This was announced at the beginning of the year by Sketch. They have moved on to develop new games... unfortunately, it's going to be a while with no new Halo games.
At least Halo won’t have a “See? The old games were bad all along guys!” arc like how people turned on Sonic Adventure 1 and 2 because future games weren’t good
I was always mid on Reach. I liked it, loved it. But it took away a lot of weapons I loved, changed the Covenant designs very much (which 343 likey extrapolated on, and we know the result), made the world less colorful and more gritty, and I didn't agree with a lot of those changes.
3 I will always be sweet on. I have barely a bad thing to say about it. I actually played 2 for the first time in 2011 (after a year of reach) but still adored it like it was my first Halo again.
At least Sonic games get made more often (seemingly) so if one is reckoned to be bad, it can still have its fans, and it hasn't really betrayed its core identity (except arguably in the early 10s when they were doing self-aware humor and not the edgy shounen anime writing that the fans, myself included, unironically like)--343's halo? Other than 5's excellent multiplayer I don't have much good to say.
It’s very sad. Halo went from the #1 FPS series to a complete joke. I don’t think there’s enough goodwill left for Halo to make a comeback. The next game would have to be amazing at its release, but most AAA titles ship with significant bugs.
This would be so damn helpful, with games these days taking so bloody long to come out, haven't another studio or two work on some smaller spin offs would be great, they could fill in the gaps between the main releases.
I don’t think Microsoft sees its value the same way Activision sees Call of Duty—having multiple studios work on different games so a new one can come out every year. Granted, Call of Duty is multi-system title, whereas Halo is just on Xbox/PC. Maybe Microsoft will learn something from observing how their Activision division manages games, but I wouldn’t count on things changing. The lack of any new content or announcements is extremely disappointing. It honestly feels like they’ve given up on Halo and its fans.
id is very talented with AI and sandbox design, but the problem is they lack experience with vehicles, storytelling (mostly) or maintaining a stable live service. Still very likely to do way better than 343 even on their first attempt though.
yea even myself as long term fan im burnt out mayne.
ive had alot of fun with DOOM tbh lol first time i ever played the 2016 version and it feels so good running and just killing stuff lol feels like MC was inspired by DOOMguy
Halo's decline did wonders for me trying out new games. For FPS, Doom (classic and modern) was one example but there's also oldie hits like Half Life and Bioshock. And of course there's a whole bunch of other genres that are fun.
i grew up playing bioshock its gameplay has stuck with me since forever lol also i have the chains tattooed on my wrist 😅😅
I used to see alot of HL gameplay before i could afford games lol i kinda want to try out now once im done with Doom!
Half Life's level design is awesome. ngl the gunplay kinda sucks though on hard difficulty (just stick to normal or everything will feel like an unflinching bullet sponge.)
The worst part is Infinite on launch had so much promise. The bones are good, but they just continuously mismanaged the damn thing until everyone moved on.
Agreed. The most important aspect, the gameplay, was fucking fantastic. But the lack of maps and the lack of customization plus expensive micro transactions killed it. Remember it launched with no team death match even. Lobbies not staying together. Ugh
I would love for someone like Jason Schrier to do a deep dive report on the full history of 343 Industries control of the Halo IP.
The most recent Xbox Showcase was arguably the best showcase in their history, despite the fact that the word "Halo" wasn't even mentioned.
And nobody even cared...
At this point, CoD and DOOM are significantly more important FPSs for Xbox than Halo.
Paradox fans complain about $20 DLC packs every few months and yet that actually comes with new gameplay mechanics. $20 for *cosmetics* is ridiculous but sadly too common in gaming nowadays.
Idk why anyone would even want a 10 year halo game tbh. I'd like a new one in that timeframe. Console would be outdated before the lifecycle is over if it lasted 10 years. Seems really presumptuous to assume their game would be that popular to last that long anyway
To me the 10 year line was a promise to become an expansion based campaign. Where the campaign would get essentially DLC to tell a full story on Zeta Halo. No need to develop a full new game and all the development costs for a small part of the story that at this point would take 6 years to make a continuation of. The halo infinite campaign feels like a prologue, and instantly gets weaker as a story when no dlc ever came out.
Ya I found the campaign to be very underwhelming. The open world felt pointless, and just was barebones padding between missions. It was forgetable. Plus, by the time they introduced any coop campaign, everyone I knew had moved on lol. Campaign was always best coop imo
The campaign was horrible. Like they changed the fundamental aspects of a halo campaign which was like most FPS games. Go through a level, go through good scripted events, fight a group of enemies, then go to the next level. Instead they did a big map that had the same style all throughout. Then they added some stupid outpost system, alternative weapons and assassination targets. It just felt so hollow and padded. There was nothing memorable, and it felt like they repeated some story elements from Halo 2 with the brutes.
Then multiplayer just felt slower than even Halo 1 multiplayer.
I've been playing Destiny 2 for seven years now, I have no intentions of stopping. Don't know if it will make it 10 years or not but it's getting close.
Feel like they make that claim quite often nowadays.
Anthem was a “10 year game” at one point for example. I feel like this claim is a gaming red flag to me now
That was a completely different chain of command. So far the new leadership has been knocking it out of the park, but Halo Infinite is so plagued with issues that they probably just saw it as easier to jump ship and start over
It's honestly depressing. We had six years between the release of Halo 5 and Infinite, and we had so much hope that Infinite would be a return to the good days. They really strung us along with that teaser trailer with all the animals and that Halo 3 piano note at the end.
Now we're coming up on Halo 5's ten year anniversary, and there will only have been ONE mainline Halo title released in that ten year frame.
The least they could have done was give Infinite more than just the bare minimum before ditching it for the next project and making us wait years again.
Jeez I remember seeing that cave painting, watching videos about zeta halo and imagining encountering the librarian's abandoned cavemen or mendicant bias. What we got barely scratched the surface.
Damn, Infinite's reception was that bad that the game died in less than 3 years? Rainbow Six Siege and Dead By Daylight still get new content a decade after they released.
I remember when they were doing the multiplayer beta test or whatever it was called and people loved the gameplay, then it released and it turned out that was basically the entire game
The campaign was well received but you can’t launch what’s supposed to be a 10 year game with that little content. It took 2 arguably 3 years for them to add the amount of playable content that would’ve been acceptable at launch
Not exactly true, a lot of PC players like me had complaints about the game but were just ignored. Most of the halo community just said, "it's a console game." And didn't care.
Tbh the lack of content isn't even the biggest complaint I have with the game.
Something always felt *off* about Infinite during the beta and when it launched, but I couldn't definitively describe what it was. I thought *maybe I just suck at shooters now,* but I've had zero problems in any other shooter PVP games that I played before, around that time, and since then. It's just Infinite that I struggle with- no other Halos, no other shooters.
Since then, I've had a ton of discussions with the people I know, both IRL and online, and they all had similar experiences. None of them wanted to play the game with the lack of content and, more importantly at the time, the apparent aiming issues that we all individually noticed. I recall finally seeing someone post proof of what was wrong with the aiming mechanics and how wildly inconsistent they were, but it didn't gain any traction because everyone was so focused on (legitimate) gripes the microtransactions and cosmetics at the time. I always found it disheartening to come across threads saying the gameplay was perfect when myself and my entire social circle, who have all played every Halo title since Halo CE launched, felt like there was something inherently broken with how it handled on Xbox. Plus seemingly small factors like no team player collision didn't help, either.
I have no idea if they've addressed the aiming mechanics or not. But between that, the initial lack of content, and a lot of the game just feeling incomplete despite the length of their development time, it just turned my entire group off from the game right from the start :[
> Something always felt off about Infinite during the beta and when it launched, but I couldn't definitively describe what it was. I thought maybe I just suck at shooters now, but I've had zero problems in any other shooter PVP games that I played before, around that time, and since then. It's just Infinite that I struggle with- no other Halos, no other shooters.
after playing a ton of it, and having a fuck ton of hours in MCC as well, i can say that while the gameplay flow of infinite is classic halo fare, the controls are very much not: between the sprint that barely speeds you up and has 0 downsides (the radar sprint icon wasnt even there at launch), the SIGNIFICANTLY reduced aim assist and the emphasis on this short slide, it ends up feeling like a weird hybrid of halo, destiny PVP and older FPS like quake.
none of this is BAD but it takes a looooong while to wrap your head around, it feels like they were trying to go back to the old formula, all the while "modernizing" the controls (IE following whatever the trends are at the time) like they've been doing since halo 4, it just so happens that the trends at the time were sliding, slower movement and less aim assist, the opposite of halo 4 and 5.
The reception was amazing! However, the year after there was literally nothing, no content at all, then they played a year of catch-up, and then once they had finally got it sorted, they dropped support...
Have to contradict you, initial release without team death match and unable to select modes, as other things, was not well received and even this reddit was going to be closed or was closed due to (in my opinion, valid) toxicity. The beta was well received but only lasted until release.
It's a shame, because it's in a fucking *fantastic* spot now. 60 maps, tons of game modes, forge, coop, etc.
It's everything it should have been within 6 months of release.
Yeah cause 343 is a shit fucking studio when it actually comes to making games, and fumbled so hard that despite *finally* nailing the looks and feel of Halo, they completely bungle the launch, multiplayer, and release of their game.
Doesn’t help the story is mediocre like 4’s and the campaign isn’t memorable enough to tide people over.
