and loaded with F2P garbage. If they had charged for the game and used a box business model with dlc in the future, this would’ve been the most successful Halo launch of all time. It also would’ve launched finished or damn near close.
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I don’t think infinite is dead. But it really does need some help in the multiplayer maps and campaign content, like being able to replay missions without having to start a whole new game would be nice.