Just make a good one. 343/halo studios just seems to hate the original Halos. Fire all those people and bring in people that love the originals and you already have a way higher chance of getting something successful.
I’d actually say the problem is that they can’t decide on a direction, and a good chunk of the reason there is decision by corporate committee and the fact that most of Microsoft is contractors. Not dinging contractors, but the longest you can have influence is 18 months, then it’s onto the next.
Then also Microsoft teams are always under intense scrutiny for how profitable they are, which in gaming we all know doesn’t really work out. How can you determine if a team is profitable or not when your product doesn’t release for 2 years. It’s also why their release dates are so strict, if you miss it you’re not profitable, and to Microsoft it doesn’t matter if it’s 95% done, you’re not profitable.
Bungie was a tiny studio full of gaming veterans who were passionate about the game. Microsoft is simply too big to replicate that.
Bungie did not have gaming veterans when they made Halo. They had worked on small stuff like a rip off of Pong for Macs, Marathon, Myth and the like. That’d be kinda like saying an indie team are game veterans because they released one successful game. Plus they only had like 50-100 people that made Halo CE.
Compare that with 343s like 500+, thats massively embarrassing.
They made good ones plenty of times, and I think I agree with the author that Halo is tapped out. We’ve seen the best it has to offer, and the best thing to do from here is something new. What they made in Infinite is definitely not what I want from Halo.
Eh I don’t think that’s necessarily fair.
The best multiplayer in the series was Halo 5, which is also the farthest from the original in many ways. It just had a crappy story.
Then Halo Infinite was great, and extremely faithful to the original, but I would argue to a fault, as you could see them repeating the exact same story beats and moments rather than coming up with new ones.
I respect your opinion but wholly disagree with H5 having the best multiplayer. In my opinion, Reach had the best feel to its multiplayer, up until 343 got hold of it and introduced their Title Update patch. I also say H4 was better than 5 and Infinite is lacking something I cant grasp, something is missing or maybe theres too much?
How can you say that when forge exists
Forge existed in Halo 5 too, and doesn’t impact the campaign…
Or, just like make a good game. You can work on a game until it’s good and then release it. Come up with some fun ideas, hire some good writers and graphic designers, spend some time making the controls and UI intuitive and responsive, and then balance gameplay through testing.
Oh, and get the music right. Halo: CE was like 90% about the music. When you hop in the back of the jeep, and the music is like “dun duh duh DUUN da dun duh duh DUUUN” and you start mowing down Grunts, or when you meet the Flood for the first time, those moments made Halo an experience worth sharing.
The music was great, but the Puma (jeep), was also a huge part of it. The developers are on record talking about how they made the Puma, realized how fun it was, and then basically built the whole game around having fun moments with it.
This conversation makes me want to plug in my old XBox and fire up some Halo.
Wasn’t it called the Warthog, though? Or am I thinking of Halo 2?
The whole experience was carefully tuned to be fun.
I can hear this comment.
So many franchises need to be laid to rest.
I would have cared but they kept not resolving stories in the games or even side games. So I checked out.
I am still somewhat hopeful because 343 Industries did make a couple of good things along the way.
I really have not much to complain about Halo 4 besides unpleasant sound design and story slowly starting to be stretched between games, novels, comics, etc. Media around the game should be complimentary, not mandatory to getting the full picture in my opinion.
Saw an opinion on Halo 5 that I totally agree with — best multiplayer, poor campaign. Even though the REQ Packs are lootboxes, I never felt forced into buying them and could earn Gold ones without much trouble.
Halo Infinite felt like a Halo themed playground. Grappling hook and open world are fun as hell, and I really enjoyed collecting audio logs for the first time since Halo 3: ODST. Loved the post-rock sounding soundtrack wich still has familiar tunes. But in all other directions it’s a bit of a letdown, even after they mostly fixed everything after a disastrous launch.
I really want to believe that the situation here can be better than simple “they want to sell everything until it’s not profitable”. The universe is massive, there are loads of stories to tell, worlds to explore, guns to shoot, vehicles to ride even without further expansion of the universe. Everything is there, just do something good with it.
The fight’s never finished.
I loved 1 & 2, then I kind of lost track of the series for a bit, but I heard everything through Halo 4 was pretty decent. But honestly, I don’t see any reason for the story to continue. Basically:
- Halo: CE - introduction to the Covenant and the Flood
- Halo 2 - learn about inner workings of the Covenant and history of the Flood
- Halo 3 - Covenant brings the fight to Earth
- Halo: Reach - prequel to Halo CE - adds backstory about human intersteller colonization
- Halo 4 - looks like a kind of side story continuation of Halo 3, with new enemies
- Halo 5 - Cortana turns evil?
I haven’t played anything past 2, so maybe it hits different in the games, but the series really looks like it loses its purpose around Halo: Reach and Halo 4 and becomes a cash grab. They really should have wrapped things up around there, at least as far as Master Chief is concerned, and build a new series in the same universe (or a completely new universe).
And that’s also why I don’t bother with Assassin’s Creed games anymore, they’ve long since lost the plot, and doing the same thing but in a different setting just isn’t interesting enough for me.
Does this website have… articles? All I ever get is a headline and a comment section.
I presume it’s an anti-adblock thing, but if so, fuck 'em.
Yes
I think that’s on your adblock. Works here without ads fine.
Same here. Firefox w/ uBlock Origin, and I see a decently lengthy article.