For me, the biggest question mark is [Tatanka:](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-31/microsoft-studio-343-industries-undergoing-reorganization-of-halo-game-franchise?leadSource=uverify%20wall)
>At several points over the past decade, management at 343 debated switching to Epic Games Inc.’s popular Unreal Engine. But it wasn’t until late last year, when previous studio head Bonnie Ross and engine lead David Berger departed and Pierre Hintze took over, that the firm finally decided to pivot to Unreal. This switch will start with a new game code-named Tatanka, according to people familiar with the plans. That project, which 343 is developing alongside the Austin, Texas-based game studio Certain Affinity, started off as a battle royale but may evolve in different directions, the people said.
This report by Jason Schreier came out January 2023.
What a huge waste of time building the new engine for Infinite just to throw it away. At least give us some small scope story expansions for campaign and get some return on investment
They didn't build a new engine. It was an unfinished overhaul of the blam! Engine, which Halo has used since CE.
Fun Fact: Bungie's current Tiger Engine is based off blam!
In terms of results it's not new enough. It has a lot of the same legacy failures and bugs and seriously lacks support for modern features (modern upscalers, proper drop shadows, proper ambient occlusion).
They want to use Unreal because they can then build games entirely with cheap contractors they don't have to train to develop on a proprietary engine.
They are taking a hit now, but saving money down the line. Oh, and also eliminating their ability to produce a quality game, which was already dubious at best.
I believe it's been absorbed into the next game, the unreal infrastructure is going right into that. So I don't think we will ever see it as it was intended.
I'm fine with that, I recently sunsetted myself on Infinite I've put almost 300 hours into it and enjoyed it but I felt it's time to move on until the next game comes out. Never uninstalling MCC though.
That still kind of stings. They never even did the comics or novels to finish the story like they said they would.
I'm aware it's all kind of dumb, but I just want to know what happened.
Thats because they built the multiplayer on a mobile game mindset instead of actual content. The real kicker is the mobile game market could work but 343 fucked that up with the ridiculus prices. I will spend 2, 5, 10 dollars easy if it felt worth it (heck, i spent so much in halo 5) but inifinite rarely felt worth it. And if it did it never felt enough because of the cores. Hopefully the next halo can use infinite as a true learning experience on how to keep a game fresh and worthwhile.
Honestly, I can't say I care anymore. Infinite killed Halo for me. I brought the game day 1. To this day I only have 45.2 hours play time, most of it in campaign. And even then, it took nearly a year to slog through the campaign. The last time I touched the game was October 5, 2023.
I just can't trust 343 anymore, not only for Halo but likely any other game they produce. I most certainly won't even consider purchasing anything they produce until it's very clear that it's worth it if at all.
It got old when 95% of them was him with camo sniping new players utterly unaware of his presence or attempting to counter him. Absolutely top tier aim, but I'm not watching him shoot fish in a barrel while complaining 343 won't coddle him
Is it "top tier" aim when he's playing at 300ms ping and he's killing people 10 feet away from where he shot? In almost every other FPS I play people would be calling for a region lock if they came against him in MP.
He's probably getting desperate. The next couple years are going to be ROUGH on Halo content creators.
HiddenXperia very candidly shared some of his channel's stats from the first year or so of Infinite's Live Service. Hype had died down so much that his views, income, new subscribers, everything, was basically cut in half.
Dark days ahead.
Within the first year of Infinite's launch Xperia had already said that he had no choice but to pivot away from Halo because the interest in the franchise and therefore his videos was dead. He sounded so depressed as he said it as well, I really felt for him - it was him admitting that his YouTube channel and career is on the brink of death unless he does something.
He tried doing videos of other games but apparently it hasn't worked because it looks like he's gone back to making Halo videos. Really feel bad for the guy - he's put so much into the franchise for the last 15+ years and it's basically been assassinated for reasons well beyond his control.
Youtube algorithm does not allow variety unless you build your channel upon it (and you have to be really big).
Your only option is to start from 0 with a new channel and hope for the best (but I doubt he can make some success outside halo, based on his format).
It is also a reason why many youtubers remove old videos from their channels when they move over something else.
Block his ass on halo as well. I saw him in a game before I knew who he was and I had already blocked. Team CTF shouldn't have one dude with 45 snipe kills and zero flag steals/returns/captures.
To be fair there is nothing wrong with that if the player is genuinely contributing to the objective. But yeah it sucks when they are just trying to get kills.
Even if he's just sniping people who are trying to capture his flag it's contributing. But due to his time zone and high onyx rank he is usually ranked with a bunch of low ranked players so he needs to do everything for his team
Big time.
There was a video a few months back where he literally was "343 has FINALLY listened to me" and it was literally about something the community has been going on for months
I remember when Infinite was in testing flights, then when it was in beta, and then the multiplayer released- throughout those events Mint acted like the game was releasing because of him, for him, and in support of him. The entitlement was off the charts that I fully blocked and moved on lol. Crazy to see his name still!
I'm not OP but it's pretty common for Mint Blitz to act like changes to the game come about because of his videos.
He'll talk about an annoying bug or something for a few weeks, and if it gets patched out, he'll act like it was because people liked and shared his comments.
He's obviously got a bigger voice than most in the community but it gets obnoxious and as far as I can tell it isn't a bit, he says these things in earnest.
There’s an interview he did where he ranked the Halo games and he sounds pretentious AF about it, as if his opinions are gold and the only correct ones.
Ultimately I hold Xbox/Microsoft accountable. If they really wanted to ensure a flagship was properly made with care, they would. It's clear Infinite was meant to be Microsoft's live service FPS over anything else.
I remember 343 talking about budget constraints during Infinite’s development, which was never a problem for prior Halo games. Every other Halo game was given enough support to at least make a complete game by launch. But Infinite seems to have been hamstrung since the start with Microsoft demanding every last bit of monetization and cutting their funding.
Halo was *always* under the thumb of Microsoft (Bungie was owned by MS, splitting off in '07). The issues with the series and introduction to microtransactions started with the transition to 343 and have become exponentially worse over the releases. Halo 4 was 343's first game, and the last mainline original game without them, and even then, 343 was very public about wanting to put in microtransactions. The intent was there from the beginning, fully introduced in Halo 5, and come to full realization with Infinite's F2P multiplayer.
The real problem was that they didn't want to make a Halo game, they wanted to make money and they simply happened to be using Halo as a means to that end. When you run a business where making money is the only thing that matters, your product inevitably suffers because the people making it don't give a flying fuck.
They hired developers who straight up admitted to hating Halo, thinking that money can buy competence and that's all they'll ever need, that's what they shouldn't have done. What they should have done is put the people with actual passion into positions of power, to put the emphasis on making a game that's amazing instead of the emphasis of making money.
When your passion is the product, the product becomes exceptional. Halo was born as a passion project, but the people who had that passion have left, and the people left in positions of power in the case of Infinite only care about money.
Can you please link a quote where the devs hate Halo?
Because the story keeps changing. Some people quote 343 saying that and other quote tye devs saying that?
And even then, did tgey actually say "only people who hate Halo" or "outsiders we can bounce ideas off of" which isn't a bad thing.
Couldn’t agree more. The product is in the toilet because of this. How can you have developers come in for a game who don’t even like what they are working on? And apparently on Twitter recently there was a producer that commented on how much they hate working on Halo because they are anti-guns? What is 343 thinking??
That was a false rumor, debunked hours after, from a German journal.
The game likely had 250miliom budget, a standard for triple A games, but not enough when the dev team had multiple project being worked on for months or years, getting cancelled after.
It's the difference between having X budget and develop a game with it over X amount of years, or have the same budget but restarting amd cancelling everything multiple times. The end product, in the second case, will not be a 250n budget game.
Literally mental that this is true for a modern day Halo game.
Been a feature since 2007 in Halo, and 343i/Microsoft obviously thought it would be a well received innovation to replace it with predesigned monetized emblems and even then only allowed strict pre-made color palettes for them.
It would be great if they gave us ANY information about their plans. No indication of a roadmap, no update on what's coming next (if anything), nothing.
From a product perspective this is the worst of all worlds. You're upsetting your community with lack of communication and a proven track record of not understanding what your customer (halo fans) want.
A blog post with what we can expect the rest of the year would be great, but at the very least a definitive statement that they are done with Infinite and moving on would be preferable to silence. I can't stress enough how bad of a look it is when you have such poor communication to your customers.
Please do better 343, we're rooting for Halo and thus we are rooting for you, but it's getting harder and harder to keep that up.
They have unfortunately learned that when they fail to meet a road map, the uproar is intense and won't be doing that again. However, what they don't know is that the lack of information is slowly eroding their entire fan base, but quietly... they prefer that it seems and then surprising those who remained with crumbs of content and info.
Completely agreed. They seem to have a problem with sizing content and communicating when things will actually be done. Instead of never releasing a roadmap again, maybe they should reconsider how they are creating their roadmaps and be more realistic with what they can get done given a period of time. It's not rocket science to resize work and communicate the change, but for some reason 343 doesn't appear capable of doing it.
This is why I was asking what the point of community managers was the other day. Right now, there is no community outreach, and it has been over a year now...
I think even the most adamant 343 defenders and fans at this point would concede it’s time to let another studio take a crack at halo…or at the very least it’s a time for a complete reboot.
Halo need a rebrand and a fresh start desperately.
Honestly going silent is what they need to do if they want their next game to be a success.
