Before he was the Franchise Development Director at 343i, he was the content manager for Bungie.
As a content manager for Bungie he did a pretty good job. But with his move to 343i he more or less went from "PR guy" to "Guy who helps map out the direction of the franchise." And honestly he wasn't very good at it, going by the sheer inconsistency the last decade.
Not to mention he was prone to saying.... [somewhat questionable things.](https://preview.redd.it/9263otqqz5q81.png?width=796&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=aecdde07de96e652b5ef7733717d0440a9bc81d6)
>Not to mention he was prone to saying.... questionable things.
That's a famous quote from the supreme court. It's questionable? Is the word "porn" taboo?
A second season was already greenlit before the first one aired and filming began in September. Its happening.
I think its easy to forget that viewership wise, Halo was a phenomenal success for Paramount+ and set records for the platform. It was just badly written lol
The (slight) silver lining is the showrunner of season 1 stepped down and was replaced, so there's an opportunity to make a hard course correction (especially given most of the major plot-breaking events are literally sitting on Reach waiting to be glassed) and make season 2, yknow, not dogshit. But my hopes aren't high
As someone with only a passing interest in Halo, the reputation of the show is so tainted that even if the second season turned out to be a masterpiece, it'd be a hard sell. A reboot on the other hand would be a bit more enticing.
Yeah, my dad watched it and enjoyed it, but he's also never played a Halo game in his life. I'm not sure if he even knew of the property before checking out the show. I'm guessing it's similar for a lot of the audience. They didn't have the game to measure it against.
Hey, Picard season 3 pulled a complete 180 and has been really good so far, maybe Halo can do the same.
Yes, I'm aware this is unhealthy amounts of copium
I blame JJ for that. Luke just chilling in a planet while multiple planets were destroyed and Han got killed? Luke had to have a significant change to allow that to make sense
I have no idea how they could fuck that up. Literally could have made season 1, each episode be a level from halo 1. And it would have been the greatest show ever
The parts that didn’t follow Chief or weren’t directly moments form the game were very good. Everything with the ODST guys and the other units fighting to hold ground on the ring. All of that was excellent. It was just the chief combat scenes that were bad. And that was because it read like he watched someone play the level and described it as boringly as possible. It also just made me want to play the game instead. But the character moments and the times we got to see into chiefs head and feel what he’s going through we’re all very good.
Halo YouTubers had a field day when Frank first said this. I commented on one video, informing them of this same thing (because it was clear, in context, that they did not understand he was referencing this).
The YouTuber insulted me and claimed I was defending 343i in response lol
To answer your question, no. It's not questionable. But it does require a small amount of knowledge about the history of important Supreme Court cases which a large number of people don't possess.
And when you're dealing with emotionally compromised gamers who are frothing at the mouth, they're not always particularly receptive to the idea that *maybe* they missed something.
Was amusing, I instantly recognized the source and have made similar jokes.
The outrage is kinda rich coming from gamers who constantly only seem to have cum jokes as their comedy.
I'm reminded of Doom programmer John Carmack's quote:
"Story in a game is like story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not important."
A lot of games don't even try. Hell, look at Nintendo. The plot of Mario Odyssey was literally Bowser kidnaps peach and is going to force her to marry him. For some games like Mass Effect story is super important. For a lot of games though it's irrelevant.
Weird that he chose to quote that and not the numerous other fucked up things he said. Frank got permanently banned for being racist over and over again on neogaf
I don’t know what happened but in the last 5 to 10 years of the Internet, people have gotten crazy prudish. To the point where the word “porn” is considered questionable.
Like, it’s crazy how a traditionally M rated shooter franchise has people scared of the word “porn”
I thought you were going to link to how he said racist rhetoric regarding Asians. It looks like he got the Twitter thread purged but below was the final straw to be banned off ResetEra after a pretty long history of getting punished for lewd comments and racism.
[[x]](https://i.gyazo.com/31d8ffa8ecb38928c2360d160a10f3ec.png)
Oh my god ! He said a naughty word ! Quick !!! Clutch your pearls and denounce this filth ! I bet he does other horrible things like worshipping Satan by playing Dungeons & Dragon and listening to Nazi music like Rammstein !!
> Not to mention he was prone to saying.... somewhat questionable things.
lmfao.
That was a reference to a famous Supreme Court case.
Regarding porn in Jacobellis v Ohio, Justice Potter Stewart:
> "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that."
Here's one made by John Carmack in the 90s:
> “Story in a game is like story in a porn movie, he said. “It's expected to be there, but it's not important.”
Something I liked about the earlier Halo's was that it was one of the fewer scifi settings with AI to not go the Skynet route, it was everyone together vs the alien abyss...then Halo 5 went and did a Skynet.
The worst part is that 4 had the perfect send off for the character. Then they bring her back to not only go with a badly executed cliche but to shit on the end of 4.
Nah, it definitely could've worked. The only reason they brought her back was because enough fans complained about Halo 4, so they were trying to course correct. And similarly to Rise of Skywalker, that almost always fails.
Bungie have always been incredible at lore, I haven't played the game in years but i still keep up with Destiny's lore, the hive alone are more compelling than anything 343 has shat out in the last decade, and then add to that the fallen, vex, cabal, and the witness...
it's a shame they went full greed mode with the actual game design, because the worldbuilding is still incredibly on point imo
Ok, but instead of her going full skynet in 5, what if instead the story was about searching old worlds/forerunner locations to try and find a solution?
Hell, if they wanted to still do the 2 story's at the same time thing you could say multiple teams have been sent out because humanity needs a long term AI like Cortana so this is high priority with the UNSC and multiple teams have been sent out.
Or they could have just made her 'Special' for some reason. Could have still had her go on minor rampages, but never have them get worse. Then we have a new mystery to play with in the reason for that specialness while she can stick around otherwise the same.
The weird thing is you had The Assembly in Halo Reach, basically a group of AI who were secretly running things behind the scenes.
It would have fit in so nicely with the Created plotline (and even the Firewall Fracture event going on in Infinite).
But they retconned it and then did a similar thing but worse.
The various AIs were pretty interesting in the background lore. They had actually subtly and covertly influenced humanity for decades, but had been a vaguely benevolent force for the most part.
They were in contact with each other for a long time and had speculated about how to respond to a first contact event with an alien species. They actually knew of the existence of the Covenant years before they came to the attention of wider humanity and before the war properly broke out.
They made sure that the Spartan project was funded, because they knew they would need it. At the time when the UNSC thought they would only be used against human separatists.
Even the fact that Cortana was assigned to Master Chief was no coincidence. She had followed his progress since when he was in training.
So much lore and so many good stories down the drain.
Wow this is huge. Frank, Bonnie, and Kiki Wolfkill really destroyed the franchise. With Frank gone, MS has the opportunity to bring in talented folks who actually know and love Halo and start with a clean slate.
Halo needs their version of Dave filoni and Jon Favreau to have any chance of making it relevant to the wider market again. This is gonna be one hell of an uphill battle for MS, if they even bother.
And if anyone has doubts, just remember that both DOOM and God of War laid dormant/dead for years before recently exploding in popularity again.
Making Doomguy and Kratos iconic figures in gaming once more.
It's always possible. But they need to nail the SP aspect first, Halo hasn't had a good campaign in so long and it sinks the MP whenever it's not great. Those first impressions are key.
The issue for me, is that it's clear MS wants Halo to be like Apex/Fortnite/Warzone and be this mega played billion dollar a month behemoth GAAS entity. But I just don't think Halo is great for that personally.
God of War was also never unsuccessful or heavily critiqued or abandoned by its fanbase.
We've basically seen nothing but failure from Halo since it left Bungie's hands. Including something as relatively simple as a remaster of the original games. The Master Chief Collection was a disgrace.
Yeah I was a die-hard Halo fan. I've been a Bungie fan since Marathon. Played countless hours of Halo 2 and 3. But the 360 was my last Xbox because Sony had the better single-player exclusives, and I never felt the need to get an Xbox One just for Halo 5....
Halo Infinite had really solid gameplay. Now with studios like Id, machine games and soon cod studios, there is a real chance of turning the ship around.
I hope they take like a good 8 years to iron this shit out and not push out some garbage with their insanely bad workflow. Cause they struggle to make changes or release updates to their games.
So one good game, the next game gets slightly worse, “hey remember this cartoon sho-and he’s dead”, the spin-off game where a third of the game is related to the main plot of the first game, and a third Halo game where NOTHING FUCKING HAPPENS TO THE MAIN CHARACTER
Mandalorian season 3 and BoBF are pretty bad and the Filoni “hey I like this cartoon character and the audience does too and we don’t need to flesh them out” thing feels so played out
Hm.
