That’s not the reason, it was probably at the beginning when Overwatch was highly popular. They wanted to test new things, see how they work, that’s pretty common in development, nothing to do with 343i in particular.
It’s kinda weird to me that the video game community feels that they need to know the details of what went wrong with a project’s development. It’s cool insight into the process, but they don’t owe us that.
Exactly, many things don’t always work out they way we want them to work out, accross several industries. It is kinda weird to see such an obsession over that.
They should ignore “the community” and build a new one. As a fairly recent Halo fan, all I see are bitter,old Bungie fans, whiny influencers wanting clicks so bad that they would do anything, PS-trolls and entitled gamer muppets who lack any ability to view things in a broader perspective.
343 should do what you say and focus on improving the game, and get new fans.
It’s this inane, “Admit your failings and beg for our forgiveness” mentality that I just can’t understand. “We deserve to know what happen”, It’s nonsense.
I guess it’s true for most things with fandoms. I hate it because these folks don’t get paid enough to have to deal with all this stuff lol. They could go work on Office and not have people calling for their heads and digging through their social media for clues.
These people are insane, I can’t think of any other explanation.
Sure, I would like to know what happened too. But that’s stuff we can read about or watch a documentary on in 5 years time or something like that, if ever. It’s not something anyone can demand.
It’s just an r/games and twitter thing. they only make up a very small % of the overall user base for gaming. Most casuals spend their time sticking to one game like Warzone, Valorant, Apex Legends, FFXIV, CSGO or Fornite.
The demand for video game investigative journalism just seem to be the most vocal voice online because most people don’t spend their time discussing the business decisions of video game publishers. You think the average Joe who games talks about the disasters of Anthem, Lawbreakers and Back 4 Blood on the regular? Nah, this is a new trend because of people like CrowbCat and the rise of cynical redditors.
They do the same stuff on r/television and stuff. People there think they have a parasocial relationship with like John Mulaney and its weird. People get way too comfortable online being internet investigators or armchair developers.
I hate this notion, when has this ever worked? Why throw out the audience that your product cultivated over the years? that’s just dumb in my opinion. Ignoring what the community wanted is what led to halo 4 and 5 isnt it? I just don’t believe in going against your core audience, if you want a new audience build something new.
Take a day and a half off from moderating and I come back to this… okay, a few things:
Calling for the heads of devs or the management of a studio or organization when you have no idea what has actually transpired is a massive red flag and will result in immediate action. It’s been a while since I’ve had to make the last similar warning but this witch hunt for 343/XGS leadership is checking all the horrible boxes for a reminder. I know first-hand that some of the issues with labor are organizational above even Phil’s head, for example, so this need to ignore all the potential contributing factors just to have a name to blame is toxic and doesn’t belong in this community.
Don’t tag Phil directly; it’s been a long-standing rule (unless it’s a birthday/congratulatory thread). He’s gracious enough to take time out of his schedule to visit the community and interact, when he can.
I see a lot of disingenuous/uninformed takes comparing the performance of 343 (a studio which consists of around 700 employees at the moment) to developers of 3-5 times the size, in relation to their performance of up-keeping a live service title. Aside from the obvious, ad nauseam statement I’ll always make to remind people that nearly all of those titles used as comparison suffered from the same issues for six to eighteen months post-launch, almost all of them did so with a much larger staff. The majority of Rockstar, Epic Games, Ubisoft Montreal maintain their live service titles and their respective staff counts ar ~4900, 5000+, and 4000 in comparison, and every single one of those titles launched pre-pandemic (meaning there were less obstacles than what current dev is).
Some want to pretend that the pandemic is over, it’s not; WFH is still the primary mechanism for the majority of game developers, so while workflows and remote tools have gotten better, there are still tangible and intangible detriments to development. With that said (not to mention the psychological impact for those that have lost loved ones en masse during this time), I’m officially over the downplaying of its effect on development and I know I speak for a majority of the moderation team in that regard. Similarly, pretending that because Halo Infinite’s original dev cycle was only affected for the last six months (the most crucial development period according to any number of game developers) at this point is well within the toxic territory. Yes, other factors contributed to the state of the delay and release, but pretending like the biggest global impact on development wasn’t one of them is frankly bullshit.
There’s nothing wrong with being disappointed by the state of the content release cadence, I’m with most of you on that front, but taking the tact that some of you do makes me embarrassed for any developer that may want to interact with this community and I expect better honestly. Many of us have repeatedly discussed the impacts of COVID, the previous project-lead issues at 343i, etc. and there are a number of other factors that have led to the state of the game. To disingenuously ignore the history of some of these comparisons, or at the very least, the size of the studios you’re comparing to is not only a bad look, but is peak bad-faith at this point.
Finally, I could make a catalog of the comments from community members stating how much they despise crunch and wish for a better working condition for developers; well, this is what that currently looks like in the world of pandemic-affected game development. So either put your money where your mouth is, or stop pretending to care about developers as the human beings they are.
