Despite having purchased every console Halo game and loving the series…I still have to say that $60 for just a single-player campaign is pretty steep. Is there anything substantively special about the retail $60 game (not just pre-order cosmetic DLC) that would warrant “owning” it vs just waiting until co-op is added to play with a friend via Game Pass trial/1-month sub?
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No game nowadays (arguably) is worth $60, too many games that launch incomplete/unfinished/unpolished/etc. and so just download MP for free, wait to see a couple reviews, then decide. Nothing too complicated.
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I don’t think it’s fair to judge whether or not $60 is steep until we’ve seen/experienced the campaign. Plenty of games in the 12-15 hour length range are generally considered worth full price, Ratchet And Clank, Resident Evil 7 and 8, Alan Wake, Control to name a few. But until Infinite launches we won’t know where it lies on that spectrum.
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$60 isn’t such a bad price when you consider how many people, time, money, resources are actually put into making a game, and support etc after.
And I’ll still be playing it for years, mcc iv’e played 1,352 hours so far, and with Infinite most likely more so it’s worth it
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You’re right, most should be much more because of inflation.
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Definitely! Games are very different to how they used to be. Gone are the days a single developer can create a whole multiplayer by themselves last minute.
True, but how are we meant to judge that without buying the campaign to play it? And then what if it isn’t worth the $60? Will Microsoft give us our money back?
The fact that multiplayer is free-to-play and very much operates as a separate game does make the whole deal feel a little skewed. In the past we paid the price of a full game and got access to campaign, multiplayer and in later games modes like firefight and forge. Yes, if you pay the $60 you get access to the campaign and multiplayer modes, but everyone gets the multiplayer without paying a penny. So it very much feels that we are paying $60 just for the campaign, where we would have gotten access to multiplayer too as a part of that cost.
At the end of the transaction you still have the same things, but it doesn’t feel like it. It feels like we are getting less. Does that make sense?
And I have to say Infinite looks to have greatly improved from what promised to be a disastrous launch planned last year, but it still bears a lot of the hallmarks of the less-consumer friendly practices in the modern games industry.
The days of a game launched in a “finished” state (accepting that some features may have been abandoned as developers realised they could not implement them in time for release) have long passed. Before you had to get your game as stable and functional as possible or it would likely remain in a broken state for its entire lifecycle and that would be the only exposure your customers ever had to your game. Best foot forward. The attitude now is very much to kick out the door whatever buggy mess you have cobbled together on launch day and patch yourself into a stable game over the years of its lifecycle.
Or just leave it as is. You got their money, right?
Last year’s intended launch of Infinite definitely looked set to follow this model, though I have to say following the delay it looks to have greatly improved. What we are being shown now certainly feels a lot better. But the delay on co-op does make me hesitant. It is very much one of the warning signs that a game may be following the model I mentioned above. Launch now, finish later. Co-op was the standard back in the day, when online play was minimal or non-existent. It remained the standard even when online services became ubiquitous. Now it is not a priority. It is something to add in later. Disappointing for me given that my introduction to the series was playing CE co-op on my friend’s Xbox. I still introduce friends to the series today with split-screen co-op.
So often it feels modern business practices exploit the most loyal fans. They get the game in its buggiest, emptiest state. Meanwhile those who wait a year or two and pick it up after price drops or in sales get the superior deal. They get a more complete, feature-rich, stable experience for a fraction of the price the day-one fans paid.
So this is where I stand now. Do I buy the campaign at launch, accepting that there will probably be some problems with it and that I cannot play co-op? Or do I wait a year or so, play the multiplayer or other games in the meantime, and get a better game experience with co-op at a lower price?
I find it hard to justify the former to myself these days.
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100% it is worth $60 dollars at launch.
Here in Australia it will be $79 dollars and I still believe that is fair. The Multiplayer has been made entirely free so there is that… but buying the campaign is entirely optional and also it is an investment just as Halo MCC has been for all these years. You will receive additional updates entirely free that will allow co-op play, forge and much, much more. Would you rather pay $30 for campaign then keep paying small increments every time there is some sort of update or added content? OR pay the $60 dollars then receive ALL additional features free?
I know what ill be doing.
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Exceptionally well-framed and well-said. Normally I have no issue paying for a game being expanded over time, and the devs have absolutely been transparent and fan-focused. But personally, this feels like a new & different beast: from CE, my personal Halo experience has always inextricably included other people, whether multiplayer fun or co-op story discovery. Now, the former is free, and the latter is not included. It’s expected to pay for a new idea and be surprised by the experience; it is not expected to pay for a long-running series and not receive a cornerstone experience it has always provided.
It’s like a long-running vehicle model that, for the first time, didn’t have an accessible trunk. Sure, there are drivers who never used the trunk and don’t miss it, but it makes me pause before paying sticker price for this one, especially when tickets to the multiplayer bus are free.