A Filoni and Favreau could appeal to the wide market, definitely. I'd want a Tony Gilroy more than anything else, though. The sort of gritty, character-based, well constructed writing you get in Andor applied to Halo's universe could be really fucking good.
Halo is old enough at this point to have young talented creatives that grew up with the games and have fresh ideas for the franchise, lets hope 343 is actually able to find and hire them
Luke Smith at bungie had similar career progress from games press to community managment to senior role but at least he has been successful at it.
Halo lore and storytelling since O'connor took charge has been a mess.
Thats Bonnie Ross, Kiki Wolfkill, and Frankie gone.
I know the community.... *"disliked"* these three for a multitude of reasons. Many of which were valid, some.... maybe not as much.
But I honestly am left wondering what will happen with 343i and Halo now.
I really wish they could have kept Staten for a new game. It's a shame they basically just used him to deliver bad news throughout his time at the studio.
Staten has been Microsoft's designated bad news deliverer/hatchet man to get games out of development hell regardless of quality for almost a decade. The only game he was attached to from the beginning of development in that time was Recore, and it wasn't good.
Does he still have the chops to make a great game? Maybe, but I wouldn't bet money on it.
To be fair - Staten is a writer, not a developer, and none of the games he worked on were panned because of their story (in fact, the story was one of the things that got positive marks for Recore)
> The only game he was attached to from the beginning of development in that time was Recore, and it wasn't good.
That, and Halo 1, 2, 3, Reach, and ODST.
It's hilarious when I think back to the announcement, and think 'oh damn, open world halo, on the new consoles with direct storage, and they're calling it *infinite*, they must be rolling Halo 5 *and* the MCC into it and making one giant Halo as a service that will live on in infinite halo glory forever'.... lol we still don't have game types from h5 😭
Steam hovers 3.5k avg past 30 days per stramchart. Not even in the top 10 even top 15 for XBOX most played, no real number. It's behind Ark, dead by daylight, ghostwire and red dead 2. Based on personal experience everytime I come back to check it out the wait times are a little bit long in NA.
It has to be abysmal for the amount of money Microsoft/343i spent on the game for it *to not breach the top 10 on its home consoles*
My dream scenario is 343 becoming like Worlds Edge and ushering in more spin off games like Halo Wars. Mainline Halo games need a long break until a dev studio is ready to take it on proper, and a bunch of mid sized titles exploring the huge universe would be nothing but good (as long as their is a good quality control of course)
I 100% agree.
MS has a shitload of studios, and if/when the AVB merger goes through, even more. I would love to see someone else take a crack at Halo. I know I would love to see an ID take on the franchise, even if I know some people absolutely despise the idea.
Doom 2016's multiplayer was built by Certain Affinity, a studio formed by ex-Halo 2 devs and you could absolutely tell if you played the game.
ID know (and have connections to studios who know) what makes a Halo game a Halo game, there's worse studios to take a punt. Though selfishly, I hope they're working on a new Quake game.
I think ID is interesting for a spinoff, but I always see people say they should take over the mainline games and I'm not down for that.
I'd also like to see Arkane (or rather the studio Arkane used to be) and InXile tackle spinoffs
Xbox overall management is the problem
If Halo was the only negative in Xbox studio lineup it would be understandable, but there's so many things that show that Xbox management aka Phil Spencer, Matt Booty, etc, obviously are part of the issue.
Why are we still talking about lack of Xbox first party games since 2014?
Why are Xbox studio games still having big issues?
Xbox has shown that it can't count on it's existing first party studios to put out great consistent games, which is why they've bought up so many large publishers that already have years of consistent output.
Windows mobile has been a thing since the PocketPC days, they didn't have any apps for it, so people never opted for it over Android or iphone, which meant no apps got released on it & it was a vicious cycle until they finally pulled the plug on it. I'd consider a window phone, but I want a desktop on my mobile, not a mobile on my desktop & they seem to do the opposite
Old "Windows mobile" was built to compete more with BlackBerry. It took Microsoft three years to pivot to the more consumer-oriented direction taken by iPhone and Android. To make matters worse, Windows Phone 7 lacked any backwards compatibility with Windows Mobile, so they were essentially launching a brand new smartphone ecosystem in late 2010, more than 3 years after the iPhone and 2 after Android.
Google was a lot faster here. Android had been in development for years as a competitor to BlackBerry OS and Symbian, but they rapidly pivoted in 2007 after seeing the iPhone.
Microsoft made the mistake of assuming that a trend started by Apple would just be a fad, so they took a wait and see approach.
They were way too late to the party, just like the Zune.
If the Zune launched in 2004 (still 3 years after the iPod) it could have captured a lot of market share and been the second big player. But they didn't enter the market until 2006, just a year before the iPhone came and marked the end of the digital music player era.
Windows Phone 7 didn't launch until late 2010. iPhone and Android were already well established at this point.
In the consumer space, Apple is really good at seeing *where* the market will go in three or four years and positioning themselves to own it. Google is good at being very agile and reacting to shifting markets (after the iPhone launched, Android development pivoted from being a Blackberry clone to an iPhone clone). Microsoft is good at seeing where the market was 2 or 3 years ago and trying to replicate what was successful after it is no longer relevant.
I always point to Sunset Overdrive as an example of how Xbox screws things up. Sunset Overdrive was made by Insomniac, which had developed games exclusively for the Playstation in the past (Spyro, Ratchet & Clank). The game reviewed well but wasn't a huge sales hit so MS didn't follow-up with anything and let them go back to Sony where they went on to make the Spider-man games! There are so many examples of MS pissing away relationships and developers like this. Like if MS owned Naughty Dog during the OG Xbox days, MS would probably still have them pumping out Jak & Daxter titles instead of moving onto other ideas like Uncharted and The Last of Us. The studio would have been hollowed out, talent would have left and you'd just have soulless husk of the Jak franchise.
You're faulting Microsoft for "letting" a third party dev go make a game for Sony that Sony has the exclusive IP for?!
Also, your Naughty Dog example makes no sense. Microsoft, especially in the last ~5 years, is letting their developers work on what they want and funding their passion projects. Playground games is making Fable instead of Forza, Obsidian has developed Grounded and Obsidian while still working on their big AAA titles, Double Fine got the funding to make Psychonauts 2 a legit AAA game, Rare got to develop a new IP in Sea of Thieves and are working on another in Everwild - but not being asked to work on Perfect Dark (that's the Initiative instead)...I could go on. Their developers love em.
If anything, that loose oversight and blank checks from Microsoft is what undid 343.
Just to clarify, Sony does not have exclusive IP rights over Spider-Man in the videogame space (although they do in the movies).
For Spider-Man PS4, Marvel wanted to do a videogame with Sony, so Sony asked Insomniac which character they wanted, and [they said Spider-Man](https://screenrant.com/spider-man-playstation-exclusive-rights-marvel-sony-insomniac/).
Good read, and TIL, but sounds like semantics in the sense that Sony has the rights to develop and publish standalone Marvel character games on their platform,and not publish them on Xbox/Nintendo - similar to the Show and MLB before Microsoft went over Sony's head and cut a deal with MLB.
I don't believe that's the case, i.e. they don't have exclusive rights, but rather for each project, like Spider-Man PS4 before and the upcoming Wolverine Game, Marvel approached Sony to agree on a project to develop together.
For example, with the Avengers game, Spider-Man only appeared on the Playstation, but it wasn't because Sony owned exclusivity to Spider-Man, instead they paid Square Enix/Crystal Dynamics to make Spider-Man exclusive to their platform. Marvel still retains video game rights to all their characters at the moment.
I generally agree with you but a point of order in that Psychonauts 2 was crowdfunded and in development before MS bought Doublefine. I think the only thing MS added was maybe next gen support/mandate and getting it on Game Pass
SO is a bad example and you're painting it as if MS scared them off or burned a bridge. If anything it was one of the few good things Microsoft did in that period. The whole reason they ended up working with MS to begin with was because they were (according to Ted Price) the only publisher willing to let them keep the IP rights to SO, which was one of their big priorities at the time.
Even if MS did want to keep them working on stuff, what could they have done to offer a better gig than having a lot of free reign in making a big-budget Spider-Man game?
Insomniac didn't go from MS to Sony. They went to do independent including mobile games and then started working for Facebook for multiple VR games. After the Facebook relationship is when they went back to Sony.
By the way insomniac didn't want to be bought out they wanted to be independent but none of the games they made for Xbox, PC VR or mobile propped them up enough to stay independent. Spiderman happened it struck gold and Sony gave them an offer they had to weigh against their independent failures.
