SO. You wanted Infinite to be like Destiny huh 343?

Games Halo Infinite
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Here’s what I’ve learned from playing Destiny 2 after wanting a break from Halo Infinite. Mind you this was triggered by Epic giving us the Bungie 30th Anniversary pack for free which gave me some Halo-ish weaponry.

SO.

In Halo Infinite, Coatings only work for the specific thing they’re made for. Armor has exclusive coatings, weapons have exclusive coatings, etcetera.
In Destiny, you get a Shader (their version of coatings) and can use that on ANYTHING YOU WANT. PERIOD. You can even use multiple shaders FOR EACH LIMB. Want your character, weapons and vehicles to match? THEN ALL YOU NEED IS ONE SHADER.

Seasonal Content in Halo Infinite means there’s a game mode and a couple cutscenes associated with it. Seasonal Content in Destiny 2 gives you another game mode, cutscenes that PROGRESS THE STORY FORWARD AND ARE MEANINGFUL, and a bunch of new weapons and goodies to earn.

The Halo Infinite shop rotates every week and if you couldn’t afford that one item you wanted that week then you better hope it comes back months later cuz it’s GONE. In Destiny 2, the shop has a page for stuff that will be on sale the entire season as well as A CATALOGUE OF OLDER STUFF ON A DIFFERENT PAGE FROM PREVIOUS SEASONS.

Plus in Halo Infinite, Credits are the only way to buy stuff from the shop. In Destiny, there’s free stuff in the shop that can be bought with a separate currency (bright dust) that you CAN NOT BUY, you can only EARN IT. So while Silver is there as currency for stuff that needs to be bought with real money, the bright stuff is there so freebie players can still get stuff from the shop without having to pay.

See? THIS is why Bungie will never come back- because why would they? Destiny 2 has its own laundry list of problems (pricing, old content being deleted, The Tower makes loading take forever, raids require more than one person and nobody wants to help because douchebags) and there’s even a couple things I think Halo Infinite does better, but once you compare Halo Infinite and the game Microsoft wanted to compete with, the comparison quickly becomes laughable.

It’s still not Halo, and I am a Halo fan so I’m not going anywhere, but I thought it would be important to remind ourselves that Bungie made Halo without trying to chase trends, while chasing trends is all 343i seems to know how to do so far.

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Their biggest mistake is straight up not making an MMO. Hear me out.

They should have kept the Campaign experience as close to OG Halos as possible. That means properly designed levels and encounters, tons of tools to mess around with.

Now the MP part as well as Openworld is what I feel was completely squandered. Like why bother making a narrative story when you are gonna trap the players in the Matrix Spartan Academy? What they should have done is have the players drop into the game and start living the Openworld. If you do that, suddenly VIP, FOBs, scattered lore will fall into place fleshing out the world of Zeta. And those Armor lockers? Why, that’s where you actually earn cosmetics instead of having to shove everything into the shop. Could even start tying cosmetics to specific boss kills. Let players party up in a hub area then go out and play that openworld.

Not to mention the Openworld is a perfect template to release and populate with content, making your world richer with each update.

  • Campaign should have been the Master Chief’s story, priced at 40 bucks
  • Main game meaning Multiplayer and Your Spartan story, priced at 20 bucks but gets patches over time
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To be fair these are all things that saw major iteration over time be that in destiny 1 or 2 and their expansions.

Secondly they have a benefit of not having to appease a diverse set of legacy fans.

Thirdly Bungie engineers know the tiger engine last i check some were even present when they updated the h3 engine for reach so they have a far better pipeline and would have tailored it and modified it further over D1 and 2s lifespan.
Where as 343i have lots of new talant working away on slipspace with little experience on how it works.
Its pretty hard to jump into an engine you havent actively been using.

Fourth the community likely pushed 343i away from considering these issue inany ways seeing as they beat bungie out the gate to a degree with fpsmmo lite design but struggled with contemt then 2. Spartan ops wasnt a great success so iteration wasnt a direction for them directly after season 1 ended.

That all said.
Yes. Yes very much.

Edit also bungie is owned by sony so yeah and it aint the same studio it was with new creative leads that wouldnt have any better concept of halo than 343i. 6 of one half dozen of the other really.

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I’m just going to say that this is not uh, faithful, to the first two years of Destiny 2’s life, which were horrendously received.

I remember how utterly contentless Year 1 was. I enjoyed that era too, for what it’s worth.

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Imma take your word for it, as I joined Destiny 2 VERY recently. I’m only speaking of my own personal experience- which has been a trip.

Destiny 2 right now is a mix of all the different things 343i wanted Halo to be and it’s surreal to be certain, at least the way I see it.

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Yeah, that explains it. Year 1 Destiny 2 was absolutely STARVING for ANY content.

Like honestly, Halo: Infinite puts it to shame in terms of existing content.

You know how folks complain about what Infinite lacks? They said the same thing about Destiny 2 but even worse. But you know how long it took Destiny 2 to get where it is today?

Five years.

Five years!

And it only got REALLY ROLLING after about one and a half to two. We’re not even at the one year point for Infinite yet.

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So basically between Destiny 2 and MCC, we basically have proof that- assuming they don’t ditch it and make a new game like some rumors claim- Infinite will take literal years to get where we want it to be.