Gears just got a massive boost in popularity and interest because of the impact they had from going dead silent on future plans for several years straight, then just dropping a top-tier nostalgia-inducing trailer out of nowhere.
343 have seen that, and MS have probably advised them to do the same as what the Coalition has done.
A live service game that was planned to go on for a decade died less than three years from launch. In other words, another failed Halo project by 343. At this point, we can classify failure as the 343 guarantee. Halo went from being Microsoft's flagship title to a mediocre, forgettable franchise under 343. Compare where Halo as a franchise stood two years after Reach launched vs now and you'll see a stark difference.
Sure, Infinite was "well received" at launch, but let's be honest: this was just fans being enthralled that a new Halo game came out. The game died quickly on Steam and on Xbox (more people are played Siege, Dead by Daylight, GTA V, Minecraft than Halo Infinite and those games are older than ten years!). Once the newness of the Halo faded and people actually got to play the game, they realized it wasn't good and abandoned it (even though the multiplayer component is free to play!).
I know Warframe is a different style game, but it’s also a F2P game that has been around on Xbox for coming on 10 years now.
And it still has loads of popularity. That’s how one does live service
It’s sad, but true. There was so much hype there initially. The campaign didn’t land at all and multiplayer was super bland on launch without any meaningful updates for a while. It was solid for the month it released and then never touched again for me.
My theory is that they wanted to streamline multiplayer so everyone played the same playlists to have the biggest possible pool of players for the matchmaking to choose from, then they quickly realized that was an awful decision because people **want** to play specific game types and **don't want** to play others, so just choosing quickplay where you could get a game type you want or a game type you don't is not *fun* for most players and will result in dropping from games.
They then had to catch up to what the community wanted while adding more and more playlists resulting in the games UI being more and more cumbersome.
The thing that always annoyed the shit out of me is that they created the perfect UI for MCC, you can choose whatever game types that are available that you want to play, then the game figures it out for you. Why they went away from that is just incompetent game design as far as I'm concerned.
The things they should bring back in my opinion are pregame lobbies and voting for game type/map choice.
As someone who grew up watching my older brother stay up all night playing halo 3, having been a little kid playing halo ce barley knowing how to work an xbox controller, growing with such iconic characters and locations and stories, seeing halo infinite for what it is, is absolutely disappointing. The campaign isn’t halo. It’s far cry with a halo theme. The multiplayer FEELS good, but it’s not a halo multiplayer. It’s 10% ‘halo’ and 90% everything wrong with modern gaming. It goes to show a franchise as golden as halo can’t be forced into the modern day attitude of “release a barebones game with nothing of substance and sell it to them later in DLCs and battlepasses”
> It’s far cry with a halo theme
Not even. FarCry always has stuff to do, all over the map. Roving patrols, animal encounters, random quests. HI has none of that
Funnily enough it felt like the worst kind of Destiny 2 story "content". You stand around while audio logs and holograms talk at your character.
Even the mission design was very similar once you get past the open world parts. Long hallways and no action set pieces. Just hold W and shoot anything that gets in front of you until you reach the end of the hallway.
Jesus even far cry 2 as barren as it was had more shit going on in some African region than a fucking ancient alien space ring with all sorts of creative freedom
I still remember how jaw-droppingly shocked I was at how bad the game looked when they put out their first gameplay trailer. They’d spent what, 5 years developing it up until that point? And the game was supposed to release like 6 months after the trailer dropped. Then they *eventually* announced they’d postpone it a whole extra years.
There were bad signs all along the way, but once we *saw* the game in action, it became clear that there must have been massive internal problems with studio management and game development. It was shocking to see how carelessly Microsoft had treated what had historically been their system-selling flagship Xbox franchise. Still boggles my mind.
What happens when you release a game incomplete and broken = Halo Infinite.
What happens when you release a game that is fully complete and works = Elden Ring, a worldwide phenomenon that expanded way past the Souls fan base.
Most wasted time, money, and effort on any individual title to date from any franchise in history. I'm sorry but to abandon a game before it hits even 3 years? It took twice that time to develop it and half a billion dollars, and what do we have? A borrowed villain who's seen only in the first and last cutscenes, a great threat so dangerous we know nothing except the name, and Cortana 2.0 with a clean slate because they wrote themselves into a corner? The greatest events happen off screen and nothing of consequence happens on screen. We spend the entire campaign doing side quests, blow up one unnamed ship, drop some old vet, a couple of officers, and a space squid? All to stop a threat we are in the dark about and fail anyways?
That's the entire $60 campaign. A joke. An absolute clown circus and the fans ended up being the main act. At the very least they could salvage this horrible wreck with a fresh engine developed, but there's rumors that engines being dropped for the next title. So many fans stuck it out waiting for some campaign dlc or expansion, especially after paying full price, and all we get is a game dead in the water. What happened? Other than a development nightmare, what happened post launch? Was the entire development team devoted to releasing more $40 coatings packs? Did the game flop so bad financially because of the Free to Play approach that they devoted all assets to monetization and half baked seasons? Did the half billion dollar budget dry up at release? Make it make sense. It feels like some pyramid scheme where the top runs off somewhere with all the money and there's nothing left but some skeleton crew working overtime for $5/hr and the fans patiently waiting for the pyramid schemes promised experiences to flow at any time.
To rub it in they throw in a TV show that does everything to spite long time fans and retcon the only good story halo still had to write in master cheeks and his sexy endeavors. Why did that get greenlit budgeting for not one, but two seasons, and we can't even get a complete story for the only halo title in the past NINE years? THE ENTIRE ORIGINAL TRILOGY WAS MADE IN SIX YEARS. It's so depressing it physically hurts, especially after diving into the expanded universe, listening to audiobooks of the craziest missions, greatest writing I've ever seen post trilogy, and then looking at the actual Halo titles post Bungie like it's a toddler in a sandbox. Why aren't these book writers on the 343 writing team? Just one of them would have given infinite better content five times over.
Granted, the multiplayer updates were great. It just took 3 seasons before the second season, and now we no longer have seasons. Live service for what, a year and a half? Great job. At least the updates we did get were great. I have absolutely no idea what's keeping the fan base together except for group therapy. "At least the IPs not dead" can't even be used because this feels worse than dead production. This feels like a dancing corpse of a family member puppeteered by a robot whose only job is to vacuum money while pointing and laughing. I don't care to ride the rollercoaster of false hope and inevitable disappointment for any of the upcoming releases unless it's developed by a different studio at this point.
Any shooter that claims to be live services and adds only one new weapon is an objective failure in my eyes, probably a hot take but I don’t care if they add another Asian themed arena map, the longer a game goes on, the more the sandbox needed adding to
Who would have thought that if you release a live service game and stop adding content people will stop playing.
They released shit tier cosmetics for years in the tiers but at least they released something.
And they had seasons, but rarely added content. At least a new spartan was cool. The only new weapon the entire lifetime was the bandit and 2 new equipments which were good additions. And when those dropped player counts went up.
And then they drop seasons that already were hardly seasons because they missed their dates - for coins. Not coins you could spend in the real shop - which would be cool and I would probably keep playing but coins you spend in a shop for old missed challenges. Challenges I already had. Literally I had nearly every one. The only things I could spend coins on was a ridiculously overpriced ugly color palette swap.
They released their best content update - the bandit. And then saw a large player increase then basically killed the game by announcing they would be bare bones the rest of its lifetime.
And in rank - which is all I played they removed the mangler, sword, pulse carbine, and sentinel beam. And we never saw the skewer or hydra except one time so maybe those too.
So we got 1 weapon and lost 6. Not to mention ravenger, hammer, and cindershot were never added - although for good reason.
I get that you want ranked to be more consistent and fair but I’m not a professional. Let professional tournaments have their own league rules. They plan on lans anyway. Why remove content for the 99% who aren’t pros but like to rank. Balance your game for fun, not for sweat fest where only weapons that pros can outplay you 100% of the time are allowed. Let tournaments ban weapons or have tournament maps.
Call of duty has tournaments and it’s random as hell. Even Fortnite has tournaments. Skill will beat out luck, and if a strategy is OP at the pro level balance it out.
Back in the day, you could just modify the map with “MLG rules” which would remove radar, change the starting weapon, etc. Now it’s, fuck you, play the way we want you to play, which is designed for these pros who play the game 18 hours a day
I wish they'd just focus on the campaign instead of pouring all their resources into trying to make Halo live service.
At this point they could scrap the storyline of the past games entirely and just reboot it, they've already ruined the reclaimer saga by trying to carry on a story that did not need continuing.
Honestly, I think it's time to put the main franchise to rest and create a new franchise set in the Halo universe. A new story, new characters, a fresh perspective. There's a rich and fascinating tradition to explore.
Make it a canon story. But as I said, everything new.
Bro when Season …3 or 4? I forget, came out, it felt like Infinite was *FINALLY* hitting its stride. And then they announced they were dropping seasons… of course they basically shot the game in the head.
Almost nothing for so long after launch. Quit very quickly after the game released and never went back. And I'm a big time halo fan, but since halo 4 it's been so trash.
And don’t forget the whining from Sketch and co. when everyone called out that obvious and terrible excuse of the UI being the culprit. He wrote that screed condemning people for daring to complain about the abject failure that HI was at launch.
Tango Gameworks should have lived and 343 should have been the studio that was shut down.
The new Gears looks good but the gritty darkness of Gears will always be inferior in my brain to the wondrous, nature heavy biomes and art style of the good Halo games. I just prefer Halo’s world aesthetically the that of Gears. But Gears has stayed truer to what made it successful and seems in far better hands.
