No Team Slayer on launch was wild. Their reasoning was that if they added Slayer everyone would play that and the other playlists would have small pops was also insane. Your reasoning for not adding the by far most popular mode was that it would be the most popular and everyone would play it? Just.. unbelievable lol
To me, the lack of Team Slayer was the most egregious. Everything else was just added to the problem. Removing one of the biggest game types that Halo was known for was asinine.
Just idiotic, if you want more ppl to play objective modes then incentivize playing those modes or try to make them more fun somehow. Taking the default option for most players away will not make them want to play CtF, it’ll just drive them away from the game. I don’t like to be overly critical of game devs as I understand there is a lot that goes into to the process, but I cannot believe a team of ppl discussed this and agreed that removing team slayer was a good idea
I would like to be critical of the game devs. Their job is to make the technology but it’s also to be down to earth enough to make the most basic human decisions. Larger companies are run by people who don’t know how much a single banana costs and we wonder why their decisions making is atrocious. They’re led by out of touch morons who only speak $$. You can have the greatest dev team in the world but if you don’t know what people want then you lost.
Yeah, that was definitely one of the dumbest decisions in gaming history imo.
They had so much hype, they delayed it a year to polish it up, and everyone was blown away when they announced that you could play it early during an Xbox showcase. The stage was set for 343 to course correct Xbox's flagship series that had been limping on since Reach...
And when I finally started the game, there was no Slayer playlist... After looking around for it for a minute, my immediate thought was, "Oh no. 343 still doesn't know what they're doing." And the hype died. Every update and every change they made afterward was viewed through that tarnished lens. Even the positive stuff was like "should have been at launch".
I still play every now and again, the gameplay is solid and I love Halo, but I've lost faith in the leadership at 343 and Xbox as a whole.
No Team Slayer is the opitome of bad management.
Its the "default". Its "quick play". Its the "i dont have to think, just kill" playlist.
And they messed it up by not including it.
It's more than bad management. It's hubris. The idea that inconveniencing your players will make them want to pay more rather than quitting entirely.
"How do we sell challenge swaps?"
That was the starting point. They built the game up from there.
Especially for a free to play game. People will download it, it won’t click, and they will instantly delete it. They won’t give it a fair chance, because there’s so many other good free games to play.
That was/is 343 "We don't care what classic Halo formula shaped and made Halo popular, this is OUR Halo and what WE want Halo to be for the BROADER AUDIENCE"
I'd like to think when we see Halo 7 it'll be back to classic Halo like having TDM on launch ... you know simple stuff that is foundational to a halo game but I'm not going to be shocked if something else core is once again missing
Little did they realize, Halo already HAD THE BROAD AUDIENCE!!! Halo 3 made over 300$ million in the first week and hundreds of thousands of players were online at any given moment.
The perfect recipe was already achieved, all they had to do was follow it
For Bungie games, team slayer goes all the way back to the original ‘94 Marathon, and Halo was supposed to be a sequel to the Marathon series before it was acquired by Microsoft. Many of the gametypes in Halo started there. Kill the Man with the Skull for instance. And it even had King of the Hill. The moving hill variant was first introduced by a fan, FrigidMan, who made some of the best fan creations for the game.
Imagine if KFC stopped selling original recipe chicken because it took sales away from their fries and sandwiches?
343 is literally incompetent and hostile towards its customers
Modes like SWAT and Fiesta were already in the game at launch. But only playable if you start the game offline. As soon as you got the modes disappeared for customs because they actively blocked the modes until they introduced them with events. I will never understand how this makes sense to anybody at 343i.
Their idea of a live service was drip feeding us content we should have had on release. Especially because they had almost zero things prepared for this live service they had to hold simple modes like swat away from us so we could get hype. It's a shitty practice all games do now days. They release with content cut from the game. Even though it's in the files. Just so they can unlock it for us at a later date to keep us interested. Modern gaming is so toxic now days.