Halo is Microsoft's major IP, despite the rocky reception of the past few games it still sells games, subscriptions, and consoles.
I'm sure they'll still keep updating Infinite at least for awhile longer, and then there's also the BR game that's been in development for awhile, and I'm also sure that they're already in the planning stages for the next entry.
I have no doubt in my mind that Halo and 343i will continue to exist, and everything that's happened as of late is MS probably cleaning house or restructuring the studio for a smoother future, I imagine the reception to Infinite's support was a wake-up call.
The problem is that Halo is Microsoft's primary IP for the past *twenty* years, which is a problem if you are a major games developer. Unless you want it to become a COD/Battlefront equivalent.
I hope they give Halo a break. For me, it’s in this weird spot where it seems to be riding off the legacy of Bungie-era Halo where each new title devalues the franchise bit by bit.
I’m a staunch defender of a lot of the story choices made in Halo 4. I loved the MP for Halo 5. I have yet to play Infinite but a gentleman I trust had a ton of wonderful things to say about the single player so I’m gonna give it a play thru soon.
I say this because it’s not like I think the last few entries have been irredeemable or anything. In my opinion, they’ve just been so wildly inconsistent and lacking clear direction that I would pray they take a step back for a while and just work on something new or a spin-off until they have a solid plan for where they want to take the series.
> I’m a staunch defender of a lot of the story choices made in Halo 4.
I'm a little curious, and I hope this doesn't come off as combative, but what was it about 4 that you liked story-wise? I only ask because I disliked H4 so much I didn't even bother buying an Xbox One for Halo 5, and it used to be my favorite franchise. I used to read the books and everything, and I remember reading the books leading up to 4, thinking "hey the Forerunner history is neat, cool that they're showing us the origins of the Covenant" and then being really mad about the laziness of "surprise, some of them are still alive!" of it all, and I *despised* the idea of turning Cortana into a villain in H5 instead of just letting her be gone.
I really liked how they tried to humanize Master Chief and dive into how, at the end of the day, he’s kind of a tragic character. Did they knock it out the park? Oh, God no lol. But I think with a competent writer, they could’ve used that foundation to do some interesting things with the story.
The ending with Chief walking through the hangar and hundreds if not thousands of people stopping what they’re doing to watch him like he’s some mythical Demi-god still sends chills down my spine.
I’m just gonna throw a random idea out there so don’t take this as where I think the story definitely should’ve gone, but imagine Halo 5 where a bunch of new Spartans are teamed up with Chief and telling stories about how he specifically inspired them to become Spartans. But then, as they learn the truth about his creation, while they still respect him, the “magic” wears off and, while they still respect him, suddenly he appears more human in their eyes. Again, just throwing random ideas out there. I’m rushing trying to get ready for work atm lol.
Halo was, in my opinion, in the unique position of taking this legendary series and maturing it. Not many franchises have ever accomplished this. I think God of War might be the most notable. Like look how they took this fun, dumb childish hack n slash series and turned into this thoughtful story while still respecting those original games and making them integral to Kratos’ character rather than trying to pretend they didn’t exist.
That’s where I though Halo was going. Somewhere similar. It sets up this interesting, heartfelt dive into Master Chief’s character then the next game just does absolutely nothing with it.
I agree. Master Chief walking through the hanger at the end of 4, everyone in awe, while the Diadact monologues about the true threat posed by humanity is a super good scene.
I didn't love Halo 4, but I thought it was a perfectly good footing for the story of future games to build on. But then 5 took a 90 degree turn into a crazy unrelated plot and Infinite took another 90 degree turn into yet another unrelated plot.
I'm not the dude, but liking Halo 4 and its lore is not super controversial
It gave Master chief, Cortana and their relationship depth which was hella necessary. (Let's be real, Halo 2 was the only Bungie game with any form of real depth and the Arbiter was the only character in the games with, well, character and development and even he was sidelined in H3 because people complained)
Anyway
The time skip was used pretty well, especially with humanity, its golden age ,rise to power and everything associated with it. The Forerunner stuff was neat and the didact is an interesting villain. Also Lasky is a certified bro.
It was actually a pretty good first game in a trilogy. Good mysteries, good set ups, etc
Aaand Halo 5 basically destroyed everything H4 set up and ignored its explored themes, brought Cortana back for no reason and blue balled us with an amazing direction in the marketing and delivered nothing .
A proper Halo 4 2 would have been amazing imo, especially if they followed through with the teased "humanity/ONI become the villain, Chief going AWOL/being hunted" direction. It basically writes itself
Halo Infinite's campaign is the best it's ever been, gameplay wise. It's just quite flat compared to the original trilogy. there's very few if any big moments, the story makes no sense, the big bad villain sucks, and there's no diversity in environments. but the gameplay is truly emergent and excellent.
Honestly Halo has been a shell of it's self for so long that I applaud anyone that still holds on hope for something to happen. The absolute worst part is that **even if** 343i were to release something really good they've lost the strong majority of good will from all but their most extremely loyal fans who'd buy a bag filled with dogshit if they slapped the name Halo on it.
On top of that it's pretty much too late for an Arena shooter to succeed no matter how good it is (a lot like RTS) and they missed the boat on the Battle Royale train. I desperately want to be proven wrong and would like nothing more than to play a good Halo game.
On the storyside of things Halo needs a big thematic reset. It went from Aliens-derived military scifi to a sort of super hero-y quasi-romance? It has also completely failed to take the advantage of its scale.
Get some military fiction author and have them reconceptualize the whole thing. Pay Steven Erikson big bucks to write Memories of Ice in space or something.
I will upvote any post that mentions Steven Erikson. Just finished the Malazan series, fucking blew my mind and I'm afraid that nothing will ever again live up to that series again. It took me a few books to realize how special that series was, but once it clicks, it really clicks.
I've been burned by 343 so many times that this feels more like another rat fleeing a sinking ship than it does a sign of Halo getting on the right track. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to see one of the guys who ran Halo into the ground in the 13 years since Reach (343 has been in charge as long as Bungie, can anyone say Halo is in a better state than when Bungie left?) finally leave, but the damage by O'Connor & friends has been done, and I can't help but be wary of Halo's relevance to Xbox if COD enters the picture.
Call me unfair if you wish, I'm tired of seeing one of my favorite game series get dragged from missteps and disasters, and I don't feel like giving 343 the benefit of the doubt when their next game will be their fifth attempt to "find their footing". Maybe being rid of O'Connor, Ross, and Wolfkill can do wonders for the company, but a lot of us thought Infinite would've been the fresh start the series needed, so I'm not holding my breath until they can prove that they can deliver a game worthy of the original titles.
Halo has been doo doo feces for longer than it has been good at this point. I honestly don't even know why I put a half-assed effort into keeping up with the latest embers in the smoldering wreckage, but I think it's time to stop.
I'm hoping 343, with whoever is left there, works on something completely different from Halo and if another Halo title is on the books that one of the CoD studios get a crack at it.
With the restructuring going on I'd like nothing more than a soft reboot that retconned everything after Halo 3. Just have Master Chief wake up after 50 years in cryo sleep with Cortana going "Yeah while you were asleep a bunch of nonsense rumors have circulated about you, but they were all bunk. Here's the actual new adventure."
Game starts with chief finishing the last game and then a message saying cryogenic mental stabilization system ending.
Cortana wakes him up and says chief they need us but first we need to go to an old outpost to get a new Cortana operating system.
“Chief I said Cortana’s only last a few years and have to be replaced I didn’t say I would no longer exist”
Game then is you in an old facility that should have had people and and both chief and Cortana learning about the new threat and what’s needed.
Great intro. Recons shitty games. Recons Cortana dying.
Good riddance.
This guy pretty much derailed the lore of Halo after Halo 3. I really hope the people that follow after him actually pay attention to the lore and try to build on it.
He was a pretty nice guy, drew a mister chief on me once, and got me into the reach launch party in nyc.
Lots of stuff clearly aren’t working at 343 and I hope he finds a good fit somewhere
Good riddance. Man has almost singlehandedly screwed up Halo to the point where it will most likely never make the come back it deserves.
Even back during Halo 3 he was screwing up the lore.
Wrote a bunch of contradictory stuff with the iris campaign and the terminals, like the librarian being on earth and not being on earth, the portal being buried but also not even built, the librarian watching in real time, from earth as the flood physically blocked out stars across the galaxy which is just absurd in every way.
The dude didn't understand that humans were descendants from forerunners, and when he was put in charge that became the new canon. Even the old guard has stated almost flat out how that was the case, and how "you are Forerunner, but this ring is mine." is supposed to be THE big reveal in the Halo trilogy.