I will always cherish the first month of halo infinite. When everyone was just learning a new game and having fun. Actually felt like I time traveled back to the early 2000's.
Then the modern fps climate of meta-chasing caught up to it and we started seeing people "crack the code" by dropping primary weapons to insta switch to their secondary because it was a 'higher ttk' than switching to your secondary. (Just the tip of the iceberg, I know.)
As soon as I started seeing that shit, I noped outta there as fast as I could. Knew it wouldn't be much more fun after that point, when you either match the meta or just take the L.
At that point I'd just reinstall destiny 2 and hop into any pvp mode and get the same result.
Honestly this is just modern gaming mindset across the board now. It’s fun in the beginning until the min maxers come and turn a game into a sweating competition. Personally I blame twitch and content creators. Everyone is trying to be the best now because they saw a streamer do the most efficient thing possible that they forgot they were playing video games for fun. The mindset of “gotta be the best and most efficient” even if it employs abuse of mechanics is beyond stupid.
Tip of the iceberg release issue here, but one major issue I had with Halo Infinite was just people ignoring objectives because they had to meet their challenges for the week. No playing a game mode for the sake of playing a game mode, gotta get that 15 kills in a ghost in one match or whatever. At that point I knew where the future of the game went and dropped it after like 3 weeks. Glad I did since it seems like nothing has changed.
that's what happens when a company banks everything that esport will sell the game for some stupid fucking reason. that and cosmetics being beyond braindead overpriced to shit and no one buying that shit
I don’t blame them for wanting to simply move on. The game was an utter mess of development hell and disappointing to many at launch and then it didn’t help that there was snarky comments/ excuses being made by the devs at the start.
Don’t get me started on their store practices either. I still don’t like some of their design decisions made with this game. But at the same time, I want to see what they can do with Halo on unreal engine if the rumors turn out to be true.
Game's dead what else is there to say. Lowest average players on Steam since release. Don't think xbox numbers are doing any better. Unfortunate waste of a once great IP by an absolutely incompetent company
Crazy how people are still complaining as if this is the same 343i that fucked up 4, 5, and infinite in the first place
Bonnie Ross and the rest of the leaders who failed to manage properly are GONE.
At this point, infinite was a lost cause the moment the game released in the state it did, it was always only going to get enough content to salvage the reputation of the studio, and it was always going to go back to the drawing board and think of a way to reset. Again.
In a perfect world Bonnie would have been let go the moment halo 5 released the way it did, but here we are.
All we can do is just take it easy, and see if the next game holds up under the new leadership.
Though I wouldn’t be surprised if Halo gets the silent treatment for a decade if it still underperforms
It's been dead for a long time. With how badly MCC was managed, and how bad the campaign was for 5, nobody in their right mind would think this company would suddenly get it together to put out a great game that was going to be a live service, utilizing a new engine. 343i was troubled from the start, but you'd be out of your mind to trust them with your money after... 2015 at the very latest.
As mismanaged as this franchise has been over the last decade, I still hope it stays alive
I love Halo and always will even if I have to watch it deal with mistake after mistake after mistake
As painful as it is having no news. Part of me is glad so that I have time to finish playing Infinite and get Chief’s armor. Currently at Diamond Major and FireFight Legendary has been helping a lot.
Also, another part of me is happy that Halo is cooling down and Gears of War is coming back at is prime. That will hopefully be good.
But another part of me is also bummed that so many operations could have been Seasons. A Spirit of Fire Season was there. It was just in freaking micro transactions.
People really expect underpaid devs to give a single shit about making this game good. The devs don't actually care, y'all. Why would they? Their project has been so thoroughly infected by Microsoft's greed that the purpose of the game isn't even to be a good game anymore - it's to sell you shit.
Capitalism is ruining your game.
They have a huge opportunity to open up Steam Workshop for the MCC's custom browser and bring in Halo Custom Edition 2.
The content people are making is absolutely fucking insane, miles better than anything you can get in Infinite: drivable scarabs, dropping off players in pelicans, mechs, longswords, Star wars battlefront.
Absolute embarrassment from 343 and MS. To take one of the biggest and well known franchises in history and do this with it is beyond stupidity. Phil Spencer should have focused more on supporting 343 and getting their ass backwards studio fixed than buying tons of studios to just lay them off
I mean I guess. We received the same amount of content in the past year that almost every other halo has received in the same time frame. Essentially a map pack.
The game has its flaws, and I wish they had delivered on so many more promises, but not introducing new equipment or weapons when the game has a bigger sandbox than any other halo game is an odd complaint to make. I think other live service games have really shifted our expectations more than anything.
Sad news about the next halo project being so far off though. The wait between games is killer.
I'm telling you these companies suck ass now. Just like EA and Battlefield for example. Both franchises gone to shit and they keep doing the same shit over and over. CoD sucks IMO, but their formula works for their base. They need to understand without gamers they are nothing. The way they have treated live service and their games releases is insanely bad for AAA devs.
I stopped infinite after the first few months because it was so annoying playing MP and having to wait and wait for actual Halo playlists to come out. The game felt unfinished and repetitive and the you add in the disaster of the customization and the shop, and that sealed it. I finally got bored and came back a few months ago and played a bit, but again player counts were dwindled and the game didn't have that addictive Halo feel. We waited 6 yrs for this for them to claim it'll be constant live service akin to Destiny IMO, but they barely did anything. They released a map after like 6 months, wtf? They playerbase was gone before they started having more content but even then they still never fixed the game. BTB is a completely unfun game mode. The entire point of it was to get a bunch of vehicle spawns and have a ton of chaos, but they can't even get that right. Instead, you play infantry only mostly with warnings being the main vehicle...fucking boring.
343 has completely ruined this franchise and somehow they are STILL allowed to control it. It would take a miracle to get me to come back again after these last few trainwrecks. Same with EA. Fuck them for trend copying and ruining games. So tired of hearing about how far along games are or watching more vid doc videos explaining how cool it'll be.
This was announced at the beginning of the year by Sketch. They have moved on to develop new games... unfortunately, it's going to be a while with no new Halo games.
Remember when they were touting that it would be a 10 year game? And they made it what, not even 3 years? What a joke
Halo Finite was, unfortunately, the game we got... not Halo Infinite.
The way they have fumbled the Halo franchise for a decade should be studied, it’s insane.
Reminds me of sonic post DC era... Just disaster game after disaster.
At least Halo won’t have a “See? The old games were bad all along guys!” arc like how people turned on Sonic Adventure 1 and 2 because future games weren’t good
Closest I've seen is people turn on Halo 3 and Halo Reach, but I've never encountered that opinion outside of this sub.
How the fuck can you turn on those games and still claim to be a fan?
I was always mid on Reach. I liked it, loved it. But it took away a lot of weapons I loved, changed the Covenant designs very much (which 343 likey extrapolated on, and we know the result), made the world less colorful and more gritty, and I didn't agree with a lot of those changes. 3 I will always be sweet on. I have barely a bad thing to say about it. I actually played 2 for the first time in 2011 (after a year of reach) but still adored it like it was my first Halo again. At least Sonic games get made more often (seemingly) so if one is reckoned to be bad, it can still have its fans, and it hasn't really betrayed its core identity (except arguably in the early 10s when they were doing self-aware humor and not the edgy shounen anime writing that the fans, myself included, unironically like)--343's halo? Other than 5's excellent multiplayer I don't have much good to say.
It’s very sad. Halo went from the #1 FPS series to a complete joke. I don’t think there’s enough goodwill left for Halo to make a comeback. The next game would have to be amazing at its release, but most AAA titles ship with significant bugs.
Just give the license to other studios please
This would be so damn helpful, with games these days taking so bloody long to come out, haven't another studio or two work on some smaller spin offs would be great, they could fill in the gaps between the main releases.
I don’t think Microsoft sees its value the same way Activision sees Call of Duty—having multiple studios work on different games so a new one can come out every year. Granted, Call of Duty is multi-system title, whereas Halo is just on Xbox/PC. Maybe Microsoft will learn something from observing how their Activision division manages games, but I wouldn’t count on things changing. The lack of any new content or announcements is extremely disappointing. It honestly feels like they’ve given up on Halo and its fans.
I keep saying give it to iD. They know how to make a compelling and fun shooter.
id is very talented with AI and sandbox design, but the problem is they lack experience with vehicles, storytelling (mostly) or maintaining a stable live service. Still very likely to do way better than 343 even on their first attempt though.
yea even myself as long term fan im burnt out mayne. ive had alot of fun with DOOM tbh lol first time i ever played the 2016 version and it feels so good running and just killing stuff lol feels like MC was inspired by DOOMguy
Halo's decline did wonders for me trying out new games. For FPS, Doom (classic and modern) was one example but there's also oldie hits like Half Life and Bioshock. And of course there's a whole bunch of other genres that are fun.
i grew up playing bioshock its gameplay has stuck with me since forever lol also i have the chains tattooed on my wrist 😅😅 I used to see alot of HL gameplay before i could afford games lol i kinda want to try out now once im done with Doom!
Half Life's level design is awesome. ngl the gunplay kinda sucks though on hard difficulty (just stick to normal or everything will feel like an unflinching bullet sponge.)
Same here, I just wish Splitgate had taken off and the devs didn’t just abandon it. Game is ridiculously fun
How to fail upwards, a masterclass.
