Starfield is going to massive on Xbox and PC
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It’s just wild that going F2P was all about capturing that PC audience and the PC space basically said “naw, we’re good”.
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Yesterday there was a large group of friends playing AOE2. It really threw me off because none of them were the type I would’ve guessed to give a genre that’s been primarily PC a try. The feedback I got from them was really positive. Not a group to hold back either.
If Microsoft Gaming really figured out a way to make traditional PC RTS games work on consoles, it says two things:
- Microsoft 1st party, outside of Halo Live service, continue to be on a roll with whatever they’re releasing. Going back to 2021, there’s been a lot of delays but everything released has been polished.
- Potential here could be huge if the ABK deal closes. Starcraft and Warcraft could be next.
12 Likes
My friends and I personally loved it at launch. BTB only (I was PC then). The progression system killed it for them however (no overall level/rank, no unlocking weapon skins with kills etc etc).
Its been beaten to death, but its interesting how those types of systems are baseline now for a shooter. I remember just playing Quake 3/CS for the hell of it.
5 Likes
Seems like the decisions Microsoft is making now regarding Halo should of been done after Halo 5, we could of gotten a top tier Halo game
Next game…no more F2P…needs to be full priced premium game, if people want to play it without dropping $70 for it you have something for that…its called Game Pass
…no more features not being at launch…either launch with Forge, Coop, Firefight, Infection, Team Slayer, BTB or dont launch and delay the game.
Hopefully being on Unreal makes development easier…I know Unreal isnt an end all be all perfect for every game engine (no such thing exist) but FFS its a 1000x better than SlipSpace which MS is willing to throw in the trash in favor of Unreal
I know game developmen mt is hard and i know its never that simple but I’m only describing what I would like to happen from a fan/player perspective
Pierre Heinz seems like a very smart and talented person who gets Halo alot better than Bonnie ever did but he definitely has a big task ahead of him
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Saw this on Twitter, someone I follow wanted to prove how popular Halo was back then but my main takeaway was how popular Fable was, like I knew it was popular and I remember it selling well on launch months but this is quite impressive, it’s only behind some huge franchises here and some of those were at their peak back then, I don’t think many people realize how huge a well done Fable can be.
4 Likes
Also finished Hi Fi Rush and maaaam game oozes with GameCube vibes, these are the kind of games that made the early 2000s so 
I would absolutely have no issue if Microsoft went all in on premium AA+ games.
Indie and AA games have embarassing the AAA space. If MS is dropping 4 or 5 games per year on the same level as Hi Fi, Hollow Knight, Hades, Ori, I’d be all all that
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I honestly think the days of releasing a huge multiplayer package with a giant campaign package are done.
I will get lambasted for saying that but its just the nature of the gaming landscape these days. I really would not be suprised to see MP and SP decoupled going forward.
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Modern Warfare 2 had a massive amount of content at launch, consisten updates etc. It can definitely be done and it needs to be done for Halo to have any chance of relevance again
Even Gears 5 had a full campaign with co op, versus, horde, escape mode at launch
I mean CODs campaigns are great, but very short. Its kind of filler and not what people want from an ‘epic’ story. Likewise Gears 5 was full campaign and great, but the multiplayer was fairly small in comparison.
I’m very happy to be wrong, but I think there is this idea of checklist development that Halo has (huge campaign, huge multiplayer, forge, coop) but that was when large teams were considered to be 100 people. We now have epic single player games crafted by 2000+ people. Times have changed is my point, but the expectations around Halo have not evolved with the times and are very much from a bygone era.
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You don’t need 2000+ people to make a great campaign, Respawn didnt to make Titanfall 2. Halo campaign doesnt have to be 15-20 hours long either. 8 or 9 hours would suffice.
There are a ton of great AAA single player games that dont need 2000+ people. ID Soft didnt to make Doom Eternal, Machine Games didnt to make Wolfenstein New Colossus, Coalition didnt to make Gears 5
Halo can literally be a flagship staple of Xbox again if it simply matched Doom Eternal campaign and Halo 5 multiplayer, in the grand scheme of things that isnt alot to ask for considering this is Xbox flagship IP.
If MS isnt going to go all in on Halo then what will they go all in on then?
If MS isnt willing to give Halo the treatment a flagship IP should get, well then prepare for Halo to slip further and further into irrelvancy
I think it depends, I’m talking about modern games like GOW that had 9 separate teams working on it (Single player only). Perhaps more relevant Call of Duty which had 10 support studios…10.
ID Software and Machine games absolutely killed it, for their team sizes. My simple point is wanting everything that came with a release from even 6 years ago has vastly changed.
Edit: Just to be clear I actually like discussing this stuff as it pertains to an industry I used to work in. I think there is a really good debate to be had about the expectations of what should ship in the modern age of gaming for something with the legacy of Halo vs what is the actual reality of the situation as it stands today.
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Its a little bit disgenuous. Most of the top 15 today didnt exist then no Minecraft, No Fortnite, No Roblox, No Forza Horizon, No overwatch. No Apex. No Ark. Even GTA and Red Dead had weak online presence.
Not to mention regardless of Halos position 12 years ago, Infinite had the biggest launch and first 12 months of any Halo game. So whatever it did then is less than it does now. It just has more peers.
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I agree that they need to kill F2P because we can see F2P design choices killed infinite imo. I thin they need to be confident in gamepass and say if you want to not pay for Halo then sub to the service. Honestly, I think they went F2P to try and get PC gamers to play the game, which end up failing beause it doesn’t seem PC community cares that much about Halo TBH.
Anyways, they need to give us a premium Halo experience and don’t launch if it doesn’t have features at launch because a bad launch can kill a game as evident with Infinite
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I think they went F2P because the competition is all F2P and that is kinda what the market expects at this point.
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Tricky, because I think most not BR shooters are not F2P. Correct me if I’m wrong but competitive shooters like Rainbow 6, COD, Battlefiled are paid for games? I think most of the free to play games are mainly BRs and Overwatch which just transitioned to F2P.
Anyways, I think there is room for paid for MP because I think F2P aspect of shooters doesn’t work well with Halo community. I guess they would need to tweak it, but it can’t have stripped down F2P content and make everything paid for because as we seen with Infinite the Halo community rejects that.
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F2P was not the problem. Content output and 343/MS management were the problem.
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generally, alpha means playable from start to finish but lacking polish etc.
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Call of Duty can get away with it because it’s Call of Duty, but outside that it seems a bit of a struggle. Even Battlefield I remember there being a lot of questions before launch as to why it wasn’t going free to play, and being full priced with the reception it got at launch did not help it. I think with so many strong titles available in the free to play space you CAN still make a full priced title, it’s just really difficult - you really need to have something that stands out as being worth buying when people can already do so much for free.
Honestly though, the free to play structure made sense for what they wanted to do. It just needed to be implemented better and have a faster roll out of content. Honestly I think at this point it’s not even that far off where it needs to be, it’s just perhaps took too long.
It doesnt matter … MS can either do it, spend the time and resources to ship it out complete, or watch Halo continue to go down the drain