A common trend I keep seeing on here and elsewhere is this idea that Infinite is just going to fade into obscurity and that Halo (as a series) is screwed.
This is unfortunately (for them) not the case. Infinite is still very popular, now its probably not as relevant as Halo 3 was at its peak but I think its closer to Halo 2/Reach in terms of popularity. The game has a lot of positives (Equipment, gunplay, maps, physics, Campaign, etc.) and although its negatives are really damning (Desync, cheaters, lack of content across the board, broken BTB, etc.) I feel that like 95% of this games problems can be resolved in 1 year. Because its a F2P game realistically it can always bring back players or release something new for people who were uninterested to begin with.
They’ll release a few maps every year, Campaign DLC like crazy (there have been so many theories/hints that I bet my life they will release one yearly) and people make a huge fuss over things like the store but it does not require a degree in economics to understand that 343i can just lower the prices or release more in game rewards. Leaks have sort of proved my point, tons of stuff unfinished/cut from the game and although that doesn’t necessarily mean we will get most of it, it definitely means that 343i are sitting on tons of assets and that they have the ability to expand the game out.
When I first heard the line about 343i wanting Infinite to last 10 years I was very skeptical, but after looking closer into it everything becomes pretty clear. Wonder why the Campaign is open world? Because adding stuff to an open world game is 10x easier then if it were linear. Wonder why the MP is F2P? Because it makes it easier to get new players and to release new stuff.
Infinite will not die anytime soon, it might decline gradually the first few months (because they decided to make season 1 last 6 freaking months) but that doesn’t necessarily mean that all the people that downloaded it before uninstalled or that it can’t garner more interest later on. Infinite may not last 10 years (10 years in gaming industry is hard to predict) but it’ll last far longer than 5 did (I’m guessing like 5 years at minimum)
I mean the player base dropped 50% in 1 month to sub 80k players estimated on all platforms, didn’t see a Christmas player boost even remotely, and will continue to drop like a rock… There’s no customizations that you don’t have to pay for pretty much, the game play and maps are meh at best almost no classic guns or feel to the game play, . I’ll give this game until March before the player base is sub 20k players and they are scrambling to figure out what happened and by that time everyone will be back to the cod, apex, or forkknife. The game will be lucky to make it to its 1 year TBH
Yea its a Sledgehammer game so alot of people including me skip those. I meant like in a year or two when they release a new infinity ward or treyarch game. Right now Halo has the edge over Vanguard for sure
Finally an actual optimistic post on this forum. Of course people have the right to say what they disagree with and all that, but it is nice to see an actual optimistic post.
You are extremely pessimistic about the entire franchise dude. Why do you even bother? There are far more than 20k Halo fans out there. It also ignores the fact that none of the other F2P games really play like Halo (Splitgate is closest, but you won’t mention that game) so I just think this is pretty bold.
I also wonder where you are getting these numbers. Obviously there is Steamcharts, but XBL doesn’t give close to as accurate numbers so I wanna know how you get to those figures. Also, Steamcharts is kind of expected to be low. The game runs like crap on PC.
Vanguard (on every valuable metric) isn’t even close to as popular as Infinite. Now Warzone is still huge, but Vanguard is a joke lol. Vanguard is not on the same level of quality or even popularity.
Why would anyone even need to make a post if the game is going to die or not? All I needed to do was read your title and that alone said enough. No game that has any portion of it f2p will ever die that is as popular as Halo has been. Seems to me this was a lot of wasted typing just to simply say 4 words.
I don’t even know if customization is the issue here.
I played a ton of Halo back in the day and some MCC, but not a lot.
Went back to MCC after Infinite’s launch and even though I’ve got a ton of stuff to still unlock, I just slapped Orange on my spartan and called it a day and just kept playing.
I just have more fun playing MCC than Infinite and I don’t really know why.
I just think that people are a bit too pessimistic about Halo nowadays, they are making temporary issues into franchise defining problems and they are out in the streets with signs held up that say “The End is Near” I just wanted to put some realism into this.
When the major bugs, glitches, desync and server issues, rejoin and a solid anti-cheat/report system is added, the game could honestly support itself well even with the lack of current map variety if there’s mode variety.
I do think that the little events that pop up here and there need a bit of hype factor. The trailers for them paired with the actual unlocks are not exciting in the least. Look like some 2008 Machinima honestly.
However the latest of the two exoduses can be reversed to a certain degree if 343 buckles in and goes full throttle moving forward this week.
The thing is, it’s this way with a lot of gaming communities. You will always have some people that will claim it will, but you also have the ones that are trolls that try to twist words around to what was actually said.
Quite frankly I tend to ignore the doom and gloom topics considering there’s always going to be people who like to overly exaggerate or just want a game to die when it doesn’t meet their personal expectations but I do like to respond to the optimism here and there.
It’s much too early to tell whether Halo is going to die and people are rather sold on ignoring the communication and support that the game had been getting beforehand when it launched and the positive response to it. The holiday break was unfortunate and when nothing is being done and the only thing being updated is the Store with its 20 dollar Mister Chief AI (something which I suspect is automated), yeah its not a good look. When there is such silence it really is easy for people to pile on it and declare it as dead/ruined/doomandgloom/yadda yadda yadda.
Depending on how much work and what they implement when they return, I think 343 will be able to get a lot of goodwill back. My brother and I still play rounds of Tactical Slayer but he’s waiting for BTB to get fixed and has been playing some Rainbow Six until then.
As for me, despite BTB the way it is, I’ve been willing to suffer through the difficulties of getting into a BTB to complete my Challenges or just to have some good BTB fun because I still just love Infinite and it’s gameplay too damn much.
I remain rather positive about the game. I think 343’s decision to back up and reevaluate Halo and going with Infinite has been the right decision and, as someone who had hated Halo 5 and had been playing MCC until Infinite’s release, I am quite happy to play this redone iteration and am excited to see how it’ll look with the improvements and content that I know will be coming in the near future.
The two most important things (objectively) is whether or not Co-op/Forge actually work well, if they don’t that’ll hurt the game massively, if they are great those two things will fix a lot of the criticisms/problems.
They can do a lot of little things in the interim (store, modes, whatever) but the lack of those two things really sets it back the most in my eyes.
They’ve got a promising game, but the lack of content is unreal. And I’m talking about maps, gametypes, playlists (especially ranked), broken btb, customization…and on and on and on.
They need to optimize the player base they have now and grow it. Not wait months to include content and try to rebuild a fading player base.
There have been plenty of examples of games flopping and dying shortly after release having massive come backs later on after receiving some TLC. (The obvious one for us being MCC). The core of Infinite is very solid. It just needs some work to fix bugs and add more content. I think it’s very likely in a year’s time Infinite will be in a very good place and have a good, healthy population.
I think the fact people said they like the gameplay and that it’s F2P should mean that future updates get influxes of players.
I am not a technician. I have no idea how your most popular mode can break because you enabled campaign.
I’d also say that Halo probably should put more focus on adding to the BTB maps than Arena. Yes, Arena is fun, competitive and a challenge; but it’s just too much of the same when it’s only four players and limited vehicles.
They are adding Forge. But Forge needs a custom browser to work effectively and let the community go mad. Yes they will be able to start adding the best forge maps into the rotations but that’s a half measure. I reckon they might treat Forge as a re-release of the game if it’s as big a deal as rumoured.
I reckon we will get some kind of road map and they’ll probably do a vid about the campaign that might drop some hints regarding where the story is going. I am not expecting story or biome DLC this year with everything else that needs looking at although we might see additional islands/activities being added to the base map.