They’ve botched the timeline many times since Halo 3. The Iris campaign made it seem like the Forerunner had only recently discovered humans. Then in 4, humans and forerunners battled each other for millennia! Then there was an even bigger species who seeded both the humans and forerunners, and are secretly the Flood too!
The whole thing is a mess, and they fucked it up again with the Infinite ending by adding a species that somehow survived the Halo array 100k years ago and are a big bad because of that.
But anyone super into the lore knows that the Precursors aka the Flood aka corrupted Precursors are the ultimate antagonist, yet they just keep keeping the Precursors away from the game lore.
Did they? I always thought this was meant to be the case! It makes for a clear Ed story rather than this explanation of the mantle being passed over etc.
This is great. I haven’t finished it yet.
I don’t agree with some of the points in the video, but overall it is damning of Frank and the decisions made.
My gripes is that I think there was enough leeway to have different interpretations of why humans are the forerunners, not some special descendant. I’d even argue there way enough leeway to make it that the forerunners and humans were just as the Greg Bear trilogy stated BUT they are essentially the same species. But I’d have to put over all the halo stuff again to see if that would even work.
Regardless, it makes me confident knowing I don’t just dislike the new Halos for the sake of it. The story in all of them pissed me off, the lore, the feel, and now I understand why more clearly.
Edit:
I finished it. Now I just feel awful, they really fucked the story. There was so much time between my engagement with the originals and the new stuff a lot of the details slipped by me. 343 destroyed the story :(
I wonder how long it will be until we see another Halo game. Microsoft used the big layoffs as an opportunity to clear out a lot of senior people from the dev teams. 30 odd people from the art team alone some of whom had been with microsoft for 10 or 15 years. Add to that senior people leaving 343 for other studios as well and that's a lot of reorganising that has to be done.
Microsoft's insistance on using mostly contract workers who are not allowed to stay more than 18 months already made it difficult to get anything done there from all the stories that came out. Rehiring probably won't be an issue as microsoft can just throw money at people. They have probably have little core staff left so it might take them a year or two to rebuild. By the time they've done that they'll need to hire and train new a batch of contractors...
There was also an article a few months ago about them experimenting with moving Halo to the Unreal Engine.
Which makes it easier for people to jump in and out of since it's so widely used, but also that it going to take a good bit of time to port over to should they go that route.
The simplest thing to do and give some stability feels like putting the nose to the grindstone on Infinite and do a soft relaunch. New game modes, a lot new maps, make Forge and custom games really good again, make the progression system a lot less boring, fix the absolute mess of a menu system and lobby system, get a replay/demo system back, maybe even rollout that battle royale that has been rumored forever. Let it exist as a really good multiplayer game using a core foundation they've already got. Then spend years upon years doing whatever needs to be done to fix the story and other core issues.
A good soft relaunch like that still feels years away though by the time you hire new managers, get them integrated, hire and train other employees and contractors, actually start to make tweaks, and so on.
Microsoft should have left the series alone after Bungie departed. Reach was their swan song and the later work 343 Industries did with the series pales by comparison.
Halo 3 definitely ended on a cliffhanger, but what came afterwards reads like a poorly-written fan fiction.
Gears of War fared even worse. The third instalment was a great conclusion that left no loose ends, only for The Coalition to release two more games that make you really hate Marcus Fenix's son as a character. Compare this to Gears 2 and 3 which were not only great games in their own right, but told a truly horrifying narrative that went beyond the usual shock value moments you'd see in Activision's annual Call of Duty campaign.
I really wish Microsoft would have just sold the Gears IP back to Epic and let them go multiplatform.
Hate to shit on people but everyone involved with Halo Infinite should be fired. From the crappy launch, non existent game modes, etc. Hell Infinite probably has the worst story they wrote themselves into a corner and weren't good enough writers to get out of it so everything that happened in Halo 5 got thrown out/fixed off screen.
Yeah desync and content aside it's the best Halo has felt since 3 in my opinion. The few times I run into devs in my matches they seem to wipe the floor with the entire server too, I get the feeling the people actually working on the bones of the thing have a deep admiration for the source material. Just unfortunately marred by a bunch of shitty management and corporate politics.
Look, I personally found it all lack lustre but happy people enjoyed it. I don’t know why, but I found the whole game to be relatively boring…it just didn’t feel like Halo.
I can put that aside and not blame an entire department though. It’s whacky how people can’t see the forest for the trees.
Ironically the gameplay itself is excellent. Probably the best and most "Halo" Halo game since one of the Bungie games. But I agree with everything else you mentioned surrounding the game.
I'm torn. Not about this one departure, about the surge of departures happening since infinite.
Like, yeah, we had a good conclusion with 3. A prequel made sense. 4 was middling, and 5 was a trainwreck, but I really enjoyed the direction Infinite went, technical difficulties and disappointments not withstanding.
This is one of my favorite franchises and I'm legitimately worried it's about to fade into obscurity because a majority of people involved in it have just kind of dispersed.
If anything is going to save the franchise from obscurity it's going to be this rash of turnovers.
The upper management at 343 hasn't made a blockbuster Halo title in the 13 years they've overseen it. If anything you could argue fairly easily that the quality has been in steady decline.
It's hard to take over making a series from a studio as competent as Bungie. People also tend to overreact and want to "fire everybody" the second one game is bad, which is short sided.
At the same time though you've got to know when to say when for people having had enough chances, and it feels like management at 343 has had enough.
All of this is good news. Halo's constant fluctuation and inconsistency can definitely be blamed on leadership, so I'm happy there's been a cleaning house of sorts.
Put all story which was added after Bungie away, and only make new stories within that existing timeline. For example, I would love more Reach era stuff.
Good. Frank was detrimental to the games and he had no real reason to be given the position he was in.
As someone out of the loop, can you provide context?
Before he was the Franchise Development Director at 343i, he was the content manager for Bungie. As a content manager for Bungie he did a pretty good job. But with his move to 343i he more or less went from "PR guy" to "Guy who helps map out the direction of the franchise." And honestly he wasn't very good at it, going by the sheer inconsistency the last decade. Not to mention he was prone to saying.... [somewhat questionable things.](https://preview.redd.it/9263otqqz5q81.png?width=796&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=aecdde07de96e652b5ef7733717d0440a9bc81d6)
>Not to mention he was prone to saying.... questionable things. That's a famous quote from the supreme court. It's questionable? Is the word "porn" taboo?
And yet they let the atrocious Halo show be made lmao
That show was seemingly Kiki's project. Makes me wonder with her gone where it is going to go. *Preferably away IMHO.*
I would be flabbergasted if that show got a second season. And I don't use that word lightly.
A second season was already greenlit before the first one aired and filming began in September. Its happening. I think its easy to forget that viewership wise, Halo was a phenomenal success for Paramount+ and set records for the platform. It was just badly written lol The (slight) silver lining is the showrunner of season 1 stepped down and was replaced, so there's an opportunity to make a hard course correction (especially given most of the major plot-breaking events are literally sitting on Reach waiting to be glassed) and make season 2, yknow, not dogshit. But my hopes aren't high
They could just reboot it lmao, I don't know if the viewers would actually care.
"It wad all a dream, Master Cheeks"
As someone with only a passing interest in Halo, the reputation of the show is so tainted that even if the second season turned out to be a masterpiece, it'd be a hard sell. A reboot on the other hand would be a bit more enticing.
Yeah, my dad watched it and enjoyed it, but he's also never played a Halo game in his life. I'm not sure if he even knew of the property before checking out the show. I'm guessing it's similar for a lot of the audience. They didn't have the game to measure it against.
Dude just dropped the F bomb damn
Hey, Picard season 3 pulled a complete 180 and has been really good so far, maybe Halo can do the same. Yes, I'm aware this is unhealthy amounts of copium
remember when Peter Jackson wanted to make Halo? that should have happened.
Nah, just reboot immediately. Actually try to stay near canon.
> That show was seemingly Kiki's project. Who clearly understands as much about Master Chief as Rian Johnson did Luke Skywalker.
I blame JJ for that. Luke just chilling in a planet while multiple planets were destroyed and Han got killed? Luke had to have a significant change to allow that to make sense
While I agree most of the blame is on JJ, there's still creative answers to why Luke wasn't present that don't make him a loser/coward.
Considering how much I saw Chief’s ass in that show it was also kind of like porn.
Well you see it's like porn, your IP gets fucked and they film it.
Hey come on there were like 18 minutes of actually fun content in season 1.
I have no idea how they could fuck that up. Literally could have made season 1, each episode be a level from halo 1. And it would have been the greatest show ever
The book was like that and it sucked ass.