FUN!

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Pretty much, but with MS’ management and 343i’s heads of development, it was always going to be this way.

We’ll be fine in 2023. Just be glad we didn’t get… Whatever tf they wanted to launch in 2020, my GODS!

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X3 God, what a ride.

First got into Halo in 2019 on PC, got all the Bungie hits back to back, got to 4 and thought “Okay this is really different but it’s not bad. I still prefer Bungie’s but I’m not disappointed or anything.”

Then got Infinite and got a crash course on being disappointed by 343m as if they sensed my hope and sought too crush it swiftly to lower my standards. Just… WOW.

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Can confirm the Spartans were still stick figures in 2020. All the mechanics were there. But the graphics weren’t. maps had a retro N64 like vibe as they were all very basic outlines.

This unfortunately is the industry norm now as gaming communities have proven they’ll tolerate it. The only exception to the rule is COD. But their business model relies on yearly releases and multiple studios developing it. bit of an oddball really.

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And somehow, a month from release, MWII 2 is full of Z-Fighting and absolutely janktastic animations. That fanbase is gonna’ eat it up though.

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I’d almost prefer that to literal nothing.

Almost.

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not making it a mmo was the right move. everything seems to be a mmo / rpg / looter shooter / pvp game these days.

sick of it.

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Do remember I’m making my comment based on the current state of Infinite, and potential marketing and design decisions they should have made. If you’re playing any sort of online game these days, it’s definitely multiplayer in some form, MMO isn’t that far away from regular MP.

MMO =/ MMORPG which is a very important distinction.

If Halo Infinite was MMORPG, then I would have an issue with it because it will focus more on player progression in a linear fashion. But when I say MMO, I meant something along the lines of an expanded Halo PvE experience.

Infinite focusing on cosmetics to earn revenue but then sealing the player away in a menu screen called “The Academy” is the silliest marketing decision period. The first thing they should have done is create a player hub area so they can show off their armor, and that in turn will lure people to want to purchase mtx. This huge mistake probably cost them so much potential revenue if the scummy prices didn’t already lose them even more.

Regardless, the damage is done and we have to live with it. But instead of squandering Infinite’s assets and potential, there is a chance for them to recover if they market, revamp and package the content they currently have cleverly in order to breathe life back into the player ecosystem.

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I think the takeaway here is, if a game company wants to learn how to make money from other games, they have to study more than the monetization scheme. Destiny 2’s early days were poorly received (Rightfully freaking so.), but we are no longer in destiny 2’s early days. This creates a “Day and Night” analogy that other companies can study to see what counts as a Good Idea, and what counts as a Bad Idea. The fact that 343i observed the monetization schemes but did not observe the behaviors that made people enjoy those schemes is… Well, maybe this is just a natural consequence of being a company that was assembled from a bunch of people who didn’t know each other well and were used to different work cultures and different focuses. Maybe it was the assembly method of 343 that’s at the core of these problems, not any particular methods of theirs. Idk. But it does seem like if you have a company that’s trying to chase trends, it shouldnt be hard to look at what other ftp games are doing, especially the successful ones, and mimic at least the quantity of content, if not the quality.

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. . . You know, I would pay money for an N64 graphics game with infinite mechanics. Clean polygons, easy hit boxes… Yeah, I’d pay for that.

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Its not so simple. I did a great deal of destiny 2, and they have erased and locked way too much content of there game in content vault. So to a new player returning it was very confusing. There Iron Banner event was very fun pvp, however once you get into pvp where its 3 vrs 3, the balance disappears.

Infinite well we all know the issues. Make a halo mmorpg? No not the answer. Destiny 2 has the right idea for the future of gaming, combing the fps with strong sand box elements. mmorpgs just have turned into gigantic cash machines with very little return content wise.

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i think its even a shame that what they intend to give out techincally credits… doesnt even work

the WCT coatings, i managed to find those for cheap sealed and… waypoint refuses to accept them or help, same for twitch things i hear. its like they try to annoy those who fund how to get something without it being from credits

like idk, did they expire or is waypoint just often bugged?

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The biggest difference between Infinite and Destiny, even comparing it to early D1 or early D2 when content was relatively lacking, is that the more I play Destiny the more I enjoy it, and the less the problems there are seem to matter.

The more I play Infinite the more I hate it, because after the initial hype of the gameplay being closer to what I want from a Halo game than 343’s past outings. The cracks in the armor became apparent. The desync, the really messed up movement and physics, the pitifully optimized aiming no matter what input you use, the massive sacrifices made to Campaign structure to fit an open world into the mix. An open world that has less to do in it than vanilla D1’s notoriously content-lacking days. The worst offender is that the gunplay, the core means of communication between the game and the player, doesn’t feel good at a baseline. Something Halo CE got so right all the way back in 2001, and that was consistently the strongest part of the franchise for 20 years, feels cheaply designed and plain BAD in Infinite. But the gunplay is friggin amazing in Destiny.

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Closest thing we have is Halo Combat Evolved on Atari. It’s called Halo 2600 and you can get it on ebay for 60-100 usually.

There was going to be a megablocks Halo game years ago but it was cancelled.

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