Planned? Hah… Did you play 4 and 5? Things have been getting worse over time since 343 has taken over and Halo has strayed further and further from what we love, so no I wouldn’t say planned. Seems to me like their planning for this game was awful and they rushed out a product that was not finished to appease their masters before they got a spanking. Our problem? Absolutely not… before someone says that. Nah they didn’t purposely plan this all they had to do was look at their fellow Devs. Ubisoft, EA, Activision, Bethesda, Bioware, Bungie, Etc… They all get away with releasing sub par garbage and STILL making insane amounts of money. Planned? Sure, what they did plan on is the backlash and knowing people are dumb enough to STILL buy their $60 campaign. Still dumb enough to go in and buy cosmetics for this bare bones incomplete mess… That’s what they did plan on. You’re right… it got all of them, not me who spent $1, but all of them.
I say planned because negativity gets attention nowadays. And companies WANT that attention. good or bad. The fact that I bought a $10 BP AND a $60 campaign I feel completely worked over. All I wanted was a solid lore story continuation and some fun MP, but 343 said nah, we want flash and cash baby, thats all. and We’ll only do what we have to as to keep the flash and cash pumping.
Cat ears and flowers anyone?!
I wouldn’t be so sure. Even the most die-hard fanboys are starting to turn, 343s rep has never been so tarnished and it doesn’t reflect well on big daddy Microsoft.
They don’t care either way. So long as people are paying their Game Pass subs or buying microtransactions, Microsoft will keep churning out this corporate slime.
Plus most of these giant corpos prioritize hiring based on social activism rather than strictly qualifications and you get a whole building full of people who raise ESG ratings but aren’t really that skilled. Then you get a busted or subpar product with corporate mandates to fleece the customer (Flashgitz on YouTube, Anthem launch, pretty much that)
As long as the leadership at Xbox remains unchanged, Halo is basically dead. It had a good run though and Halo 5 looks way better now lol.
I don’t think bad press draws people into the game. On YouTube most of the Halo creators don’t seem to be getting very many views pushing the negative content.
The general impression is people came, said they liked the campaign and said they liked the multiplayer. But neither had enough content to keep people occupied for very long. That and what we do have has some big technical issues that don’t seem to be going anywhere.
I mean I am happy grinding away for my coating. But just the other night my mates were asking after BTB and was like “no” so we ended up on Chivalry 2 instead.
If we’re putting on tinfoil hats and creating conspiracies… I’ll bite.
When Microsoft gave 343 another shot at Halo. They said, “make it count this time,” to which 343 replied, “oh, it will be legendary.”
Unimpressed with the work shown to them at quarterly meetings over the years of development. Microsoft finally steps in and tells 343: “Contractually, we are bound to keep you employed. However, the reality is you guys failed for a third time. And our investors don’t want to go through years of waiting like with H4 and H5 to make back the money invested into Infinite. So to fix your mistakes, we re-hired an old writer to help work on the campaign and while him and his team focuses on that… here’s a change our marketing team came up with for the multiplayer. You guys are going to use this Free to Play model to make our investors more happy and more willing to keep investing. Besides, we’re buying out a couple of big boy companies in a year or so anyways… so Halo will just be one of the many flagships of Xbox and you guys can finish up this travesty for the next decade and then go start on some other projects that we have planned in the future.”
It could explain why Microsoft had so many different outside studios involved, I think Microsoft kind of lost faith in 343. I know my conspiracy probably has a lot of plot holes similar to Infinite’s story line, but I think it makes some sense.
They overplayed their hand like idiots by trying to attract new communities of players. Back then they just had to deal with us actual fans that stuck around. They should’ve listened to feedback from their fans and used the isolation to their advantage. Nobody really cared about Halo a few years ago. But now they’re truly exposed to the rest of the gaming world. I don’t know how they’ll get out of the hole they’re in to be honest.
Not that hard to imagine. I don’t think a tinfoil hat is necessary to ponder all the BS going on. My original post was essentially a joke at the state of the game but connotation is lost online with lyric alone.
343 definitely messed the story up again. And this time the MP. As fun as the campaign and MP are they still leave most of us alienated or fed up.
I think it’s less so that it was intentionally designed to be bad, and moreso that they intentionally chose to ride a line to see how much they could increase profits through the store and by cutting content to sell later (campaign.) I feel like a lot of corporations are at that point these days… they’ve figured out how to make profit regardless of the satisfaction of their customers and will continue to do so for as long as it is profitable.
I agree. They have been trying to make Halo for people that don’t really like Halo. They have pissed off nearly all the veteran fans in too many ways to count or keep track of. Like I’ve said many times now, its seems like their executives just want flash and cash with some demographic variability thrown in. Which is funny because sales/marketing people should know to not try and market combs and brushes to bald people… We want our old Halo, with maybe a few new updates, we didn’t want a whole new game that just LOOKS like Halo 
Its our jobs as consumers and fans to rectify their behavior, but because so many younger gens only care about spending money on cosmetics, 343 thinks they are at least in safer waters… Them releasing MP ahead of campaign (that doesn’t even have co-op or forge, and then charging full price for a very incomplete game was a complete embarrassment and should be reflected on the executives. They need to know they did a trash job and we don’t approve.
I thought you meant destructible walls and buildings so I watched two youtube videos before I read the thread.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jY1TuCYM6yg
Destructible Environments (Halo 5 Forge Tutorial)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoCugUpZnVo
Halo 5 Building Demolition | Destructive Enviroment
It’s technically possible in Reach but managing the map’s object count is going to be hard. The Reach Variant Tool “Megalo” gametype scripting could definitely let you save some objects but that gets tricky fast.
On topic, I disagree. They’ve made a bunch of mistakes and some of their choices have been bad but nobody is trying to crash Halo into the ground out of malice. (Right now though I am completely disinterested in the story. That’s a big shame since I love stories.)
Yeah stop trying to make yourself feel better. There’s not millions of people complaining about the game lmao. There’s like 500 on discourse and Reddit -Yoink!-. Everyone loves the game.
Your “job” as a consumer is to not buy products you don’t want. Going on Reddit and complaining doesn’t do anything lmao
I mean considering that MSFT is claiming they’ve had 20 million players but they have far less than 100,000 playing these days, it’s safe to assume that at least 10 million players were not impressed and stopped playing.
Yeah it’s f2p which is what happens. People go on and try it then leave.
Also, your “100k” concurrent player assessment is likely invalid as you’re like looking at steam when there are more Xbox players playing than PC (my guess based of Twitter response to the game)
100K is an estimate, there are only 17K on Steam atm. I don’t think it is unreasonable to think that there are millions of people who are complaining about the game, or who are at least unsatisfied with it.