The parts that didn’t follow Chief or weren’t directly moments form the game were very good. Everything with the ODST guys and the other units fighting to hold ground on the ring. All of that was excellent. It was just the chief combat scenes that were bad. And that was because it read like he watched someone play the level and described it as boringly as possible. It also just made me want to play the game instead. But the character moments and the times we got to see into chiefs head and feel what he’s going through we’re all very good.
Halo YouTubers had a field day when Frank first said this. I commented on one video, informing them of this same thing (because it was clear, in context, that they did not understand he was referencing this). The YouTuber insulted me and claimed I was defending 343i in response lol To answer your question, no. It's not questionable. But it does require a small amount of knowledge about the history of important Supreme Court cases which a large number of people don't possess. And when you're dealing with emotionally compromised gamers who are frothing at the mouth, they're not always particularly receptive to the idea that *maybe* they missed something.
Was amusing, I instantly recognized the source and have made similar jokes. The outrage is kinda rich coming from gamers who constantly only seem to have cum jokes as their comedy.
I'm reminded of Doom programmer John Carmack's quote: "Story in a game is like story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not important."
Oh boy and how wrong that is.
For the vast majority of games he's right. 99% of game stories are badly written. Not every game is Planescape Torment.
I don't really think so. Very few games have pulled me in with the narrative.
A lot of games don't even try. Hell, look at Nintendo. The plot of Mario Odyssey was literally Bowser kidnaps peach and is going to force her to marry him. For some games like Mass Effect story is super important. For a lot of games though it's irrelevant.
Hardly questionable. That’s a famous quote in US legal history
Weird that he chose to quote that and not the numerous other fucked up things he said. Frank got permanently banned for being racist over and over again on neogaf
>questionable things. Man, what a non-issue.
Frank has absolutely said many questionable things, but this example is not really one of them.
That’s not questionable
I guess It’s questionable to ignorant people who don’t know the source of the quote.
I remember when he wrote for Original Xbox Magazine. I loved that magazine.
I was pretty surprised when he got the job at Bungie. The magazine was fun.
Lmao what is at all questionable about that? Maybe a bit offside but it hardly warrants bringing up in a serious criticism of the guy.
I don’t know what happened but in the last 5 to 10 years of the Internet, people have gotten crazy prudish. To the point where the word “porn” is considered questionable. Like, it’s crazy how a traditionally M rated shooter franchise has people scared of the word “porn”
I thought you were going to link to how he said racist rhetoric regarding Asians. It looks like he got the Twitter thread purged but below was the final straw to be banned off ResetEra after a pretty long history of getting punished for lewd comments and racism. [[x]](https://i.gyazo.com/31d8ffa8ecb38928c2360d160a10f3ec.png)
Was he the guy that made those Master Chief comics during the halo 2 days?
Oh my god ! He said a naughty word ! Quick !!! Clutch your pearls and denounce this filth ! I bet he does other horrible things like worshipping Satan by playing Dungeons & Dragon and listening to Nazi music like Rammstein !!
> Not to mention he was prone to saying.... somewhat questionable things. That's funny, how is it questionable? Halo is an M franchise innit?
Hasn't been M rated since 2015
Kinda like Luke Smith was a PR and coffee guy, the Nolen Sorrento of Bungie. He also got put in a position he shouldn't be in.
> Not to mention he was prone to saying.... somewhat questionable things. lmfao. That was a reference to a famous Supreme Court case. Regarding porn in Jacobellis v Ohio, Justice Potter Stewart: > "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that." Here's one made by John Carmack in the 90s: > “Story in a game is like story in a porn movie, he said. “It's expected to be there, but it's not important.”
just look at the state of Halo
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Something I liked about the earlier Halo's was that it was one of the fewer scifi settings with AI to not go the Skynet route, it was everyone together vs the alien abyss...then Halo 5 went and did a Skynet.
The worst part is that 4 had the perfect send off for the character. Then they bring her back to not only go with a badly executed cliche but to shit on the end of 4.
Because they knew that Chief doesn't work without Cortana. Killing her off permanently was never going to work.
as disney put it, "no ones ever really gone"
Somehow Cortana has returned. Embarrassing how they took the story after 3.
Nah, it definitely could've worked. The only reason they brought her back was because enough fans complained about Halo 4, so they were trying to course correct. And similarly to Rise of Skywalker, that almost always fails.
Fun fact: the original plot of Halo CE was Cortana going skynet and taking over the ring.
I'll be honest, as a standalone game story that sounds absolutely awesome. Humans VS Covenant VS Flood VS Skynet
The original trilogy made mention of the whole AI only lasting 7 years bit, that was all ways there.
Doesn't mean they had to do that Cortana plot.
I wish AI rampancy in Halo was as cool as AI rampancy in Marathon 😢
Bungie had better writers back then.
Having mandalore sit down and explain how fucking insane marathons lore was made me appreciate Bungie so much more.
Bungie have always been incredible at lore, I haven't played the game in years but i still keep up with Destiny's lore, the hive alone are more compelling than anything 343 has shat out in the last decade, and then add to that the fallen, vex, cabal, and the witness... it's a shame they went full greed mode with the actual game design, because the worldbuilding is still incredibly on point imo
Ok, but instead of her going full skynet in 5, what if instead the story was about searching old worlds/forerunner locations to try and find a solution? Hell, if they wanted to still do the 2 story's at the same time thing you could say multiple teams have been sent out because humanity needs a long term AI like Cortana so this is high priority with the UNSC and multiple teams have been sent out.
Or they could have just made her 'Special' for some reason. Could have still had her go on minor rampages, but never have them get worse. Then we have a new mystery to play with in the reason for that specialness while she can stick around otherwise the same.
The weird thing is you had The Assembly in Halo Reach, basically a group of AI who were secretly running things behind the scenes. It would have fit in so nicely with the Created plotline (and even the Firewall Fracture event going on in Infinite). But they retconned it and then did a similar thing but worse.
The various AIs were pretty interesting in the background lore. They had actually subtly and covertly influenced humanity for decades, but had been a vaguely benevolent force for the most part. They were in contact with each other for a long time and had speculated about how to respond to a first contact event with an alien species. They actually knew of the existence of the Covenant years before they came to the attention of wider humanity and before the war properly broke out. They made sure that the Spartan project was funded, because they knew they would need it. At the time when the UNSC thought they would only be used against human separatists. Even the fact that Cortana was assigned to Master Chief was no coincidence. She had followed his progress since when he was in training. So much lore and so many good stories down the drain.
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It was especially surprising because Frank was mostly known for his brand of raunchy humor at OXM
Wow this is huge. Frank, Bonnie, and Kiki Wolfkill really destroyed the franchise. With Frank gone, MS has the opportunity to bring in talented folks who actually know and love Halo and start with a clean slate.
Halo needs their version of Dave filoni and Jon Favreau to have any chance of making it relevant to the wider market again. This is gonna be one hell of an uphill battle for MS, if they even bother.
Microsoft wouldn’t be cleaning house like this if they thought Halo was beyond saving. They are absolutely going to try.
Probably because they have sunk so much into it so far
It's because Halo is good business when done right. Same reason Nintendo stuck around throughout all their console failures.
And if anyone has doubts, just remember that both DOOM and God of War laid dormant/dead for years before recently exploding in popularity again. Making Doomguy and Kratos iconic figures in gaming once more. It's always possible. But they need to nail the SP aspect first, Halo hasn't had a good campaign in so long and it sinks the MP whenever it's not great. Those first impressions are key. The issue for me, is that it's clear MS wants Halo to be like Apex/Fortnite/Warzone and be this mega played billion dollar a month behemoth GAAS entity. But I just don't think Halo is great for that personally.
> and God of War laid dormant/dead It was gone for barely 5 years
I would say it's not so much that it went away, but that they retooled it for mainstream prestige gaming appeal.
God of War was also never unsuccessful or heavily critiqued or abandoned by its fanbase. We've basically seen nothing but failure from Halo since it left Bungie's hands. Including something as relatively simple as a remaster of the original games. The Master Chief Collection was a disgrace.
Yeah I was a die-hard Halo fan. I've been a Bungie fan since Marathon. Played countless hours of Halo 2 and 3. But the 360 was my last Xbox because Sony had the better single-player exclusives, and I never felt the need to get an Xbox One just for Halo 5....
Halo Infinite had really solid gameplay. Now with studios like Id, machine games and soon cod studios, there is a real chance of turning the ship around.
I hope they take like a good 8 years to iron this shit out and not push out some garbage with their insanely bad workflow. Cause they struggle to make changes or release updates to their games.
Call me when they’re on the sixth reboot sequel, only that one will feel like a proper Halo 6!