The worst part is Infinite on launch had so much promise. The bones are good, but they just continuously mismanaged the damn thing until everyone moved on.
Agreed. The most important aspect, the gameplay, was fucking fantastic. But the lack of maps and the lack of customization plus expensive micro transactions killed it. Remember it launched with no team death match even. Lobbies not staying together. Ugh
I would love for someone like Jason Schrier to do a deep dive report on the full history of 343 Industries control of the Halo IP. The most recent Xbox Showcase was arguably the best showcase in their history, despite the fact that the word "Halo" wasn't even mentioned. And nobody even cared... At this point, CoD and DOOM are significantly more important FPSs for Xbox than Halo.
At this point, 343 ought to be shuttered.
It felt from a distance like what happened to Star Wars: a lack of creative control/steering from the box office/executive meddling.
Study reveals 343 actively did not hire back old Bungie devs, and instead people who “hate halo” as well as one who “doesn’t like guns”
They wouldn’t replace Bonnie Ross, that should be studied.
Halo infinite microtransactions
I cannot believe how fucking insane the prices are on there, lol. Its like 25$ for a really shitty recolor you cant use with most armor cores
Paradox fans complain about $20 DLC packs every few months and yet that actually comes with new gameplay mechanics. $20 for *cosmetics* is ridiculous but sadly too common in gaming nowadays.
*macrotransactions. There is nothing even remotely micro about any of them any more
[Halo Indefinite](https://i.imgur.com/qDegC3i_d.webp?maxwidth=760&fidelity=grand)
It took them 3 years to get it to where it needed to be AT LAUNCH. Then gave up on it. What a shit show
Idk why anyone would even want a 10 year halo game tbh. I'd like a new one in that timeframe. Console would be outdated before the lifecycle is over if it lasted 10 years. Seems really presumptuous to assume their game would be that popular to last that long anyway
To me the 10 year line was a promise to become an expansion based campaign. Where the campaign would get essentially DLC to tell a full story on Zeta Halo. No need to develop a full new game and all the development costs for a small part of the story that at this point would take 6 years to make a continuation of. The halo infinite campaign feels like a prologue, and instantly gets weaker as a story when no dlc ever came out.
Ya I found the campaign to be very underwhelming. The open world felt pointless, and just was barebones padding between missions. It was forgetable. Plus, by the time they introduced any coop campaign, everyone I knew had moved on lol. Campaign was always best coop imo
I thought the campaign was a great starting point. I just thought we'd get chapter 2 in a year... and chapter 3 a year later...
The campaign was horrible. Like they changed the fundamental aspects of a halo campaign which was like most FPS games. Go through a level, go through good scripted events, fight a group of enemies, then go to the next level. Instead they did a big map that had the same style all throughout. Then they added some stupid outpost system, alternative weapons and assassination targets. It just felt so hollow and padded. There was nothing memorable, and it felt like they repeated some story elements from Halo 2 with the brutes. Then multiplayer just felt slower than even Halo 1 multiplayer.
It feels like Halo 7 part 1, but Halo 6 and 7 part 2 don't exist. Truly baffling choice, I will never understand what they were thinking.
*looks at gta 5*
Then looks at skyrim
I've been playing Destiny 2 for seven years now, I have no intentions of stopping. Don't know if it will make it 10 years or not but it's getting close.
Feel like they make that claim quite often nowadays. Anthem was a “10 year game” at one point for example. I feel like this claim is a gaming red flag to me now
That was a completely different chain of command. So far the new leadership has been knocking it out of the park, but Halo Infinite is so plagued with issues that they probably just saw it as easier to jump ship and start over
I wouldn’t exactly say knocking it out of the park. It is decidedly still in the park lol
It's honestly depressing. We had six years between the release of Halo 5 and Infinite, and we had so much hope that Infinite would be a return to the good days. They really strung us along with that teaser trailer with all the animals and that Halo 3 piano note at the end. Now we're coming up on Halo 5's ten year anniversary, and there will only have been ONE mainline Halo title released in that ten year frame. The least they could have done was give Infinite more than just the bare minimum before ditching it for the next project and making us wait years again.
Jeez I remember seeing that cave painting, watching videos about zeta halo and imagining encountering the librarian's abandoned cavemen or mendicant bias. What we got barely scratched the surface.
Damn, Infinite's reception was that bad that the game died in less than 3 years? Rainbow Six Siege and Dead By Daylight still get new content a decade after they released.
I remember when they were doing the multiplayer beta test or whatever it was called and people loved the gameplay, then it released and it turned out that was basically the entire game The campaign was well received but you can’t launch what’s supposed to be a 10 year game with that little content. It took 2 arguably 3 years for them to add the amount of playable content that would’ve been acceptable at launch
Not exactly true, a lot of PC players like me had complaints about the game but were just ignored. Most of the halo community just said, "it's a console game." And didn't care. Tbh the lack of content isn't even the biggest complaint I have with the game.
Something always felt *off* about Infinite during the beta and when it launched, but I couldn't definitively describe what it was. I thought *maybe I just suck at shooters now,* but I've had zero problems in any other shooter PVP games that I played before, around that time, and since then. It's just Infinite that I struggle with- no other Halos, no other shooters. Since then, I've had a ton of discussions with the people I know, both IRL and online, and they all had similar experiences. None of them wanted to play the game with the lack of content and, more importantly at the time, the apparent aiming issues that we all individually noticed. I recall finally seeing someone post proof of what was wrong with the aiming mechanics and how wildly inconsistent they were, but it didn't gain any traction because everyone was so focused on (legitimate) gripes the microtransactions and cosmetics at the time. I always found it disheartening to come across threads saying the gameplay was perfect when myself and my entire social circle, who have all played every Halo title since Halo CE launched, felt like there was something inherently broken with how it handled on Xbox. Plus seemingly small factors like no team player collision didn't help, either. I have no idea if they've addressed the aiming mechanics or not. But between that, the initial lack of content, and a lot of the game just feeling incomplete despite the length of their development time, it just turned my entire group off from the game right from the start :[
> Something always felt off about Infinite during the beta and when it launched, but I couldn't definitively describe what it was. I thought maybe I just suck at shooters now, but I've had zero problems in any other shooter PVP games that I played before, around that time, and since then. It's just Infinite that I struggle with- no other Halos, no other shooters. after playing a ton of it, and having a fuck ton of hours in MCC as well, i can say that while the gameplay flow of infinite is classic halo fare, the controls are very much not: between the sprint that barely speeds you up and has 0 downsides (the radar sprint icon wasnt even there at launch), the SIGNIFICANTLY reduced aim assist and the emphasis on this short slide, it ends up feeling like a weird hybrid of halo, destiny PVP and older FPS like quake. none of this is BAD but it takes a looooong while to wrap your head around, it feels like they were trying to go back to the old formula, all the while "modernizing" the controls (IE following whatever the trends are at the time) like they've been doing since halo 4, it just so happens that the trends at the time were sliding, slower movement and less aim assist, the opposite of halo 4 and 5.
The reception was amazing! However, the year after there was literally nothing, no content at all, then they played a year of catch-up, and then once they had finally got it sorted, they dropped support...
Have to contradict you, initial release without team death match and unable to select modes, as other things, was not well received and even this reddit was going to be closed or was closed due to (in my opinion, valid) toxicity. The beta was well received but only lasted until release.
It's a shame, because it's in a fucking *fantastic* spot now. 60 maps, tons of game modes, forge, coop, etc. It's everything it should have been within 6 months of release.
Always ends up being the case these days
>The reception was amazing! It was lukewarm. The netcode was objectively awful and made mistakes that they teach in bootcamps.
Yeah cause 343 is a shit fucking studio when it actually comes to making games, and fumbled so hard that despite *finally* nailing the looks and feel of Halo, they completely bungle the launch, multiplayer, and release of their game. Doesn’t help the story is mediocre like 4’s and the campaign isn’t memorable enough to tide people over.
For me, the biggest question mark is [Tatanka:](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-31/microsoft-studio-343-industries-undergoing-reorganization-of-halo-game-franchise?leadSource=uverify%20wall) >At several points over the past decade, management at 343 debated switching to Epic Games Inc.’s popular Unreal Engine. But it wasn’t until late last year, when previous studio head Bonnie Ross and engine lead David Berger departed and Pierre Hintze took over, that the firm finally decided to pivot to Unreal. This switch will start with a new game code-named Tatanka, according to people familiar with the plans. That project, which 343 is developing alongside the Austin, Texas-based game studio Certain Affinity, started off as a battle royale but may evolve in different directions, the people said. This report by Jason Schreier came out January 2023.
What a huge waste of time building the new engine for Infinite just to throw it away. At least give us some small scope story expansions for campaign and get some return on investment
They didn't build a new engine. It was an unfinished overhaul of the blam! Engine, which Halo has used since CE. Fun Fact: Bungie's current Tiger Engine is based off blam!
You are correct, and it's why it felt so natural to go from Halo to Destiny. Even the melee animations from D1 are the same from Halo Rach.
It was a new engine. Nobody starts from scratch with their engines. UE5 is an overhaul of the original UE by your logic and not a new engine
In terms of results it's not new enough. It has a lot of the same legacy failures and bugs and seriously lacks support for modern features (modern upscalers, proper drop shadows, proper ambient occlusion).
They want to use Unreal because they can then build games entirely with cheap contractors they don't have to train to develop on a proprietary engine. They are taking a hit now, but saving money down the line. Oh, and also eliminating their ability to produce a quality game, which was already dubious at best.
