Here is my roadmap on how 343 can fix Halo quickly before and immediately after season 2’s launch. I’m a nobody with no experience in game development. Laugh with me.
- Release Breaker (BTB) and Catalyst (Arena) as soon as they’re ready. I mean, even if one of them is ready now then just release the map before 3rd May (S2).
- Begin working on a third ‘new’ map for Arena, even if it’s a map from a previous Halo and work to release that as soon as physically possible.
- Double the amount of spaces for shop items from 5 slots to 10 and add in popular bundles and lower the prices more than you already have.
- Ensure weekly ultimate rewards are more varied and if you ever offer an emblem, ensure you give out the armour, vehicle, weapon and nameplate versions at the same time (not like the Driving Offensively emblem we’ve had 4 weeks running).
- Add classic game modes into the game such as Assault, Neutral Flag and Infection.
- Create an Action Sack playlist with weird and wonderful game modes like Shwatguns, Team Snipers, Rockets, Swords and other silly game modes.
Then, once you’ve got content in the game for people to have fun with, then you work on the actual proper meat of the game such as:
- Work on mission replay as campaign priority 1
- Work towards co-op campaign progress
- Fix and improve custom games (which is less important if you have a solid online matchmaking service)
- Put every available resources towards Forge. Once that’s done, 90% of your work is done because the community can then make game types and maps for matchmaking.
- After all that, quality of life improvements. People will be less angry about server connections, desync and armour customisation / store prices if they have fresh, repayable content.
Getting Halo into a playable and fresh state to bring people back in is easy. The important stuff listed at the top is essentially don’t release the same emblem five times, add a new playlist with some fun game modes and release a map or two as soon as they’re complete.
In the grand scheme of things, there’s really not a lot you (343) need to do to make Halo Infinite great to play. It’s actually quite a simple feat, and I know it’s simple because other studios have done it in the past as well. The only excuse is if you don’t have any staff working on anything, which seems likely considering recent blog posts and comments from Sketch saying you’re working on things like hiring.
It’s so easy to get Halo to where it needs to be short term. This is why people are so angry.