I don’t really like to play the Bungie vs. 343 game, because it’s usually a dishonest exercise in over-valorizing Bungie, despite Bungie’s own recurrent failures.
But one thing I don’t really understand is the massive and immediate difference between the Bungie and 343 approaches to playlist variety. In Halo 3 and Reach, there were DEEP CUT, STRAIGHT-UP unpopular playlists that Bungie supported for the entire lives of the games. And I played them and loved them. To go even further, they included explicit visual counters of the populations in every single playlist. I would boot up Reach, see that 35 people in the entire world were playing Multi-Team, queue up, and have the time of my life.
343 immediately seemed super self-conscious about playlist populations with the launch of Halo 4. They hid population counters. And they deleted playlists that couldn’t maintain population parity with the most popular. That lack of transparency, and to be honest, that apparent hostility toward the niche communities has been LOUD for almost a decade.
But I think that supporting strange, niche playlists was a huge part of Halo’s popularity at its height. You could log on and really believe that Halo was a place where anything could happen. Even if someone only plays the objective playlist 1 out of 10 times they log on, it’s providing the variety that defines Halo.
I liked Ske7ch’s recent post. I feel for the 343 employees who are working really hard and trying to navigate what seems like a hostile corporate environment. These are real Halo fans who want to make great Halo games. But the one comment that really rubbed me the wrong way was Ske7ch’s insecurity about dead objective playlists. WHO CARES? More people will always want to play Slayer than objective. It’s always been true. But Halo 3 gave us multiple objective playlists for its entire life. AND it had the balls to tell us that only 13 people in the entire world were playing them. And it didn’t care. Give the 13 people the time of their lives and keep real the belief that Halo is a place where anything can happen.
This will likely be the Halo game with the largest population. I don’t think there’s a compelling pro-player case to be made for a smaller playlist pool than Halo 3.