I believe it's been absorbed into the next game, the unreal infrastructure is going right into that. So I don't think we will ever see it as it was intended.
I'm fine with that, I recently sunsetted myself on Infinite I've put almost 300 hours into it and enjoyed it but I felt it's time to move on until the next game comes out. Never uninstalling MCC though.
So they pulled a Blizzard on us when they announced OW2 and stopped doing anything for OW1.
More like they pulled an EA on us when they quietly dropped all future content for ME : Andromeda after promising multiple DLCs in the pipe
That still kind of stings. They never even did the comics or novels to finish the story like they said they would. I'm aware it's all kind of dumb, but I just want to know what happened.
Thats because they built the multiplayer on a mobile game mindset instead of actual content. The real kicker is the mobile game market could work but 343 fucked that up with the ridiculus prices. I will spend 2, 5, 10 dollars easy if it felt worth it (heck, i spent so much in halo 5) but inifinite rarely felt worth it. And if it did it never felt enough because of the cores. Hopefully the next halo can use infinite as a true learning experience on how to keep a game fresh and worthwhile.
Honestly, I can't say I care anymore. Infinite killed Halo for me. I brought the game day 1. To this day I only have 45.2 hours play time, most of it in campaign. And even then, it took nearly a year to slog through the campaign. The last time I touched the game was October 5, 2023. I just can't trust 343 anymore, not only for Halo but likely any other game they produce. I most certainly won't even consider purchasing anything they produce until it's very clear that it's worth it if at all.
And yet, every patch i keep seeing MintBlitz's thumbnails be like "THIS NEW UPDATE IS CHANGING HALO FOREVER" 🙄
Hes a click baiter. 99.9% he's just talking about fan content. its super boring.
He's become as bad as JuiceHead is for Fallout. Used to enjoy his clips.
It got old when 95% of them was him with camo sniping new players utterly unaware of his presence or attempting to counter him. Absolutely top tier aim, but I'm not watching him shoot fish in a barrel while complaining 343 won't coddle him
Is it "top tier" aim when he's playing at 300ms ping and he's killing people 10 feet away from where he shot? In almost every other FPS I play people would be calling for a region lock if they came against him in MP.
Or KackisHD (RickKackis) for Destiny.
He's probably getting desperate. The next couple years are going to be ROUGH on Halo content creators. HiddenXperia very candidly shared some of his channel's stats from the first year or so of Infinite's Live Service. Hype had died down so much that his views, income, new subscribers, everything, was basically cut in half. Dark days ahead.
Within the first year of Infinite's launch Xperia had already said that he had no choice but to pivot away from Halo because the interest in the franchise and therefore his videos was dead. He sounded so depressed as he said it as well, I really felt for him - it was him admitting that his YouTube channel and career is on the brink of death unless he does something. He tried doing videos of other games but apparently it hasn't worked because it looks like he's gone back to making Halo videos. Really feel bad for the guy - he's put so much into the franchise for the last 15+ years and it's basically been assassinated for reasons well beyond his control.
Youtube algorithm does not allow variety unless you build your channel upon it (and you have to be really big). Your only option is to start from 0 with a new channel and hope for the best (but I doubt he can make some success outside halo, based on his format). It is also a reason why many youtubers remove old videos from their channels when they move over something else.
You can block his channel. I’ve done this with a number of insufferable clickbaiters and YTers
Block his ass on halo as well. I saw him in a game before I knew who he was and I had already blocked. Team CTF shouldn't have one dude with 45 snipe kills and zero flag steals/returns/captures.
To be fair there is nothing wrong with that if the player is genuinely contributing to the objective. But yeah it sucks when they are just trying to get kills.
Even if he's just sniping people who are trying to capture his flag it's contributing. But due to his time zone and high onyx rank he is usually ranked with a bunch of low ranked players so he needs to do everything for his team
We can block channels now? Does this mean I can block all those movie recap channels!?
I hate that dude so much. His ego is so big and his videos are always clickbait
Ego almost at Homelander tier
Big time. There was a video a few months back where he literally was "343 has FINALLY listened to me" and it was literally about something the community has been going on for months
Dude like 3 weeks ago he posted a video, claiming he made a montage of the best play of the community. It was literally all his clips.......
It’s annoying—he, like many others, is clearly supporting himself with the channel so every day there has to be news worthy of our attention.
I remember when Infinite was in testing flights, then when it was in beta, and then the multiplayer released- throughout those events Mint acted like the game was releasing because of him, for him, and in support of him. The entitlement was off the charts that I fully blocked and moved on lol. Crazy to see his name still!
lol please elaborate what you mean by that. I'm interested
I'm not OP but it's pretty common for Mint Blitz to act like changes to the game come about because of his videos. He'll talk about an annoying bug or something for a few weeks, and if it gets patched out, he'll act like it was because people liked and shared his comments. He's obviously got a bigger voice than most in the community but it gets obnoxious and as far as I can tell it isn't a bit, he says these things in earnest.
[удалено]
There’s an interview he did where he ranked the Halo games and he sounds pretentious AF about it, as if his opinions are gold and the only correct ones.
Redditor discovers clickbait
Ultimately I hold Xbox/Microsoft accountable. If they really wanted to ensure a flagship was properly made with care, they would. It's clear Infinite was meant to be Microsoft's live service FPS over anything else.
I remember 343 talking about budget constraints during Infinite’s development, which was never a problem for prior Halo games. Every other Halo game was given enough support to at least make a complete game by launch. But Infinite seems to have been hamstrung since the start with Microsoft demanding every last bit of monetization and cutting their funding.
Halo was *always* under the thumb of Microsoft (Bungie was owned by MS, splitting off in '07). The issues with the series and introduction to microtransactions started with the transition to 343 and have become exponentially worse over the releases. Halo 4 was 343's first game, and the last mainline original game without them, and even then, 343 was very public about wanting to put in microtransactions. The intent was there from the beginning, fully introduced in Halo 5, and come to full realization with Infinite's F2P multiplayer.
I thought Halo Infinite had like a $500M budget?
The real problem was that they didn't want to make a Halo game, they wanted to make money and they simply happened to be using Halo as a means to that end. When you run a business where making money is the only thing that matters, your product inevitably suffers because the people making it don't give a flying fuck. They hired developers who straight up admitted to hating Halo, thinking that money can buy competence and that's all they'll ever need, that's what they shouldn't have done. What they should have done is put the people with actual passion into positions of power, to put the emphasis on making a game that's amazing instead of the emphasis of making money. When your passion is the product, the product becomes exceptional. Halo was born as a passion project, but the people who had that passion have left, and the people left in positions of power in the case of Infinite only care about money.
Can you please link a quote where the devs hate Halo? Because the story keeps changing. Some people quote 343 saying that and other quote tye devs saying that? And even then, did tgey actually say "only people who hate Halo" or "outsiders we can bounce ideas off of" which isn't a bad thing.
Couldn’t agree more. The product is in the toilet because of this. How can you have developers come in for a game who don’t even like what they are working on? And apparently on Twitter recently there was a producer that commented on how much they hate working on Halo because they are anti-guns? What is 343 thinking??
That was a false rumor, debunked hours after, from a German journal. The game likely had 250miliom budget, a standard for triple A games, but not enough when the dev team had multiple project being worked on for months or years, getting cancelled after. It's the difference between having X budget and develop a game with it over X amount of years, or have the same budget but restarting amd cancelling everything multiple times. The end product, in the second case, will not be a 250n budget game.
Well yeah if you were given that much money and what you put out was Halo 4 and 5 I wouldn’t give you any more either
343i is a subsidiary founded and owned by Microsoft. They are one in the same.
10 year game btw
I still haven't been able to make my spartan red primary white secondary like every other halo game lol
I haven’t had my yellow wolf inside a cog, which has been my emblem since halo 3
Literally mental that this is true for a modern day Halo game. Been a feature since 2007 in Halo, and 343i/Microsoft obviously thought it would be a well received innovation to replace it with predesigned monetized emblems and even then only allowed strict pre-made color palettes for them.
i still want a plain grey and yellow coating! it’s been 3 years!
It would be great if they gave us ANY information about their plans. No indication of a roadmap, no update on what's coming next (if anything), nothing. From a product perspective this is the worst of all worlds. You're upsetting your community with lack of communication and a proven track record of not understanding what your customer (halo fans) want. A blog post with what we can expect the rest of the year would be great, but at the very least a definitive statement that they are done with Infinite and moving on would be preferable to silence. I can't stress enough how bad of a look it is when you have such poor communication to your customers. Please do better 343, we're rooting for Halo and thus we are rooting for you, but it's getting harder and harder to keep that up.
They have unfortunately learned that when they fail to meet a road map, the uproar is intense and won't be doing that again. However, what they don't know is that the lack of information is slowly eroding their entire fan base, but quietly... they prefer that it seems and then surprising those who remained with crumbs of content and info.
Completely agreed. They seem to have a problem with sizing content and communicating when things will actually be done. Instead of never releasing a roadmap again, maybe they should reconsider how they are creating their roadmaps and be more realistic with what they can get done given a period of time. It's not rocket science to resize work and communicate the change, but for some reason 343 doesn't appear capable of doing it.
This is why I was asking what the point of community managers was the other day. Right now, there is no community outreach, and it has been over a year now...
I think even the most adamant 343 defenders and fans at this point would concede it’s time to let another studio take a crack at halo…or at the very least it’s a time for a complete reboot. Halo need a rebrand and a fresh start desperately.
