Sadly no, what we were duped into buying was the SEASON 1 battlepass. In May, they’ll launch another one that costs $10, and includes a small fraction of the content they have created for the season, with most of it being stripped from the pass to sell in the store.
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Cyberpunk 2077 was a tad buggy on release day but at least they fixed it. I see occasionally fixes still surfacing for the game suggesting there are still a few minor problems.
Halo: MCC was updated extensively while each part was readied for publishing. Now there are not any evident problems with the game so I play it occasionally,
Infinite is pending an update in a month or two when the game will have coop for the campaign. This should be fun with friends.
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Probably because indie devs tend to use established game engines like Unreal or Unity rather than rolling their own. If there wasn’t the club of copyright, I’m pretty sure experienced developers in either engine could replicate Halo Infinite’s feel - movement, gunplay, aesthetics, etc. - with surprising accuracy.
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Copyright for a game engine only applies to copying the actual coding. If you mean the design of the players themselves, it can easily be adverted by designing it a bit different, and not calling them spartans. It can easily be done, and not be against any copyright, and at this point, I’d probably be willing to pay for a completely different game than stick around for the constant hand in my pocket rifling around for my wallet that Halo has become.
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This is what I was referring to - experienced devs could emulate the experience but never use keywords like Spartan in the same context. Although it would be amusing if someone created the game where the player was a Persian and everything else had a thesaurus taken to their name.
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If I had any actual ability, I’d start coding. That being said, I bought a majority of the software when I was about to create a stupid yet amusing phone game, but work is busy… and because I am aware on how to focus on what is important, my work is more important than making a side game. cough cough
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These are my honest thoughts, modern gaming is bad, freemium model as a whole is just a bad model. It can be good if you put the work into it, but 343 didn’t. They poorly planned the game with contractors and technical debt
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There’s plenty of engines out there and yeh there are the common ones but 343i are supposed to be a AAA studio and yet there acting like a Indy dev studio that has barely any budget and not seeming to care about being accountable for lying about the progression system.
People are always making fan games out there and 343i seem to be ok with that but compared to the official content that 343i is doing… it’s worse what 343i are doing.
I’m surprised at a studio like 343i that can fail and has failed so badly in so many ways and how unprofessional they have been acting about it. I feel like 343i are poorly managing the IP.
I remember ‘old Bungie’ always being about player 1st and 343i lied to us with Infinite and I feel betrayed because 343i does not put the player 1st and continues to make false promises. 343i should be accountable.
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No I remember them saying “ once you buy the battle pass you never have to buy it again?
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The point is developing a game engine is not a trivial undertaking and is something different than developing a game. Indie Studios tend not to because of the sheer volume of work this adds. This allows them to focus on content because they’re using tried and tested tools provided by teams or companies whose purpose is to develop the engine.
But I hear you: 343 is a AAA studio backed by Microsoft and they have the resources to write their own engine. Look at some of my other posts - I agree management is at fault and people in outward facing roles could do a better job at communicating and setting expectations that align with the development target. I agree 343 has been lethargic in development, used a lot of words to say nothing, left most players unhappy with the state, and done little to instill trust things will change. Having watched a GDC video where the dev broke down networking for Reach I would say Bungie definitely was in touch with their players. It was a stark contrast to how I perceive the current relationship between 343 and Players.
The link for networking in reach: https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014345/I-Shot-You-First-Networking
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Nobody is saying game design is easy. What I have problem is when developers lie about a game to build hype then do the worst thing they can imagine instead. 343i didn’t need a new engine anytime soon and they choose they do this and that was always going to be a ‘risk’ which they would have known. Heck if they wanted to they could have spent time on a new engine and make it for UE4/5 if their engine is such a mess.
The thing is I understand not all dev’s are perfect and they should have delayed their game even further and they know it wasn’t ready and they mislead fans and continued to act like everything is normal after losing 270k out of 272k…which just comes off as like there not caring that they butchered the release.
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Modern gaming is honestly a joke lol.
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I never implied it was. I said because Indie developers don’t have to allocate resources on a custom game engine therefore they can focus on the meat of the game.
This. I think commercial game engines are at a point where writing a new one for a networked FPS game doesn’t seem worthwhile. I don’t think Forge requires its own engine either - UE4/5 should be able to replicate it.
The average dev doesn’t have a say as to whether the release date should be pushed back. i.e. Even if they wanted to delay the game they couldn’t because that’s above their paygrade. I can’t speak as to whether the devs where content with the released product and I don’t know enough about who exactly is on the dev team to know if any of the public figures is actually a developer of the game or the game engine. Either way, they need to get a PR person who can manage Player expectations and get them out of the No Man’s Sky trap they’re quickly sinking in.
I will say the game felt solid it’s just the lack of core features - network/render lag, anti-cheat, robust ranked system - killed the hype and 343’s lack of engagement is smothering the remaining flame. Hopefully it doesn’t smother it beyond the point they’re able to rekindle interest.
The problem is that the Marketing Departments in many game companies ended up either having their best employee become the new company head or the former company head was replaced by the Marketing Department.
Why do you think Apple has become entirely about overpricing their product to be 4x as valuable while being the exact same every year now?
At least that is one of the main reasons why the market decided to care more about lootboxes and such instead of actual gameplay features.
Umm maybe they don’t have a choice on what get’s delayed or not but 343i at the very least should have told the truth. It’s like they can make all sorts of amazing claims but at the moment 343i have destroyed that trust and they need to re-earn that trust.
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The only thing we’re disagreeing on is grouping - 343i, devs, and leadership are different groups. Leadership should have delayed the game. Whoever’s responsible for PR should have tried to temper player expectations before release… Not sure what they’d say but thats also why I don’t work PR.
Yeah, they just need someone who knows how to set expectations that align with the development pace. It’s identical to the problem No Man’s Sky went through except No Man’s Sky was worse with respect to over promising and underdelivering. To be fair, they pulled it back after months of radio silence like the Legends they are but this isn’t No Man’s Sky and to your earlier point 343 is a AAA game studio so they shouldn’t be in a similar position in the first place.
Poor management was part of it. I also believe Covid had done a lot damage itself. It was stated that they had to rework in the middle of covid and with everyone adapting to covid regs there was bound to be problems. Games like Halo need clear lines of communication and over the phone and internet just cannot replace face to face. Poor planning, poor communication has lead to majority of the games problems and delays.
Technically, it still cost $60 to get a story mode, and one with minimal features. So, the F2P marketing was just to give the illusion that they are offering up a free experience. Honestly, it should have been the other way around; the Campaign should be free and the Multiplayer should be $60. The features expected from both aligns with this as well.
I understand the whole Covid but Covid has nothing to do with them lying about the progression system and they had 4 years before Covid to get things right and they would have had more time if they had delayed the game. Nobody is saying Covid wasn’t an issue and what is the issue is that 343i’s priorities were more about quick buck instead of remotely caring about the fanbase. Poor management of Halo has been going a lot longer than the epidemic and the pandemic doesn’t excuse how snarky they’ve been to the fanbase.
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Yeah, they mean that once you buy the season 1 battle pass, as far as I know.
They said a lot of things! Like something about how most of the stuff is earnable just by playing the game.
…and about how Halo games would have co-op from now on.