The passage about Live & Customization is a good read. What happened between 2020-2021???
http://web.archive.org/web/20201208234331/https://www.halowaypoint.com/en-us/news/inside-infinite-december-2020
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Let’s review how 343 sticked to its own “Strategic Pillars”:
- "Healthy engagement is paramount: We want everyone to play the game in a healthy manner that they enjoy. We’re not trying to build a grind-machine that burns everyone out in an attempt to get more game time from them. Halo Infinite needs to be a place where we all look forward to spending time. "
FAIL. Weekly challenges are a grind-machine and I’m already burned out with awful objectives depending on playing (or worse even, winning) game types that rarely proc, like Total Control in BTB, or getting a number of kills with weapons or vehicles that are not present on every map.
- “We maintain a player-first focus: Think of all the games we’ve all played that have random rewards, ask people to play a way they hate just for a new shiny, or weaponize FOMO against the player. There will be limited-time events, but we don’t want to turn free time into a chore. We’re not all about that. Everyone should enjoy their time in Halo Infinite.”
FAIL. All the challenges do is to ask us to play in ways that we hate. Not all the time, but it surely happens. Case in point: you made me hate BTB because I had a challenged of winning 3 total control matches, but even though I played for hours, I rarelly could find total control. Boy, did you make me hate stupid BTB CTF…
- "Unambiguous Value: If someone invests their time or money in the game, they should understand what they’re getting and that it will be worth more than the investment. Examples of this in practice include no lootboxes, either through engagement or any premium route. And we’re not selling power or giving an unfair advantage in-game via any route. "
SUCCESS. I know what I’m buying in this game. I still think most of it is severely overpriced and there is an awful grind for leveling up if you’re not actively trying to do the weekly challenges, though.
- "Always be listening, learning and experimenting: The Live team is all about growth and iteration. We build and support some fun content, but there will be times when things don’t go as planned or where something we tried didn’t land well. There will also be times when we believe in ideas and want to give them a chance in the wild, and we ask that you be understanding as we try them out. These will be moments for us to learn, and grow. It’ll require a close partnership with our players, where we can talk about what happened and what we were trying to do, and be transparent in our plans to move ahead, as much as we can. "
The jury is still out on this one. I hope you do listen and overhaul this terrible progression system that sullies an otherwise terrific videogame.
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I am genuinely interested what happend because they sounded reasonable in the past. I also don’t believe the blame Microsoft card. Take the bigger “flagship” franchises like Forza Horizon or Sea of Thieves for example.
With the player numbers in these games, they could’ve easily added some more stuff to the store, but these two games are more or less well monetized. The only other “big” name that went south in that regard was Gears 5 and they deserved every critique they got and learned almost nothing.
And I don’t believe for one second that the questionable change to F2P MP is the sole reason for what we have now. They could’ve easily filled Forza and SoT with transactions to the brim but both games provide you with tons of stuff to unlock for free/reasonable time investment.
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Gears 5 had the same problem as infinite at launch, barebones game with barely any content and everything paywalled along with slow progression system. However infinites is far worse than what G5 was at launch. They corrected course later but it hurted the game on the long run.
It pains me that halo is doing the same thing and i have to deal with it again… damn incompetent devs.
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343i are absolute scumbags to think that charging people $10 to have different coloured armour is acceptable. Like, every previous Halo game you’ve had a choice of lots of colours, and now you have to pay $10 to be white or blue is honestly incredible. 99c would be one thing, but literally charging people $10 for every single thing you can think of is outrageous.
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Infinite’s multiplayer was either rushed or reworked significantly in the past year, because there is so much missing and overlooked.
The game plays great, but the mechanics surrounding that core experience are just awfully implemented.
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They’ve betrayed their very core tenets, it would seem.
After we see Halo Infinite launch, we’ll shift a bit more to monitoring the state of the game and ensuring we react appropriately. Not only is this working with our friends on the Community team, but with Analytics, ongoing work with User Research, etc. to ensure that the team knows what’s working and what’s not. This means that we will have a direct partnership with you, the players, that we’ll use to improve the game experience together over the lifetime of the game.
If this doesn’t happen within days of December 8th, I’m going to be sick.
You’ve already failed us, Live Team. Don’t do even worse.
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