A lot of ppl get upset at seeing so many complaints on the forums, but the complaints are a good thing. If you care about the game and the franchise then you want to give the truth about what is going on so that it will get better and not die. Not every complaint is constructive, but ppl get emotional about the things they care about and that reaction should be forgiven. The day the forums start going silent is when you really need to worry, that’s when ppl have lost hope in the game’s improvement.
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People care about their own vested interests in the game and optimising things that will give their unique playstyle and advantage.
Very rarely are these “complaints” put in the perspective of how it will benefit all players or improve a game mode, but instead result out of a specific issue to a specific player who “doesn’t like some aspect of Halo Infinite because on their hardware from their internet node, X doesn’t suit their needs”.
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Very rarely? That tells me you haven’t been here long. Yeah, it can get pretty toxic at times with people discussing the people at 343 more than the issues with the game.
However, through all that vitriol there’s actual constructive criticism. Pay attention to that.
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I don’t mind legitimate complaints. Lag/dsync issues for instance. But there are a fair share of complaints that feel more like whining instead of being an actual genuine complaint too. Like they’re -Yoink!- just because they want to -Yoink!- and nothing more.
Also the people who don’t bother to read the front page too see if a topic they want to start is already present. We don’t need multiple threads covering the same problem.
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If they are not engineers working on the technical aspects of delivering a game, they are part of some ideology that isn’t inclusive or encouraging of thought discussion outside of their own echo chamber, so I am not surprised.
Starting your issue off with a complaint is not saying “I ran into this issue while playing and you could fix it like this, what does the community think”? It’s criticising without realising how much effort is needed to maintain games and build up the infrastructure to support them.
I’ve been mentioning that MCC is in direct competition with Infinite, which is why we might be seeing lapses in effort being made into diversifying cosmetics, but no one is saying that. These complainers are just saying 343 is “le bad” and “make the game more like how I want to play it” and that’s it.
What I meant by “people discussing 343 more than Infinite” is that people are more concerned with criticising 343 than the actual game.
Every now and then I see comments about “Halo needs to be removed from 343’s hands” or something like that.
Talking points like that is fair game to criticize because it’s really not the type of discourse that moves the discussion forward. In fact, it hinders it.
What is to be gain from that? It’s a pipe dream that’s not likely to grant the result desired and will serve to piss more people off rather than please them.
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I’ve seen too many franchises get turned into empty corpses being paraded around. Call of Duty, Assassin’s Creed, Grand Theft Auto, just to name a few. The franchises are still going and are still financially successful, but lack the identity and power they used to have. Halo is the last bastion of properties I grew up with that hasn’t entirely fallen apart.
Call of Duty: grounded emotional stories criticizing the military industrial complex and a multiplayer about customising your guns to suit your playstyle turned shallow yearly cash-cow that doesn’t innovate its gameplay.
Assassin’s Creed: Historical fiction stealth with a dash of sci-fi conspiracy turned fantasy action-rpg filled with MTX in a single-player game.
Grand Theft Auto: Nonsensical re-releasing with a focus on its lack luster pay to win multiplayer and letting other games from the studio flounder and die.
Halo, for all its faults, stands as the most capable to return to its former greatness. If DOOM was able to come back, so can Halo. But its like for every good decision made with Infinite, 2 mistakes are made. I have faith Halo Infinite will be good, but sometimes it feels like the fans have to hand-hold 343 to move forward when we shouldn’t be doing that in the first place. We should be eagerly awaiting a new fun surprise, not complaining about issues that shouldn’t be issues, or issues that when fixed would put Halo above the competition.
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Most complaints are in line with making this game hit the minimum expectations of previous titles, or calling out terribly selfish business practices.
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I think it’s normal to have complaints as it can show your passion but… From what I’ve seen there’s little no construction criticism.
There’s a time to complain and there’s time to applaud. They’ve taken time to notice the issues and try to start working on a lot of them, while providing content.
The problem with live services is you don’t get a full game which was my mistake for hopping we would get that as many others did as well. In my opinion we should’ve gotten it but I do think 343 and Halo has a possible redemption path. I’ve started to slowly play more and more games recently and I have been having more fun.
Especially after experiencing the other super buggy games that have been out for awhile like Fortnite no build or warzone or apex.
I think Infinite should get full attention and MCC time is over but I think MCC loyalist should be rewarded with cool rare cosmetics.
343 needs their team only on Infinite.
We need to keep up the criticism, but it has to be constructive and the community needs to come together.
We need to talk about what we all want, what we want done first, and include what 343 is already working on.
Just have to accept 343 is Halo and they love it but they are still new and trying to give it what we want and what Halo needs. We just have to remind them of the love this community has for the game. We have to tell them good job but also demand change.
There’s always challenges with everything and AAA games just aren’t Good quality at launch and all have been build up better over time and grown.
So keep up the constructive criticism but let’s not get all toxic about it.
