Yeah. I am curious what the internal roadmap for Local Co-Op was, meaning how many issues they have and the estimates for fixing them are. I’m sure it’s not trivial or a smaller level of effort. If it was, we’d be getting it sometime.
A common thing with developing is the 80/20 rule “The last 20% of work takes the same amount of time as the previous 80%.” It’s not always the scenario, but fixing some of those last few issues can be absolutely brutal. That’s even when things were well architected and implemented as not everything is foreseeable.
I’ll be honest, for an engine that needs support for years to come this one is a bit surprising.
In regards to what we’re “allowed” to talk about, I suppose that differs with every person but the way I’ve been looking at it, I look at the specific issue the game and 343 faced and whether that in particular has been addressed.
For example, the entire armour system was poorly conceived. The progression was poorly designed. The season pass was poorly designed. The gameplay was well designed. The equipment system was well designed. The graphics engine, judging from Forge and its scalability, is well designed as well.
Each of these things must have undergone weeks of debate and justifications for their decisions and some of these designers have been vindicated while others have been shown to be clearly wrong.
If they replace the designers who made some clearly bad decisions (while I hate backseat development and design, I think it’s virtually unanimous that the progression system was extremely out of touch and demonstrated no understanding of live services), I think it’s safe to say that it’s a move in a positive direction.
I personally think that the engine folks leaving is a bad sign. While I’m sure people have their criticisms of the engine, it wasn’t a complete flop like some of the other features I mentioned. I think some of the controversial decisions on the engine can be justified by its flexibility for use cases like Forge.
I do think the people at the top (Ross, Booty, Spencer) face some responsibility but they can fulfill their responsibilities by making changes (which they have).
I am not be knowledgeable about this, but I would assume that the person leaving was not in charge of the day to day code? He seemed like someone who was managing the overall team.
They already do this. All of the 343 Halo games are multi studio.
For example, the only armor 343 made for Halo 4 was Chief’s campaign armor. An outside studio made the rest of the armor for the campaign characters and the multiplayer armor, and Halo MP has been largely Certain Affinity since Halo 4 (and technically Reach, since they made it’s last 2 DLC packs). Infinite’s Forge is being done by an outside studio as well, Skybox Labs.
(Halo 4 Cortana is also a 3D body scan of a supermodel and the face scan of another supermodel with paint applied to the nude body geometry, so depending on your definition of ‘create’ they sort of outsourced Halo 4 Cortana too… they were really into their bodyscans for Halo 4 )
It’s 18 months. And the reason Microsoft does it is because they got in trouble with the government because they would keep people on ‘temp’ for like, 5 years straight, perpetually promising them full time but getting away with not paying them full benefits because they were ‘temp’. So as part of their compliance with the govt’s terms going foward, lawyers worked out that somewhere between month 18 and month 19 is when an employee is to be considered permanent. So that’s the longest their contracts can go.
Boy, for a dead game especially after the news, it sure hovering the same spot over Steam player count and top 20 most played Xbox. I probably shouldn’t have said that. It needs a narrative to satisfy the need for whatever reason.
I don’t know if spinning the steam numbers in a positive light when it’s currently free and still has less players than Halo MCC atm is the move but yeah, the game isn’t dead dead, atleast not on Xbox.
The term “dead” is being used so loosely, I think I’m dead by this point. The game that’s dead whether it’s now or soon, would be Babylon’s Fall. In a way, Splitgate is another one, which is odd because they like to joke against Halo and now, here we are.
Look, I get it. The game needs support. I know the news isn’t the best, but if you want to cry (not you specifically), go ahead but stop acting like what you said is dead is actually dead. It was much easier to say it for Battlefield 2042. Sure, use the F2P card all day, but many games can still suffer under. F2P isn’t guaranteed. It’s basically another CoD speaking: I won’t buy this game yet sold over 20 million. Sure works well with Diablo Immortal as well.
Bottom line, you can be disappointed, sad, angry, or whatever, but don’t act like revolutionary.
The term “dead game” has always been used loosely in gaming.
I think when you constantly see the negative optics of the game (putrid steam numbers, borderline 0 twitch views, almost all of the big Halo content creators calling it a dead game or a failure) on top of the big names in 343 getting replaced or quitting contributes to all of this “dead game” for casual gamers”
As always when dealing with extremes, the truth probably lies in the middle.
Steam numbers are useless for judging any multi platform game, especially one that has a large historically console playerbase and lets you play the campaign without a rebuy if you use the identical Windows Store/Xbox App version.