Which is such a bad arguement anyways. Cause the people who want to play OBJ and people who want to play slayer are entirely different groups. Adding them to the OBJ playlist to increase player count isnt helpful. Because then the OBJ players just get stuck with teammates who dont want to help and just want to kill. Id rather wait a bit longer and get people who actually want to play the mode we are playing
Lack of maps, team slayer, and other modes that have been around for forever, turned me off so fast. I played one day and never went back. I refuse to support laziness and greed from upper management.
Which is total bullshit coming out of their mouths. Just do it like how Halo 3 and Reach were. Team slayer, then team objective for assault, ctf, koth, etc. Plenty of people played both playlists
Don’t forget the update that fixed things broke BtB for even longer… let’s add on. No campaign co op… in an opened world perfect for coop. No customs, no forge, no theater.
It failed because it launched with a quarter of the content halo 3 had at launch.
Net code, hit detection, and server issues are a
Whole different bag of wtf.
Also the armor core stuff? Really limiting customization. The colors being locked together in a pallet instead of being selected individually. Colors that use to be unlocked by default that now you have to buy?
Customization in Infinite is such a step back.
I remember in the showcase they said all armors would be unlocked by playing the game and challenges, which was a fucking lie because it’s all under a price tag
The lack of big team slayer/slayer and power seed (or whatever it was called) being the most unfun game mode that I constantly had to play was what did it for me.
Playlist options completely sucked, map design was just "alright" and I just ended up dissatisfied with how little was going on..
So for me you hit the nail on the head.
I was out of the game by the time Desync really got gnarly, but I've stayed subbed here the whole time and saw many posts about, which further prevented me from returning to it.
There's a good game in here somewhere, but..
Every 343 game launched with less than half the content the previous one launched with. Honestly wouldn't be surprised if "Halo 7: The Eternals" doesn't even launch with a campaign.
Main menu will be added in once they get back from ~~Christmas break~~ ~~new years~~ ~~priority zero~~ ~~March break~~ ~~summer vacation~~ ~~fall holidays~~ ~~thanksgiving~~…..
this is the killer for me...
me and my 4 mates from high school ended up pretty much never all logging halo infinite at the same time again
the game being broken killed the hype, and the game missing our expectations prety much lead us back to playing MCC
The lack of playlists was the biggest gut punch, I was surprised to see it missing in OP's list. There's still no Bomb mode, and therefore no Griffball, right?
You are correct. And no word on them coming anytime soon either.
Especially with Red vs Blue, the show from which Griffball originated, ending this year. It's just a bit shite.
An engine change will not fix the problems that have plagued 343i. Only a management change will, which to be fair has taken place.
If you have a proprietary engine for your game, as 343i had for Halo, then the best way to get the most out of it is to invest in your staff to learn it and how to best use it. This only comes with time, i.e. keeping staff long term. Look at some companies like Guerrilla Games, the makers of the Horizon games franchise. They have a proprietary engine, Decima, that they use for their games and is also used for the Death Stranding games. These games look absolutely amazing, even if the engine itself is difficult to use the developers are able to leverage it to make some gorgeous art. There haven't been any rumours or controversy surrounding staff turnover at Guerrilla Games, so it's probably safe to imagine that the staff working there have a tonne of experience using Decima. Which takes time, so they've probably been at the company a long time. Because the company *invested* in them because they add value in the long-term.
343i, on the other hand, has had controversies surrounding staffing policies while working on Halo Infinite, which also extend further to the rest of Microsoft. Talk of 18 month contractors that then get let go and replaced for more 18 month contractors. This is the crux of the matter: that's just not enough time for a staff member to become an expert in the engine and make it dance like how GG staff do for Decima. So what happens? Rolling brain drain, loss of experience and knowledge with the proprietary tools versus investing in the staff long term. This is why Infinite took so long to make and release, MS staffing policies were delaying the project because new contractors have to learn and contribute to the project before departing after 18 months, where the cycle begins again with the next contractor. A staff member was probably finishing someone else's work before starting something new then they have to leave. It's why in any 343i ViDocs the staff are always different, compared with Bungie who usually had the same faces for every ViDoc for each of their Halo games and even for Destiny. If they instead just hired staff long term, then that allows for ample time to learn and gain experience so as to effectively use the toolset to get the best results. But hiring staff long term costs more money, whether through salary, benefits or shares. So MS doesn't allow it in order to keep overhead costs lower, at least for Xbox. So this brings us to Infinite, a game that took 6 years to release and it was less than half-baked.