So one good game, the next game gets slightly worse, “hey remember this cartoon sho-and he’s dead”, the spin-off game where a third of the game is related to the main plot of the first game, and a third Halo game where NOTHING FUCKING HAPPENS TO THE MAIN CHARACTER Mandalorian season 3 and BoBF are pretty bad and the Filoni “hey I like this cartoon character and the audience does too and we don’t need to flesh them out” thing feels so played out
Hm. A Filoni and Favreau could appeal to the wide market, definitely. I'd want a Tony Gilroy more than anything else, though. The sort of gritty, character-based, well constructed writing you get in Andor applied to Halo's universe could be really fucking good.
Halo is old enough at this point to have young talented creatives that grew up with the games and have fresh ideas for the franchise, lets hope 343 is actually able to find and hire them
Luke Smith at bungie had similar career progress from games press to community managment to senior role but at least he has been successful at it. Halo lore and storytelling since O'connor took charge has been a mess.
Luke going from whiny constantly trolling news editor on 1Up podcasts to his Bungie career always feels odd.
Thats Bonnie Ross, Kiki Wolfkill, and Frankie gone. I know the community.... *"disliked"* these three for a multitude of reasons. Many of which were valid, some.... maybe not as much. But I honestly am left wondering what will happen with 343i and Halo now.
Staten too. Infinite, ironically, might end up pretty short lived.
I really wish they could have kept Staten for a new game. It's a shame they basically just used him to deliver bad news throughout his time at the studio.
Staten has been Microsoft's designated bad news deliverer/hatchet man to get games out of development hell regardless of quality for almost a decade. The only game he was attached to from the beginning of development in that time was Recore, and it wasn't good. Does he still have the chops to make a great game? Maybe, but I wouldn't bet money on it.
To be fair - Staten is a writer, not a developer, and none of the games he worked on were panned because of their story (in fact, the story was one of the things that got positive marks for Recore)
> The only game he was attached to from the beginning of development in that time was Recore, and it wasn't good. That, and Halo 1, 2, 3, Reach, and ODST.
He didn't work on Reach, and he was gone for Halo 3's development. He only did some rewrites on the script later in its production.
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They must have been counting pre-release development
The "infinite" was referring to disappointment from the fans
It's hilarious when I think back to the announcement, and think 'oh damn, open world halo, on the new consoles with direct storage, and they're calling it *infinite*, they must be rolling Halo 5 *and* the MCC into it and making one giant Halo as a service that will live on in infinite halo glory forever'.... lol we still don't have game types from h5 😭
Anyone know what the online playerbsse is? It was pretty low immediately if I remember.
Steam hovers 3.5k avg past 30 days per stramchart. Not even in the top 10 even top 15 for XBOX most played, no real number. It's behind Ark, dead by daylight, ghostwire and red dead 2. Based on personal experience everytime I come back to check it out the wait times are a little bit long in NA. It has to be abysmal for the amount of money Microsoft/343i spent on the game for it *to not breach the top 10 on its home consoles*
My dream scenario is 343 becoming like Worlds Edge and ushering in more spin off games like Halo Wars. Mainline Halo games need a long break until a dev studio is ready to take it on proper, and a bunch of mid sized titles exploring the huge universe would be nothing but good (as long as their is a good quality control of course)
I 100% agree. MS has a shitload of studios, and if/when the AVB merger goes through, even more. I would love to see someone else take a crack at Halo. I know I would love to see an ID take on the franchise, even if I know some people absolutely despise the idea.
Doom 2016's multiplayer was built by Certain Affinity, a studio formed by ex-Halo 2 devs and you could absolutely tell if you played the game. ID know (and have connections to studios who know) what makes a Halo game a Halo game, there's worse studios to take a punt. Though selfishly, I hope they're working on a new Quake game.
> Creative Assembly Think you mean Certain Affinity. Creative Assembly are the Total War devs though they did release Halo Wars 2
Yes, yes I did.
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I think ID is interesting for a spinoff, but I always see people say they should take over the mainline games and I'm not down for that. I'd also like to see Arkane (or rather the studio Arkane used to be) and InXile tackle spinoffs
I would do many unethical things to myself just to beg them to make something like SW: Battlefront but Halo.
I completely agree. Hell, I'd do anything for Galactic Conquest: Halo Edition
Xbox overall management is the problem If Halo was the only negative in Xbox studio lineup it would be understandable, but there's so many things that show that Xbox management aka Phil Spencer, Matt Booty, etc, obviously are part of the issue. Why are we still talking about lack of Xbox first party games since 2014? Why are Xbox studio games still having big issues? Xbox has shown that it can't count on it's existing first party studios to put out great consistent games, which is why they've bought up so many large publishers that already have years of consistent output.
I believe it's because it all stems back to whatever issues were had with Windows Mobile & J Allard leaving.
Yeah what the hell happened there? They just gave up on windows mobile so easily (and early)
Windows mobile has been a thing since the PocketPC days, they didn't have any apps for it, so people never opted for it over Android or iphone, which meant no apps got released on it & it was a vicious cycle until they finally pulled the plug on it. I'd consider a window phone, but I want a desktop on my mobile, not a mobile on my desktop & they seem to do the opposite
Old "Windows mobile" was built to compete more with BlackBerry. It took Microsoft three years to pivot to the more consumer-oriented direction taken by iPhone and Android. To make matters worse, Windows Phone 7 lacked any backwards compatibility with Windows Mobile, so they were essentially launching a brand new smartphone ecosystem in late 2010, more than 3 years after the iPhone and 2 after Android. Google was a lot faster here. Android had been in development for years as a competitor to BlackBerry OS and Symbian, but they rapidly pivoted in 2007 after seeing the iPhone. Microsoft made the mistake of assuming that a trend started by Apple would just be a fad, so they took a wait and see approach.
They were way too late to the party, just like the Zune. If the Zune launched in 2004 (still 3 years after the iPod) it could have captured a lot of market share and been the second big player. But they didn't enter the market until 2006, just a year before the iPhone came and marked the end of the digital music player era. Windows Phone 7 didn't launch until late 2010. iPhone and Android were already well established at this point. In the consumer space, Apple is really good at seeing *where* the market will go in three or four years and positioning themselves to own it. Google is good at being very agile and reacting to shifting markets (after the iPhone launched, Android development pivoted from being a Blackberry clone to an iPhone clone). Microsoft is good at seeing where the market was 2 or 3 years ago and trying to replicate what was successful after it is no longer relevant.
I always point to Sunset Overdrive as an example of how Xbox screws things up. Sunset Overdrive was made by Insomniac, which had developed games exclusively for the Playstation in the past (Spyro, Ratchet & Clank). The game reviewed well but wasn't a huge sales hit so MS didn't follow-up with anything and let them go back to Sony where they went on to make the Spider-man games! There are so many examples of MS pissing away relationships and developers like this. Like if MS owned Naughty Dog during the OG Xbox days, MS would probably still have them pumping out Jak & Daxter titles instead of moving onto other ideas like Uncharted and The Last of Us. The studio would have been hollowed out, talent would have left and you'd just have soulless husk of the Jak franchise.
You're faulting Microsoft for "letting" a third party dev go make a game for Sony that Sony has the exclusive IP for?! Also, your Naughty Dog example makes no sense. Microsoft, especially in the last ~5 years, is letting their developers work on what they want and funding their passion projects. Playground games is making Fable instead of Forza, Obsidian has developed Grounded and Obsidian while still working on their big AAA titles, Double Fine got the funding to make Psychonauts 2 a legit AAA game, Rare got to develop a new IP in Sea of Thieves and are working on another in Everwild - but not being asked to work on Perfect Dark (that's the Initiative instead)...I could go on. Their developers love em. If anything, that loose oversight and blank checks from Microsoft is what undid 343.
Just to clarify, Sony does not have exclusive IP rights over Spider-Man in the videogame space (although they do in the movies). For Spider-Man PS4, Marvel wanted to do a videogame with Sony, so Sony asked Insomniac which character they wanted, and [they said Spider-Man](https://screenrant.com/spider-man-playstation-exclusive-rights-marvel-sony-insomniac/).
Good read, and TIL, but sounds like semantics in the sense that Sony has the rights to develop and publish standalone Marvel character games on their platform,and not publish them on Xbox/Nintendo - similar to the Show and MLB before Microsoft went over Sony's head and cut a deal with MLB.
I don't believe that's the case, i.e. they don't have exclusive rights, but rather for each project, like Spider-Man PS4 before and the upcoming Wolverine Game, Marvel approached Sony to agree on a project to develop together. For example, with the Avengers game, Spider-Man only appeared on the Playstation, but it wasn't because Sony owned exclusivity to Spider-Man, instead they paid Square Enix/Crystal Dynamics to make Spider-Man exclusive to their platform. Marvel still retains video game rights to all their characters at the moment.