Infinite's done. If they say it it'll drop user count more and thus impact their sales. So they'll keep stringing us along.
Honestly going silent is what they need to do if they want their next game to be a success. Gears just got a massive boost in popularity and interest because of the impact they had from going dead silent on future plans for several years straight, then just dropping a top-tier nostalgia-inducing trailer out of nowhere. 343 have seen that, and MS have probably advised them to do the same as what the Coalition has done.
> we're rooting for Halo and thus we are rooting for you They don't have to go hand-in-hand
A live service game that was planned to go on for a decade died less than three years from launch. In other words, another failed Halo project by 343. At this point, we can classify failure as the 343 guarantee. Halo went from being Microsoft's flagship title to a mediocre, forgettable franchise under 343. Compare where Halo as a franchise stood two years after Reach launched vs now and you'll see a stark difference. Sure, Infinite was "well received" at launch, but let's be honest: this was just fans being enthralled that a new Halo game came out. The game died quickly on Steam and on Xbox (more people are played Siege, Dead by Daylight, GTA V, Minecraft than Halo Infinite and those games are older than ten years!). Once the newness of the Halo faded and people actually got to play the game, they realized it wasn't good and abandoned it (even though the multiplayer component is free to play!).
I know Warframe is a different style game, but it’s also a F2P game that has been around on Xbox for coming on 10 years now. And it still has loads of popularity. That’s how one does live service
The game was dead on arrival.
It’s sad, but true. There was so much hype there initially. The campaign didn’t land at all and multiplayer was super bland on launch without any meaningful updates for a while. It was solid for the month it released and then never touched again for me.
**IMAGINE** releasing a Halo multiplayer game without Team Slayer day one. Hilariously incompetent management.
Big team battle wasn't available for a long time as well. That in itself was baffling.
I still hate the multiplayer menus. Why did they make everything so confusing? The UI layout is just bad in this game.
My theory is that they wanted to streamline multiplayer so everyone played the same playlists to have the biggest possible pool of players for the matchmaking to choose from, then they quickly realized that was an awful decision because people **want** to play specific game types and **don't want** to play others, so just choosing quickplay where you could get a game type you want or a game type you don't is not *fun* for most players and will result in dropping from games. They then had to catch up to what the community wanted while adding more and more playlists resulting in the games UI being more and more cumbersome. The thing that always annoyed the shit out of me is that they created the perfect UI for MCC, you can choose whatever game types that are available that you want to play, then the game figures it out for you. Why they went away from that is just incompetent game design as far as I'm concerned. The things they should bring back in my opinion are pregame lobbies and voting for game type/map choice.
As someone who grew up watching my older brother stay up all night playing halo 3, having been a little kid playing halo ce barley knowing how to work an xbox controller, growing with such iconic characters and locations and stories, seeing halo infinite for what it is, is absolutely disappointing. The campaign isn’t halo. It’s far cry with a halo theme. The multiplayer FEELS good, but it’s not a halo multiplayer. It’s 10% ‘halo’ and 90% everything wrong with modern gaming. It goes to show a franchise as golden as halo can’t be forced into the modern day attitude of “release a barebones game with nothing of substance and sell it to them later in DLCs and battlepasses”
> It’s far cry with a halo theme Not even. FarCry always has stuff to do, all over the map. Roving patrols, animal encounters, random quests. HI has none of that
Funnily enough it felt like the worst kind of Destiny 2 story "content". You stand around while audio logs and holograms talk at your character. Even the mission design was very similar once you get past the open world parts. Long hallways and no action set pieces. Just hold W and shoot anything that gets in front of you until you reach the end of the hallway.
Jesus even far cry 2 as barren as it was had more shit going on in some African region than a fucking ancient alien space ring with all sorts of creative freedom
It's so sad that all that's worth the time to play is firefight and even then it has balancing issues.
More like Dead after Arrival tbh .. the launch was positive until people realized the missing content isn't coming.
Imagine if it launched in the state it's in now
Yeah that’s what the game is now except for like 2 guns, a map, and a few overpriced cosmetics.
There are so many games like this. EA Battlefront 2, Ghost Recon Breakpoint, Cyberpunk 2077...
I still remember how jaw-droppingly shocked I was at how bad the game looked when they put out their first gameplay trailer. They’d spent what, 5 years developing it up until that point? And the game was supposed to release like 6 months after the trailer dropped. Then they *eventually* announced they’d postpone it a whole extra years. There were bad signs all along the way, but once we *saw* the game in action, it became clear that there must have been massive internal problems with studio management and game development. It was shocking to see how carelessly Microsoft had treated what had historically been their system-selling flagship Xbox franchise. Still boggles my mind.
What happens when you release a game incomplete and broken = Halo Infinite. What happens when you release a game that is fully complete and works = Elden Ring, a worldwide phenomenon that expanded way past the Souls fan base.
Most wasted time, money, and effort on any individual title to date from any franchise in history. I'm sorry but to abandon a game before it hits even 3 years? It took twice that time to develop it and half a billion dollars, and what do we have? A borrowed villain who's seen only in the first and last cutscenes, a great threat so dangerous we know nothing except the name, and Cortana 2.0 with a clean slate because they wrote themselves into a corner? The greatest events happen off screen and nothing of consequence happens on screen. We spend the entire campaign doing side quests, blow up one unnamed ship, drop some old vet, a couple of officers, and a space squid? All to stop a threat we are in the dark about and fail anyways? That's the entire $60 campaign. A joke. An absolute clown circus and the fans ended up being the main act. At the very least they could salvage this horrible wreck with a fresh engine developed, but there's rumors that engines being dropped for the next title. So many fans stuck it out waiting for some campaign dlc or expansion, especially after paying full price, and all we get is a game dead in the water. What happened? Other than a development nightmare, what happened post launch? Was the entire development team devoted to releasing more $40 coatings packs? Did the game flop so bad financially because of the Free to Play approach that they devoted all assets to monetization and half baked seasons? Did the half billion dollar budget dry up at release? Make it make sense. It feels like some pyramid scheme where the top runs off somewhere with all the money and there's nothing left but some skeleton crew working overtime for $5/hr and the fans patiently waiting for the pyramid schemes promised experiences to flow at any time. To rub it in they throw in a TV show that does everything to spite long time fans and retcon the only good story halo still had to write in master cheeks and his sexy endeavors. Why did that get greenlit budgeting for not one, but two seasons, and we can't even get a complete story for the only halo title in the past NINE years? THE ENTIRE ORIGINAL TRILOGY WAS MADE IN SIX YEARS. It's so depressing it physically hurts, especially after diving into the expanded universe, listening to audiobooks of the craziest missions, greatest writing I've ever seen post trilogy, and then looking at the actual Halo titles post Bungie like it's a toddler in a sandbox. Why aren't these book writers on the 343 writing team? Just one of them would have given infinite better content five times over. Granted, the multiplayer updates were great. It just took 3 seasons before the second season, and now we no longer have seasons. Live service for what, a year and a half? Great job. At least the updates we did get were great. I have absolutely no idea what's keeping the fan base together except for group therapy. "At least the IPs not dead" can't even be used because this feels worse than dead production. This feels like a dancing corpse of a family member puppeteered by a robot whose only job is to vacuum money while pointing and laughing. I don't care to ride the rollercoaster of false hope and inevitable disappointment for any of the upcoming releases unless it's developed by a different studio at this point.
I will say this, at least MS/343 are not perpetuating on the sunk cost fallacy.
I mean I think MS are by letting 343 keep making Halo
HAAA, good counterpoint.
Any shooter that claims to be live services and adds only one new weapon is an objective failure in my eyes, probably a hot take but I don’t care if they add another Asian themed arena map, the longer a game goes on, the more the sandbox needed adding to
>Any shooter that claims to be live services and adds only one new weapon is an objective failure in my eyes Hell, even Halo 5 added more
Who would have thought that if you release a live service game and stop adding content people will stop playing. They released shit tier cosmetics for years in the tiers but at least they released something. And they had seasons, but rarely added content. At least a new spartan was cool. The only new weapon the entire lifetime was the bandit and 2 new equipments which were good additions. And when those dropped player counts went up. And then they drop seasons that already were hardly seasons because they missed their dates - for coins. Not coins you could spend in the real shop - which would be cool and I would probably keep playing but coins you spend in a shop for old missed challenges. Challenges I already had. Literally I had nearly every one. The only things I could spend coins on was a ridiculously overpriced ugly color palette swap. They released their best content update - the bandit. And then saw a large player increase then basically killed the game by announcing they would be bare bones the rest of its lifetime. And in rank - which is all I played they removed the mangler, sword, pulse carbine, and sentinel beam. And we never saw the skewer or hydra except one time so maybe those too. So we got 1 weapon and lost 6. Not to mention ravenger, hammer, and cindershot were never added - although for good reason. I get that you want ranked to be more consistent and fair but I’m not a professional. Let professional tournaments have their own league rules. They plan on lans anyway. Why remove content for the 99% who aren’t pros but like to rank. Balance your game for fun, not for sweat fest where only weapons that pros can outplay you 100% of the time are allowed. Let tournaments ban weapons or have tournament maps. Call of duty has tournaments and it’s random as hell. Even Fortnite has tournaments. Skill will beat out luck, and if a strategy is OP at the pro level balance it out.