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I don’t really look at it that way. All AAA sp games are full price. The difference between them and Halo was that Halo had a sp AND mp (that were both good) instead of just one or the other. Now you just don’t HAVE to buy the mp to play it with it going f2p, I don’t think sp should suddenly be half the price when every other AAA sp game is full price.
I see what you’re saying, but what you’re describing isn’t a Halo Infinite issue. You face the same dilemma buying any game on launch day. The solution is you don’t pre-order, and read through some reviews first, ideally not just from a large publication like IGN but from someone you’re familiar with, share a similar taste with and trust. You cannot fully judge any experience before either experiencing it, and you can’t experience it for free.
I would somewhat argue against your point about modern game practices though. In theory, historically, games needed to be polished before releasing because they couldn’t be patched. This often wasn’t the case though. I can’t count the number of crap, buggy and unfinished games I used to play, back from when I started gaming on my Snes all the way up through my PS2 days and now. Ugly, poorly optimised and buggy games were common, and they were often movie tie ins designed to prey on kids. It’s the reality of all consumer products, it’s an industry that wants to make money, and I don’t think the industry today is any different than it used to be, they just have different methods.
It’s a perfectly valid idea to wait for a while before you make a purchase. $60 isn’t a small amount of money for a lot of people, and if you’d rather wait until its cheaper, that’s probably smart. Or, just get 1 month of game pass, so you’re only risking $10, then buy it in the future when it’s cheaper if you want. For me, personally, I’d rather play the game in december without co-op. I already pay for game pass, so from my perspective the money is the same whether the game launches today, in three months or in six months.
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You shouldn’t worry too much, honestly. Co-op will arrive eventually so no matter what timeframe you buy it, you’ll have it.
As for the pricetag, really think about it. $60 for only singleplayer campaign? Well that’s what people have paid for since the 80’s. Halo CE cost that much, had no inherent online capabilities, the metal gear series, metroid, list goes on. I understand people believe that there should be a multiplayer to justify the $60 price-tag but honestly it’s rather nonsensical.
But if you really need a justification, the campaign is something we’ve never had in Halo before. The amount of content is higher, the freedom to go through the story as we wish, the amount of playspace. If you bought Assassins Creed or Far Cry at $60 and felt like it’s a fair price then so should it be with this one.
Also I think there are rumors that the campaign will get DLC’s in the future like sidestories or whatnot, could be wrong on that one so don’t quote me.
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Oh, I do not peer through rose tinted glasses and claim that things were perfect in the past. Many games launched with a considerable amount of bugs. They often became considered “features” and now hard-sought exploits usable by speed-runners today.
My point is more about the behaviour it insentivises. The companies that did care about the product had to work to make it the best they could because there would be no opportunity to update or fix it later. You either re-released the game or let your reputation be forever tarnished.
When the ability to update games came along it was fantastic at first. If game-breaking bugs accidentally made their way into a game, they could be patched and fixed. And the developers could add new content further down the line.
Now there is no incentive to produce a quality product for day-one. Dump what you have, patch it later, and hold back as much as you can for DLC.
Not that every developer does this. And not every buggy game release is the result of laziness, incompetence, greed or malice. These modern developments simply create an environment where companies can get away with the behaviour that may have sunk their company before. That is the problem.
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If you preorder on most retailers you get a nice steelbook case (and a big megablox helmet and pack from Walmart). Aside from that, it comes down to personal preference. The campaign is going to be open world and probably allow for a lot of fun encounters.
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the fact that Infinite won’t have Forge or Co-op at launch is great evidence of this. 6 years isn’t enough to make a quality product anymore, compared that to a game like Halo 3 that had 3 years but was content complete at launch.
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Evidence of what? There are plenty of games that have released with shorter dev times, hasn’t had additional DLC or cut content added after launch, and still released with great results. And I mean games that have been releasing these past few years.
Most of these games are of course indie games but if anything that enforces the idea that dev time can be short and a game can still release with plenty of content and with small amount of bugs. How is it evidence? Indiegames work with much smaller teams, smaller economy and usually with less help from outsourcing which AAA studios usually use. It’s about how the company manages their resources, not their dev time (most of the time).
You read my post wrong, just saying.
Could you explain a bit to me then? Because it sounds like you’re trying to say that 6 years isn’t enough for any game in the market now, as standards are higher, and that the delay to forge and co-op is evidence of that. Which my post addresses.
Nothing official has ever been said that future updates to campaign will be free. I wouldn’t be so confident in that assumption. It would be a really bad move to charge for co-op and forge, but beyond that it could easily be paid content drops (if we get anything at all outside of multiplayer content).
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They won’t charge for Co-op or Forge, they might charge for addons though.
343i/MS aren’t EA, I think it is pointless to expect them to just charge for things like that.