First of all please name me a single positive thing about Free-to-play Halo.
You can’t, not even the population argument is valid anymore if you look at the numbers, it’s honestly embarrassing how a FREE Halo game died faster than any other £60 Halo.
With that said the biggest issue I have with the game isn’t the lack of content or monetization, it’s amount of amateur mistakes 343 keeps showing since they took over the franchise, there’s something that always screamed inexperienced with them.
Why is there no in-game report feature in a PC game in 2022? Why is the UI so bad? Why has matchmaking been broken for weeks with no fix? Why is the performance abysmal on PC? It feels like they lied about this game being built from the ground up for PC, it’s just another bad console port.
I don’t know how to explain it but even Battlefield and COD, two terrible games this year still feel like they are backed up by a somehow competent company when it comes to the absolute basics, it’s the small things like the ones listed above that really separates a company from being a Triple A company to an Indie one (budget aside). Just the fact they have no report feature on a F2P game makes 343 look like a developer with no resources, they are miles behind developers like Riot games despite being backed up by Microsoft and really don’t understand the priorities of releasing a game.
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I don’t believe that they are inexperienced, but what I do believe is 343 has very poor leadership. Poor leadership leads to poor development.
Let’s get real here people. This is a multi-billion dollar company that had the time and all the resources they actually needed, that is a fact. Then when you add that they outsourced a lot of work this game should have been released in a much better state than it is in when it comes to the amount of content and the quality of it.
343/Microsoft has had over a decade with the Halo franchise. Yes, we all know it takes work to develop a game. Yes, we all know there will be issues with any game when it’s first released, but 343/Microsft isn’t new to gaming, nor is the shop new to gaming. They had years to figure all this out when it comes to designing a game, this mean 343 had ( creative control )
They chose to poorly design this game in spite of what anyone thinks about Microsoft and No one knows what their agreement is when they signed that contract. ) 343 is 100% as much as responsible as Microsoft is for the very poor state this game is in.
Longer story short, no more excuses for this multi-billion-dollar company. It’s just like the new Bungie. They have had 15 years with Destiny, yet the game is in a far worse state than it ever has been.
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could also be politics. Even in H2 and H3, leadership had to scrap some good ideas due to politics
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Company Politics SHOULD NEVER INTERFERE WITH GAME DEVELOPMENT PERIOD!
INTERFERING WITH GAME DEVELOPMENT ONLY PROMOTES DISASTER! …FACT!
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I mean your points are accurate OP, but its kind of obvious/common sense. 343i are inexperienced at releasing PC games… So? Only way to solve that problem is to get some experience lol.
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That would be true if they didn’t have MCC to test the PC environment and the problems listed were exclusive to PC, the UI, matchmaking and other issue are present on the console version. Even then why aren’t they hiring people experienced with such PC features?
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MCC originally came out in 2014, its PC version didn’t release until 5 years later… I mean its a bit of a stretch to use MCC as a gold standard or something. Regardless, PC optimization (in general) is usually a fairytale. PC’s are so different that most games have PC issues when they release (BF2042 is one such example)
I know how awful it is for PC players right now, but its also awful for a lot players (poor OG XB1 users with their 30fps) so its not as though the game is just poorly optimized for PC.
I will agree, PC optimization for Infinite in its current state is abysmal garbage.
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I disagree. I think 343 produce high quality AAA games. I just don’t think the leaders have any idea what makes Halo so great. The amount of mistakes, oversights, fixing of stuff that was never broken, adding new stuff that was never needed, it’s unbelievable that so many highly skilled grown adults can work together like this with a long history of insanely popular products that worked… and fail so hard 3 times in a row.
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There was an article shortly after launch (can’t find it anymore), that they’re using a lot of contractors instead of regular employees. While this would not be a big issue in general, this seems to combine with Microsoft corporate policy that no contractor is allowed for more than 18 months at a time. So you have quite a bit of forced fluctuation on the team which in turn means that the people who built several systems just aren’t around anymore.
If you want all the details you can look here: h ttps://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-08/how-microsoft-s-halo-infinite-went-from-disaster-to-triumph
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I think we all need to be realistic here, they hit that free to play button for more reasons to charge.
And realize that all triple A shooters get released like this now, but get better with time
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Because the 343 of Halo 4 are not the same 343 of Halo Infinite I suspect. same with Halo 5’s 343.
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They are inexperienced in the operation of a free multiplayer game, which can be seen from the excessive pricing
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There was that one interview awhile back which mentioned 343i was running like they were making 5 games at once and everyone was fighting for resources.
They clearly have no good leadership.
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Bonnie Ross isn’t chad enough. Needs more jawbone.
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Honestly 80% of 343 development teams are outsourced emotes, one would think they would of Outsourced someone who understood PC game development and all the things to work on to prevent such issues like hacking and what not to become rampant
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It can be further seen in how they restrict customization almost extreme strictly in order to sell you the same.content multiple times.
For example scarlet wake was sold strictly for the Mk7 core
The following week they sold people Scarlet skies strictly for the Reach core.
They were the same color. It is like me selling you the same crayola Twice and saying it only works on this price of paper. I made more money and out out much less content.
That’s 343. They want to maximize repeatable content. And they can do it Using 50 of the 60 most basic default colors we had available in Halo 5.
Yes in Halo 5 we had 60 default colors to select from. While in Halo Infinite they started us off with 10…
And locked the other 50 behind a slow timegated releasing Paywall.
Imagine the combinations of the same.colors they can sell us for the next 10 yrs…
And that’s how they will sustain monetization of selling you the same.things over and over…
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Maybe, but they still released as full games, building many features on from their predecessors rather than becoming a stripped version of the preceding game, and both revolutionised online gaming as we know it, ultimately defining Xbox Live. Infinite can’t even release as a semi-complete game at launch, not even close. If that’s strictly politics, then the entire gaming industry needs a complete reset. In the 80s, 90s and 2000s, video games were constantly evolving, adding more layers to the incredible amounts of fun they offered. In the 2010s we slowed down, and it seems, in the 2020s, we’ve come to a complete halt. Something is need of urgent fixing.
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Too greedy to attract disgust. They’d better be able to adjust pricing and give more freedom to collocation.
I think you hit the nail on the head here. There does not seem to be an abundance of focus at 343, and too many cooks in the kitchen.
I think they may be on to something now, but lack of leadership is how this game ended up in development hell, and releasing half baked.
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