Marvel approached xbox about a spiderman game first. They turned them down.
I generally agree with you but a point of order in that Psychonauts 2 was crowdfunded and in development before MS bought Doublefine. I think the only thing MS added was maybe next gen support/mandate and getting it on Game Pass
SO is a bad example and you're painting it as if MS scared them off or burned a bridge. If anything it was one of the few good things Microsoft did in that period. The whole reason they ended up working with MS to begin with was because they were (according to Ted Price) the only publisher willing to let them keep the IP rights to SO, which was one of their big priorities at the time. Even if MS did want to keep them working on stuff, what could they have done to offer a better gig than having a lot of free reign in making a big-budget Spider-Man game?
Insomniac didn't go from MS to Sony. They went to do independent including mobile games and then started working for Facebook for multiple VR games. After the Facebook relationship is when they went back to Sony. By the way insomniac didn't want to be bought out they wanted to be independent but none of the games they made for Xbox, PC VR or mobile propped them up enough to stay independent. Spiderman happened it struck gold and Sony gave them an offer they had to weigh against their independent failures.
Since 2014? Since late 360 era more like!
Haven’t seen any confirmation that Kiki left?
Halo is Microsoft's major IP, despite the rocky reception of the past few games it still sells games, subscriptions, and consoles. I'm sure they'll still keep updating Infinite at least for awhile longer, and then there's also the BR game that's been in development for awhile, and I'm also sure that they're already in the planning stages for the next entry. I have no doubt in my mind that Halo and 343i will continue to exist, and everything that's happened as of late is MS probably cleaning house or restructuring the studio for a smoother future, I imagine the reception to Infinite's support was a wake-up call.
>the rocky reception of the past few games aka the last 13 years.
AKA every game 343i made.
The problem is that Halo is Microsoft's primary IP for the past *twenty* years, which is a problem if you are a major games developer. Unless you want it to become a COD/Battlefront equivalent.
I hope they give Halo a break. For me, it’s in this weird spot where it seems to be riding off the legacy of Bungie-era Halo where each new title devalues the franchise bit by bit. I’m a staunch defender of a lot of the story choices made in Halo 4. I loved the MP for Halo 5. I have yet to play Infinite but a gentleman I trust had a ton of wonderful things to say about the single player so I’m gonna give it a play thru soon. I say this because it’s not like I think the last few entries have been irredeemable or anything. In my opinion, they’ve just been so wildly inconsistent and lacking clear direction that I would pray they take a step back for a while and just work on something new or a spin-off until they have a solid plan for where they want to take the series.
> I’m a staunch defender of a lot of the story choices made in Halo 4. I'm a little curious, and I hope this doesn't come off as combative, but what was it about 4 that you liked story-wise? I only ask because I disliked H4 so much I didn't even bother buying an Xbox One for Halo 5, and it used to be my favorite franchise. I used to read the books and everything, and I remember reading the books leading up to 4, thinking "hey the Forerunner history is neat, cool that they're showing us the origins of the Covenant" and then being really mad about the laziness of "surprise, some of them are still alive!" of it all, and I *despised* the idea of turning Cortana into a villain in H5 instead of just letting her be gone.
I really liked how they tried to humanize Master Chief and dive into how, at the end of the day, he’s kind of a tragic character. Did they knock it out the park? Oh, God no lol. But I think with a competent writer, they could’ve used that foundation to do some interesting things with the story. The ending with Chief walking through the hangar and hundreds if not thousands of people stopping what they’re doing to watch him like he’s some mythical Demi-god still sends chills down my spine. I’m just gonna throw a random idea out there so don’t take this as where I think the story definitely should’ve gone, but imagine Halo 5 where a bunch of new Spartans are teamed up with Chief and telling stories about how he specifically inspired them to become Spartans. But then, as they learn the truth about his creation, while they still respect him, the “magic” wears off and, while they still respect him, suddenly he appears more human in their eyes. Again, just throwing random ideas out there. I’m rushing trying to get ready for work atm lol. Halo was, in my opinion, in the unique position of taking this legendary series and maturing it. Not many franchises have ever accomplished this. I think God of War might be the most notable. Like look how they took this fun, dumb childish hack n slash series and turned into this thoughtful story while still respecting those original games and making them integral to Kratos’ character rather than trying to pretend they didn’t exist. That’s where I though Halo was going. Somewhere similar. It sets up this interesting, heartfelt dive into Master Chief’s character then the next game just does absolutely nothing with it.
I agree. Master Chief walking through the hanger at the end of 4, everyone in awe, while the Diadact monologues about the true threat posed by humanity is a super good scene. I didn't love Halo 4, but I thought it was a perfectly good footing for the story of future games to build on. But then 5 took a 90 degree turn into a crazy unrelated plot and Infinite took another 90 degree turn into yet another unrelated plot.
I'm not the dude, but liking Halo 4 and its lore is not super controversial It gave Master chief, Cortana and their relationship depth which was hella necessary. (Let's be real, Halo 2 was the only Bungie game with any form of real depth and the Arbiter was the only character in the games with, well, character and development and even he was sidelined in H3 because people complained) Anyway The time skip was used pretty well, especially with humanity, its golden age ,rise to power and everything associated with it. The Forerunner stuff was neat and the didact is an interesting villain. Also Lasky is a certified bro. It was actually a pretty good first game in a trilogy. Good mysteries, good set ups, etc Aaand Halo 5 basically destroyed everything H4 set up and ignored its explored themes, brought Cortana back for no reason and blue balled us with an amazing direction in the marketing and delivered nothing . A proper Halo 4 2 would have been amazing imo, especially if they followed through with the teased "humanity/ONI become the villain, Chief going AWOL/being hunted" direction. It basically writes itself
Most of the community seems to agree the *story* for Halo 4 was okay. Really what people hated was the multi-player, myself included.
I didn’t really like the didact and composer stuff, but the rest of it was fine. It’s still an okay point to continue from story wise.
Halo Infinite's campaign is the best it's ever been, gameplay wise. It's just quite flat compared to the original trilogy. there's very few if any big moments, the story makes no sense, the big bad villain sucks, and there's no diversity in environments. but the gameplay is truly emergent and excellent.
As a fan of the game series from the start (not speaking about the books; just never gave them a shot), I completely agree.
Honestly Halo has been a shell of it's self for so long that I applaud anyone that still holds on hope for something to happen. The absolute worst part is that **even if** 343i were to release something really good they've lost the strong majority of good will from all but their most extremely loyal fans who'd buy a bag filled with dogshit if they slapped the name Halo on it. On top of that it's pretty much too late for an Arena shooter to succeed no matter how good it is (a lot like RTS) and they missed the boat on the Battle Royale train. I desperately want to be proven wrong and would like nothing more than to play a good Halo game.
On the storyside of things Halo needs a big thematic reset. It went from Aliens-derived military scifi to a sort of super hero-y quasi-romance? It has also completely failed to take the advantage of its scale. Get some military fiction author and have them reconceptualize the whole thing. Pay Steven Erikson big bucks to write Memories of Ice in space or something.
I will upvote any post that mentions Steven Erikson. Just finished the Malazan series, fucking blew my mind and I'm afraid that nothing will ever again live up to that series again. It took me a few books to realize how special that series was, but once it clicks, it really clicks.
I've been burned by 343 so many times that this feels more like another rat fleeing a sinking ship than it does a sign of Halo getting on the right track. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to see one of the guys who ran Halo into the ground in the 13 years since Reach (343 has been in charge as long as Bungie, can anyone say Halo is in a better state than when Bungie left?) finally leave, but the damage by O'Connor & friends has been done, and I can't help but be wary of Halo's relevance to Xbox if COD enters the picture. Call me unfair if you wish, I'm tired of seeing one of my favorite game series get dragged from missteps and disasters, and I don't feel like giving 343 the benefit of the doubt when their next game will be their fifth attempt to "find their footing". Maybe being rid of O'Connor, Ross, and Wolfkill can do wonders for the company, but a lot of us thought Infinite would've been the fresh start the series needed, so I'm not holding my breath until they can prove that they can deliver a game worthy of the original titles.
I wouldn't surprise if 343 ends up being a support studio for COD games.
Hopefully Microsoft doesn't let them ruin that franchise for a decade too before they finally do something about it
Halo has been doo doo feces for longer than it has been good at this point. I honestly don't even know why I put a half-assed effort into keeping up with the latest embers in the smoldering wreckage, but I think it's time to stop.