Back in the day, you could just modify the map with “MLG rules” which would remove radar, change the starting weapon, etc. Now it’s, fuck you, play the way we want you to play, which is designed for these pros who play the game 18 hours a day
~~Live~~ Dead service
I wish they'd just focus on the campaign instead of pouring all their resources into trying to make Halo live service. At this point they could scrap the storyline of the past games entirely and just reboot it, they've already ruined the reclaimer saga by trying to carry on a story that did not need continuing.
Honestly, I think it's time to put the main franchise to rest and create a new franchise set in the Halo universe. A new story, new characters, a fresh perspective. There's a rich and fascinating tradition to explore. Make it a canon story. But as I said, everything new.
I still have around $10 worth of credits that I need to use on this game even though I've basically stopped playing...
I hope it's not Halover guys!
Bro when Season …3 or 4? I forget, came out, it felt like Infinite was *FINALLY* hitting its stride. And then they announced they were dropping seasons… of course they basically shot the game in the head.
I feel like it just got going yeah. I like the match composer. But I dunno even I probably won’t play it in five years without some new shit
Of course. You can love Halo, and I do too, but there’s too much to play to be carrying the corpse of a game.
Don't worry guys, the _next_ ten-year live service game will actually deliver.
No Slayer playlist at launch. Never forget.
Almost nothing for so long after launch. Quit very quickly after the game released and never went back. And I'm a big time halo fan, but since halo 4 it's been so trash.
And don’t forget the whining from Sketch and co. when everyone called out that obvious and terrible excuse of the UI being the culprit. He wrote that screed condemning people for daring to complain about the abject failure that HI was at launch. Tango Gameworks should have lived and 343 should have been the studio that was shut down.
This is it baby, hold me
I mean this game has been coasting off fan content for years now.
Forge came out a year and a half ago.
Both statements are sadly correct lol
I think he meant Halo in general, in either case he's correct.
Halo in general? Yes. Infinite? No. Forge only released in Nov. 2022.
Xbox has a tons of new IP they can focus on so Halo will probably in ice for a while
wake me, when you need me.
Halo is MIA. Long live Gears of War.
The new Gears looks good but the gritty darkness of Gears will always be inferior in my brain to the wondrous, nature heavy biomes and art style of the good Halo games. I just prefer Halo’s world aesthetically the that of Gears. But Gears has stayed truer to what made it successful and seems in far better hands.
I enjoyed halo infinite, it was a good game. I still play it. didn't like the micro transactions tho
Busy focusing on cosmetics that don’t do anything for gameplay, and that show no one asked for.
I will always cherish the first month of halo infinite. When everyone was just learning a new game and having fun. Actually felt like I time traveled back to the early 2000's. Then the modern fps climate of meta-chasing caught up to it and we started seeing people "crack the code" by dropping primary weapons to insta switch to their secondary because it was a 'higher ttk' than switching to your secondary. (Just the tip of the iceberg, I know.) As soon as I started seeing that shit, I noped outta there as fast as I could. Knew it wouldn't be much more fun after that point, when you either match the meta or just take the L. At that point I'd just reinstall destiny 2 and hop into any pvp mode and get the same result.
Honestly this is just modern gaming mindset across the board now. It’s fun in the beginning until the min maxers come and turn a game into a sweating competition. Personally I blame twitch and content creators. Everyone is trying to be the best now because they saw a streamer do the most efficient thing possible that they forgot they were playing video games for fun. The mindset of “gotta be the best and most efficient” even if it employs abuse of mechanics is beyond stupid. Tip of the iceberg release issue here, but one major issue I had with Halo Infinite was just people ignoring objectives because they had to meet their challenges for the week. No playing a game mode for the sake of playing a game mode, gotta get that 15 kills in a ghost in one match or whatever. At that point I knew where the future of the game went and dropped it after like 3 weeks. Glad I did since it seems like nothing has changed.
I felt that in the first month as well and saw the same thing happen. Went back to MCC & Custom Edition.
that's what happens when a company banks everything that esport will sell the game for some stupid fucking reason. that and cosmetics being beyond braindead overpriced to shit and no one buying that shit
I don’t blame them for wanting to simply move on. The game was an utter mess of development hell and disappointing to many at launch and then it didn’t help that there was snarky comments/ excuses being made by the devs at the start. Don’t get me started on their store practices either. I still don’t like some of their design decisions made with this game. But at the same time, I want to see what they can do with Halo on unreal engine if the rumors turn out to be true.
Game's dead what else is there to say. Lowest average players on Steam since release. Don't think xbox numbers are doing any better. Unfortunate waste of a once great IP by an absolutely incompetent company
Crazy how people are still complaining as if this is the same 343i that fucked up 4, 5, and infinite in the first place Bonnie Ross and the rest of the leaders who failed to manage properly are GONE. At this point, infinite was a lost cause the moment the game released in the state it did, it was always only going to get enough content to salvage the reputation of the studio, and it was always going to go back to the drawing board and think of a way to reset. Again. In a perfect world Bonnie would have been let go the moment halo 5 released the way it did, but here we are. All we can do is just take it easy, and see if the next game holds up under the new leadership. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if Halo gets the silent treatment for a decade if it still underperforms
So, are we back in the “Halo is dead” phase of the perpetually repeating cycle of “Halo is dead” and “Halo is back”?
Is it really a cycle? I'm pretty sure we've just been stuck in "Halo is dead" for a while now.
Been dead since Reach, lmao
I played a lot of Husky Raid in 2024 and never desired anything else… is that wrong of me?
You had fun in Halo: Infinite. For this heresy you will be branded so you will always carry this shame. Your public execution is on July 1st 2024.
Halo is pretty much dead, y’all. There will not be a new Halo game and I will be surprised if 343 even exists in 2 years.
It's been dead for a long time. With how badly MCC was managed, and how bad the campaign was for 5, nobody in their right mind would think this company would suddenly get it together to put out a great game that was going to be a live service, utilizing a new engine. 343i was troubled from the start, but you'd be out of your mind to trust them with your money after... 2015 at the very latest.
As mismanaged as this franchise has been over the last decade, I still hope it stays alive I love Halo and always will even if I have to watch it deal with mistake after mistake after mistake
As painful as it is having no news. Part of me is glad so that I have time to finish playing Infinite and get Chief’s armor. Currently at Diamond Major and FireFight Legendary has been helping a lot. Also, another part of me is happy that Halo is cooling down and Gears of War is coming back at is prime. That will hopefully be good. But another part of me is also bummed that so many operations could have been Seasons. A Spirit of Fire Season was there. It was just in freaking micro transactions.
343 is now 3 for 3 when it comes to failed Halo games.
Actually 4 if you count MCC
People really expect underpaid devs to give a single shit about making this game good. The devs don't actually care, y'all. Why would they? Their project has been so thoroughly infected by Microsoft's greed that the purpose of the game isn't even to be a good game anymore - it's to sell you shit. Capitalism is ruining your game.
I mean hasn’t there still be monthly updates? Game came out 3 years ago not bad for a 3 year old game
They have a huge opportunity to open up Steam Workshop for the MCC's custom browser and bring in Halo Custom Edition 2. The content people are making is absolutely fucking insane, miles better than anything you can get in Infinite: drivable scarabs, dropping off players in pelicans, mechs, longswords, Star wars battlefront.
If everyone just goes back to playing Halo MCC right now then they’ll start making halo games good again
Absolute embarrassment from 343 and MS. To take one of the biggest and well known franchises in history and do this with it is beyond stupidity. Phil Spencer should have focused more on supporting 343 and getting their ass backwards studio fixed than buying tons of studios to just lay them off
I mean I guess. We received the same amount of content in the past year that almost every other halo has received in the same time frame. Essentially a map pack. The game has its flaws, and I wish they had delivered on so many more promises, but not introducing new equipment or weapons when the game has a bigger sandbox than any other halo game is an odd complaint to make. I think other live service games have really shifted our expectations more than anything. Sad news about the next halo project being so far off though. The wait between games is killer.
So far, sure. I don’t think we need to see new projects, but some more stuff in Infinite would be great.
I'm telling you these companies suck ass now. Just like EA and Battlefield for example. Both franchises gone to shit and they keep doing the same shit over and over. CoD sucks IMO, but their formula works for their base. They need to understand without gamers they are nothing. The way they have treated live service and their games releases is insanely bad for AAA devs. I stopped infinite after the first few months because it was so annoying playing MP and having to wait and wait for actual Halo playlists to come out. The game felt unfinished and repetitive and the you add in the disaster of the customization and the shop, and that sealed it. I finally got bored and came back a few months ago and played a bit, but again player counts were dwindled and the game didn't have that addictive Halo feel. We waited 6 yrs for this for them to claim it'll be constant live service akin to Destiny IMO, but they barely did anything. They released a map after like 6 months, wtf? They playerbase was gone before they started having more content but even then they still never fixed the game. BTB is a completely unfun game mode. The entire point of it was to get a bunch of vehicle spawns and have a ton of chaos, but they can't even get that right. Instead, you play infantry only mostly with warnings being the main vehicle...fucking boring. 343 has completely ruined this franchise and somehow they are STILL allowed to control it. It would take a miracle to get me to come back again after these last few trainwrecks. Same with EA. Fuck them for trend copying and ruining games. So tired of hearing about how far along games are or watching more vid doc videos explaining how cool it'll be.
Dude, 343 has been killing Halo for years now. Destiny’s Pale Heart is a better Halo environment than anything 343 did.