But they aren’t new. The people working on it aren’t inexperienced, and they’ve been working on Halo about just as long as Bungie did. Thats not an excuse. PLUS they had precedent to work off of.
343 has a whole isnt new but there’s a lot of me Devs and employees. A lot of the old said they fell in love with the game but loss love for the community. Also to help speed the process up of releasing the game they hired extra teams that weren’t apart of 343. Also they aren’t a really large team studio and I think that’s a large problem. Microsoft should allow them to expand and get devs that have Halo at the heart.
They’ve never really have found their footing because they haven’t really been given a chance. They’ve only been the release and fixing team.
Everyone has there own complaints, wants, and needs.
Only time will really tell what’s next for Halo.
I feel like people have given 343 more chances than most
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“I ran into this issue while playing and you could fix it like this, what does the community think?” is a silly way of looking at things because not all complaints are an issue found within the game but a user taking issue with the direction / execution of the game.
I COULD say “I find the armour cores restrictive in how it handles player expression and that if they did it X way we could get Y result, what does the community think?” This is silly because much of the complaints the community has with the game were intentional features and not an issue with the effort needed to maintain and build a game. Gating legacy playlists and gamemodes behind event windows is another example, it IS there and it IS working, it’s just not being done.
There’s also things 343 have said they have no short term intention of tackling like desync, that the community at large agrees is one of the biggest factors driving players away, if players have posed a criticism and it goes no further do you just go silent? What’s the next course there, pose it a second time then ad nauseum?
When games like splitgate can be content rich and functional and your dev company is lead by the VP of Xbox with a 500 million budget and whether they had development hell or not, 7 years between the previous main installment, it will catch more ruthlessly honest criticism than the sterile Peter Pan exchange you wish would occur.
Why have this divorced view of reality that a players selfish interests and criticisms with the game can’t be analysed and cross referenced by that same player to determine if it is a criticism beneficial for the community at large? Or that each criticism needs to carefully consider 343s time and resources for a pipeline we don’t have any remote access to knowing.
Say
“theatre is broken, it needs fixed” or
“pairing good players with bad players to artificially achieve a 50% winrate isn’t SBMM and is a bad system, it needs changed” or
“releasing Infinite without forge or a good range of custom games is killing the game”
The game easily has over 100 serious complaints that is a major contributing factor into the health of this game, these threads are just trying to repeat the issues the game has, its the players best means of getting it fixed, getting it known and not tolerating it.
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Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of extravagant threads explaining in great detail on how to fix or make things better for many different issues in 343’s Halo trilogy. But I have never seen even one of those threads get implemented by the developers… So, why waste your time typing out paragraphs of ideas just for them to get buried deep into the forums and forgotten? After years of sitting on the sidelines and watching 343, I can confidently say that our feedback is about as useful as an overfilled trashcan.
The suggestion box from the oblongs sums it up nicely.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKVAs2J84w8
The sad thing about it even though people want things to improve whether it’s complaints or constructive feedback, it doesn’t matter anymore. Games are not being designed for the players these days, they are being designed for the business when it used to be for both.
My #1 complaint is how much 343 lied to their fans prior to infinite being released and they continue to hold on to their lies and they have no problem doing so. If they can’t be at least somewhat honest and refuse to actually communicate, how can they or anyone on this forum expect more constructive feedback?
This is not to hate on 343, this is simple just pointing out the truth and there is no need to hate on anyone for doing so either.
Staten said keep the feedback coming, but what’s the point when the higher ups really don’t want that feedback?
We care, but most that have been around for a while know this forum is as far as it will ever go that all we are really doing is Just chatting with one another. The game is set in stone and until the poor business model is actually fixed, to where it works for 343 and the community things will never change.
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You should tag this post as feedback
Also 100% agree. Funny story, I tried explaining this to a friend who refused to touch any more 343 titles after 5. He kept neh saying me and just repeated ‘infinite is trash’ and kept bashing on everything. Recently I talked him into playing infinite for the first time and now he completely gets it. Infinite is (at its core) amazing - not without critiques of course. He went from hating infinite since its release and refusing to even touch it, to completely understanding the perspective of the whole community in about 10 matches.
Anyone who plays the game for a bit quickly realizes why the community complains so much and is so hard on 343.
It’s like the community are parents of a musically gifted child who refuses to practice. We know how much potential is there and how to access it but our advise is repeatedly ignored. Then when the kid gets on stage and chokes, we’re there waiting off stage to give them a hug as they walk off crying, to try and support them because we care that much, and the cycle just repeats.
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People have given Activision Blizzard and EA both major platforms with more then one studio. 343 is so small Bungie had double the people from halo 2-reach then 343 had for halo 4 - infinite.
They still have a larger team.
So I honestly think for what they’ve done compared to all these other games who’ve released less or about the same amount of content on a game release and how long it takes for them to fix or add content to their games.
Having a larger studio.
Their inability to have a competently staffed team is not the player’s problem. They make more than enough money to keep it staffed to what is required.