Let’s start with the low-hanging fruit. 343i reset ranks but didn’t fix any issues that compromise the game’s competitive integrity. Not only that, but a majority of people are playing multiple 3v4s in placements, simply unacceptable for a 4-month-old game. The rank reset was a complete waste of everyone’s time. All it did was change the emblem you see. Ranked is still broken. We still have people dropping hard negatives after placements in almost every game. This was supposed to “fix” that.
They simply don’t care; if they did, they would spend a few hours on adding a function that is called a few seconds after a match starts, and if it’s a 3v4, end the game, show a splash screen saying “match canceled” and return you to the lobby. Instead of taking a little time to handle 3v4 at the start of a match properly, they just left it alone didn’t do a damn thing about it.
Microsoft barred 343i from talking to anyone from Bungie once they took over the Halo franchise, which is why the first few halo games they released were utter garbage. Halo Infinite is the first game they released with proper Halo mechanics; despite nailing the mechanics, they are thoroughly screwing up almost everything else. This is what is driving a lot of frustration in the community, the game has a ton of potential to be the best Halo, but it’s clear that it won’t be, too many things are broken that are not even being addressed honestly. Instead, they are blaming things on irrelevant stuff like solar flares and geo-filtering.
Most developers at 343i are on 18-month contracts. They have very few full-time employees. The quality of work they release leads me to believe the devs aren’t passionate about Halo. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of them haven’t even played the original Halos. The state of the game tells me that the majority of devs at 343i want to get their code good enough to pass peer review and make it into production so they can collect their paycheck at the end of the week. I genuinely believe the dev team could care less about the game experience, which is why the game is plagued with issues deeply seeded in the codebase, despite what the 343i marketing team wants you to believe. If a single dev at 343i is truly passionate about Halo, they sure as hell aren’t showing it through their work.
No top-tier developer is going to work for 343i simply because they aren’t interested in having to find another job in 18 months. I wouldn’t be surprised if 343i is full of entry-level developers, based on the game’s stability and buggy codebase. To make a truly great game, you need devs that are passionate about the game. No serious dev is going to be passionate about a game on an 18-month contract.
- I know, a lot of game devs are on contract, but that mostly applies to one-off games. When you have a franchise game that uses the same engine, they should be full-time as it makes no sense to have new devs learn the codebase the old team made every 18 months.
Why are server tick rates set at 60hz, they use Azure which is owned by Microsoft (which, unfortunately, isn’t ideal). If the game isn’t just a cash grab, why do they have a laughable tick rate and such a limited amount of playlists? There is absolutely no reason for it.
The Blogs going into reasons for Desync and geo-filtering are complete and utter nonsense. They are nothing more than a PR move. Find me a single game developer that says anything 343i has blamed issues on is legitimate. They literally explained how the internet works and was like, “this is why we have desync”…. no, you have Desync, mele, and shot registration issues because the game engine is broken. The game engine is broken because every 18 months, your developer’s contracts expire, and the newly hired developers need to spend a significant amount of time familiarizing themselves with the codebase before they can even get started working on the game.
Any programmer knows how much of a pain this is, and if it’s sloppy and poorly documented, forget about it.
Infinite will never be in a good state. Did they nail the game mechanics, finally? Yes, yes, they did. But they screwed up just about everything else, and I have serious doubts about any of it ever being fixed.
343i cares more about predatory microtransaction practices than releasing game content. I don’t think I need to go into detail here; the community is pretty aware of this already.
I would say the best way to get them to change quickly is to stop playing and uninstall the game, but 343i is doing a perfectly fine job of decimating the player base without anyone’s help.
I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if the player base falls so low that the game is no longer profitable, and as a result, they don’t end up finishing the game, let alone fixing a lot of the game’s issues, or creating any new content. They will continue to drip-feed the content they have already created, and end it there.
I would like to formally thank 343i for ruining the game franchise that many of us have such fond memories of, they just spit in our faces time and time again.
343i, F you.