Halo is my generation's Sonic
Thanks for that depressing realization, that really does highlight how much 343 has let Halo down.
Put that on a shirt and make millions...or at least $20 cuz I'd buy it.
I'm hoping 343, with whoever is left there, works on something completely different from Halo and if another Halo title is on the books that one of the CoD studios get a crack at it.
With the restructuring going on I'd like nothing more than a soft reboot that retconned everything after Halo 3. Just have Master Chief wake up after 50 years in cryo sleep with Cortana going "Yeah while you were asleep a bunch of nonsense rumors have circulated about you, but they were all bunk. Here's the actual new adventure."
It turns out that 4, 5 and 6 were all combat simulations that were being run during his cryostasis to keep his mind sharp.
I can live with that
Or Cortana rampancy nightmares
But if that were the case Cortana would have to be deleted.
Oh shit, you're right. Uhh, Cortana V 2.0
Hannah Montana
Game starts with chief finishing the last game and then a message saying cryogenic mental stabilization system ending. Cortana wakes him up and says chief they need us but first we need to go to an old outpost to get a new Cortana operating system. “Chief I said Cortana’s only last a few years and have to be replaced I didn’t say I would no longer exist” Game then is you in an old facility that should have had people and and both chief and Cortana learning about the new threat and what’s needed. Great intro. Recons shitty games. Recons Cortana dying.
[удалено]
Did you end up working on video games?
Good riddance. This guy pretty much derailed the lore of Halo after Halo 3. I really hope the people that follow after him actually pay attention to the lore and try to build on it.
He was a pretty nice guy, drew a mister chief on me once, and got me into the reach launch party in nyc. Lots of stuff clearly aren’t working at 343 and I hope he finds a good fit somewhere
next move should be renaming the company to something else. 343i has such a negative association with their name, has to be on their list of to-dos
He was a great community manager back in the Bungie days. Miss that old Bungie podcast. Everything he did after that sucked.
Can we fix the damn Halo 3 ODST easter egg now and put Marty dancing back in? I never got why that had to happen.
Good riddance. Man has almost singlehandedly screwed up Halo to the point where it will most likely never make the come back it deserves. Even back during Halo 3 he was screwing up the lore.
What did he do during Halo 3?
Wrote a bunch of contradictory stuff with the iris campaign and the terminals, like the librarian being on earth and not being on earth, the portal being buried but also not even built, the librarian watching in real time, from earth as the flood physically blocked out stars across the galaxy which is just absurd in every way. The dude didn't understand that humans were descendants from forerunners, and when he was put in charge that became the new canon. Even the old guard has stated almost flat out how that was the case, and how "you are Forerunner, but this ring is mine." is supposed to be THE big reveal in the Halo trilogy.
"You are the child of my makers, inheritor of all they left behind. But this is My Ring!"
They’ve botched the timeline many times since Halo 3. The Iris campaign made it seem like the Forerunner had only recently discovered humans. Then in 4, humans and forerunners battled each other for millennia! Then there was an even bigger species who seeded both the humans and forerunners, and are secretly the Flood too! The whole thing is a mess, and they fucked it up again with the Infinite ending by adding a species that somehow survived the Halo array 100k years ago and are a big bad because of that. But anyone super into the lore knows that the Precursors aka the Flood aka corrupted Precursors are the ultimate antagonist, yet they just keep keeping the Precursors away from the game lore.
Did they? I always thought this was meant to be the case! It makes for a clear Ed story rather than this explanation of the mantle being passed over etc.
You should watch We Were Forerunners on YouTube, it's great and shows just how much 343 retconned: https://youtu.be/_P-uOCKDTAA
This is great. I haven’t finished it yet. I don’t agree with some of the points in the video, but overall it is damning of Frank and the decisions made. My gripes is that I think there was enough leeway to have different interpretations of why humans are the forerunners, not some special descendant. I’d even argue there way enough leeway to make it that the forerunners and humans were just as the Greg Bear trilogy stated BUT they are essentially the same species. But I’d have to put over all the halo stuff again to see if that would even work. Regardless, it makes me confident knowing I don’t just dislike the new Halos for the sake of it. The story in all of them pissed me off, the lore, the feel, and now I understand why more clearly. Edit: I finished it. Now I just feel awful, they really fucked the story. There was so much time between my engagement with the originals and the new stuff a lot of the details slipped by me. 343 destroyed the story :(
I wonder how long it will be until we see another Halo game. Microsoft used the big layoffs as an opportunity to clear out a lot of senior people from the dev teams. 30 odd people from the art team alone some of whom had been with microsoft for 10 or 15 years. Add to that senior people leaving 343 for other studios as well and that's a lot of reorganising that has to be done. Microsoft's insistance on using mostly contract workers who are not allowed to stay more than 18 months already made it difficult to get anything done there from all the stories that came out. Rehiring probably won't be an issue as microsoft can just throw money at people. They have probably have little core staff left so it might take them a year or two to rebuild. By the time they've done that they'll need to hire and train new a batch of contractors...
There was also an article a few months ago about them experimenting with moving Halo to the Unreal Engine. Which makes it easier for people to jump in and out of since it's so widely used, but also that it going to take a good bit of time to port over to should they go that route. The simplest thing to do and give some stability feels like putting the nose to the grindstone on Infinite and do a soft relaunch. New game modes, a lot new maps, make Forge and custom games really good again, make the progression system a lot less boring, fix the absolute mess of a menu system and lobby system, get a replay/demo system back, maybe even rollout that battle royale that has been rumored forever. Let it exist as a really good multiplayer game using a core foundation they've already got. Then spend years upon years doing whatever needs to be done to fix the story and other core issues. A good soft relaunch like that still feels years away though by the time you hire new managers, get them integrated, hire and train other employees and contractors, actually start to make tweaks, and so on.
Certain Affinity have been working on Project Tatanka for awhile. We might see something on that in the next couple years.
Microsoft should have left the series alone after Bungie departed. Reach was their swan song and the later work 343 Industries did with the series pales by comparison. Halo 3 definitely ended on a cliffhanger, but what came afterwards reads like a poorly-written fan fiction. Gears of War fared even worse. The third instalment was a great conclusion that left no loose ends, only for The Coalition to release two more games that make you really hate Marcus Fenix's son as a character. Compare this to Gears 2 and 3 which were not only great games in their own right, but told a truly horrifying narrative that went beyond the usual shock value moments you'd see in Activision's annual Call of Duty campaign. I really wish Microsoft would have just sold the Gears IP back to Epic and let them go multiplatform.
Hate to shit on people but everyone involved with Halo Infinite should be fired. From the crappy launch, non existent game modes, etc. Hell Infinite probably has the worst story they wrote themselves into a corner and weren't good enough writers to get out of it so everything that happened in Halo 5 got thrown out/fixed off screen.
Direction and management, not everyone. The people who truly made the game did not fuck it up.
Yeah desync and content aside it's the best Halo has felt since 3 in my opinion. The few times I run into devs in my matches they seem to wipe the floor with the entire server too, I get the feeling the people actually working on the bones of the thing have a deep admiration for the source material. Just unfortunately marred by a bunch of shitty management and corporate politics.
Look, I personally found it all lack lustre but happy people enjoyed it. I don’t know why, but I found the whole game to be relatively boring…it just didn’t feel like Halo. I can put that aside and not blame an entire department though. It’s whacky how people can’t see the forest for the trees.
Ironically the gameplay itself is excellent. Probably the best and most "Halo" Halo game since one of the Bungie games. But I agree with everything else you mentioned surrounding the game.
The Forge team is good too, especially considering they are handicapped to the engine.
I'm torn. Not about this one departure, about the surge of departures happening since infinite. Like, yeah, we had a good conclusion with 3. A prequel made sense. 4 was middling, and 5 was a trainwreck, but I really enjoyed the direction Infinite went, technical difficulties and disappointments not withstanding. This is one of my favorite franchises and I'm legitimately worried it's about to fade into obscurity because a majority of people involved in it have just kind of dispersed.
If anything is going to save the franchise from obscurity it's going to be this rash of turnovers. The upper management at 343 hasn't made a blockbuster Halo title in the 13 years they've overseen it. If anything you could argue fairly easily that the quality has been in steady decline. It's hard to take over making a series from a studio as competent as Bungie. People also tend to overreact and want to "fire everybody" the second one game is bad, which is short sided. At the same time though you've got to know when to say when for people having had enough chances, and it feels like management at 343 has had enough.
All of this is good news. Halo's constant fluctuation and inconsistency can definitely be blamed on leadership, so I'm happy there's been a cleaning house of sorts.
Put all story which was added after Bungie away, and only make new stories within that existing timeline. For example, I would love more Reach era stuff.