I have been a Halo fan for years now and I am having trouble staying invested in the series with all the changes and drama going on since 343 took over. Now I know i’m already going to get a lot of hate just for bringing this up but I want to create a civil discussion about what the future of Halo is going to be and what 343 is going to have to do to keep Halo relevant and bring back the fans they have lost. I also want to clear this up I don’t hate 343 or their games but they have made questionable choices in how they have treated both this franchise and its following.
First off I want to address some of the issues that need to change in the next installment of Halo:
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343 needs to focus on the actual fans of Halo and not the fans of other popular games like Call of Duty (sorry for bringing this up again), battlefield or whatever. Halo fans play Halo games because they want an actual Halo experience and there is a formula that has worked for the main Halo trilogy and 343 has abandoned it for trying to imitate whatever else is currently popular in an attempt to draw fans of those games in but the problem with this is that it will also drive Halo fans away and whatever new fans 343 may have attracted they won’t stay for long most likely which is why Halo 4 and 5 had population issues soon after launch while Halo 3 was still popular even 2 years after its launch. There is nothing wrong with wanting to attract more players but you can’t overlook the ones that have been here for years.
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343 really needs to pay more attention to the community and help it grow and expand, we need forge and a file sharing system from the start, they need to include more community maps and game types. For example Breakout while being a good game type should not have received the amount of resources and time that was dedicated to when the community was capable of creating the same thing if they really wanted to, it at least should have been created with the custom game and forge settings since there was much more important things this game needed than this and for anyone that wants to defend Breakout let me reiterate, I like Breakout and it does deserve to be in the game. Part of what keeps a Halo game thriving after launch is the community created content and even with this feature delayed it still harms the community immensely do to many of the players leaving only weeks after launch.
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Actual meaningful rewards need to be implemented at this point as there is no satisfaction of earning something with the REQ system and while it is not necessarily bad and doesn’t even need to be taken out of the game there needs to be a way to earn something other than by pure chance. If you earn a legendary REQ there is no skill involved and all that was involved was luck and possible lots of time and/or money. In Halo 3 all of the customization options were locked behind achievements which mean’t you had actual goals and you had to work to get what you wanted and when you finally earned whatever armor you wanted it was highly satisfying to see your work pay off. I know that this is not necessarily fair for casual gamers and I want to see a compromise where you can have a Halo Reach/4/5 system for unlocking armors but there also needs to be a good selection of customization that you need to work hard to earn and no grinding in a game type like warzone is not what I mean by hard work. I don’t think 343 understands what makes something rewarding and a good example of this misunderstanding would be how they treated the recon armor in Halo 3, before Bungie left the only way to get it was to get Bungie’s attention with a cool forge creation or video clip or screenshot and this sparked the community causing them to come together and share everything in an attempt to stand out and even when Bungie made it easier to earn with the vidoc challenges it was still hard and it still took a lot of work and dedication to earn. When 343 was given Halo they gave the recon armor to every player and it seems really kind of them to do that at first but what they didn’t realize that once everyone had this highly sought after armor it was no longer special. The problem is that 343 views the item itself as a reward not the journey it takes to earn it.
I’m curious about what else you guys think about what will happen to Halo and what 343 will need to do or not do for future games. There is much more to be said here and I may post further ideas about this in the future but for now these are the biggest issues that need to be addressed.