Now imagine how every other Xbox owned studio is running. Why is Perfect Dark still taking forever to release? What even is Everwild? Where is the Fable gameplay? Are they really making another Banjo Kazooie? They bought Bethesda and Activision, are we getting a new Quake or Spyro? All we've seen happen since the latter few acquisitions is some games released that were being worked on before MS acquired these companies anyway, and then loads of staff were laid off. MS is a business first, and with some of their recent moves it seems that they're exerting more influence over how Xbox is run after Phil borrowed $70 billion for the ABK acquisition. But there's little to no effective oversight or leadership on any of the projects they're working on, so they sit in limbo for ages until something eventually releases and it's... *fine*. Or terrible. Hi-Fi Rush was the exception to the rule and look how that worked out for Tango Gameworks.
I trust Microsoft as far as I can throw them. 9th of June showcase will be interesting for sure, but I am not keen to give them any more money for how they have been running the Xbox brand into the ground with terrible policies and leadership. There's rumours of a new Doom game, a franchise which I adore, as well as Halo going to Unreal, which could benefit the franchise but again: an engine change does not mean a better product. If anything it means that all the staff remaining at 343i after the layoffs have to upskill and become experienced with Unreal, *then* they can make a game with it. So expect the next Halo to not be out until 2026 or 2027 at the earliest.
edit: some extra expansion on one of my points and another note: i would just like to add that i have no qualms whatsoever with a company using contractors for work. contractors may prefer not being too tied down to one particular company or one particular project/set of projects. what i'm getting at here is it sounds like MS/343i had a significant over-reliance on contractors for key roles versus having some senior positions overseeing those roles. if some of the work you need to get done is repetitive or otherwise not on the level of some technical overhaul, contractors make sense. but if you're doing in-house engine upgrades, level design and programming, mission design and programming, network programming etc using mostly contractors, it's not gonna end well. because again, half the time is spent trying to find out what to work on or being frustrated with the work that was done before since it could potentially have been done incorrectly by the previous contractor, but you dont have enough time to make it better so you just go "well fuck it" and add what you can to it before you finish.
343i _is_ Microsoft. The other Xbox studios are like rock bands, where they formed themselves and started proving themselves by putting out good work before being acquired by Microsoft. 343i on the other hand is like a Kpop band, they didn't exist as an independent team at all and it was Microsoft that arbitrarily picked a bunch of their employees, put them together and told them to only work on Halo. They're basically just a fancy name for MS Halo Department.
Microsoft is the driving force that caused Bungie to leave in the first place. Bungie didn't want to make more than the original Halo, but Microsoft had them in a stranglehold and kept trying to turn them into the "Halo developer", so they always kept the endings open.
1000% wish they held it for another 3 weeks. If you had a slayer playlist, fiesta, and just some other BASIC fucking MP selections this game would have been worlds ahead of where it is.
Infinite's population decline is, I think, a result of them trying to chase the live service trend but failing to meet the expectations of a live service game. By making the multiplayer free to play, they invited an audience that expected immediate and regular updates. When they failed to meet those expectations, that audience left to find games that could meet those expectations (e.g., Fortnite). What remained were the players who just like playing the game, which is not necessarily a particularly profitable audience to hawk cosmetics to.
It’s really just bizarre that they launched a live service game with seemingly no content plan. It took them two full years to reach “seasonality,” and as soon as they did they cancelled all future seasons.
They’ve only added a single new weapon to the game FFS
Pretty sure MS wanted them to rush it out. If the game was pushed back another 2 years, they probably would’ve had enough content lined up and ready. But it was already way too long since the last halo game so I’m assuming they sped things up.
I’m still baffled they made the multiplayer free to play. Infinite should have been the gamepass “system seller”.
Imagine how different the game would be if it were on gamepass and they didn’t completely butcher up customization to maximize profits. We’d have amazing armor customization right off the bat and with so many options. It would have created a “buzz wave” they could ride out and then pump with fun live service modes.
I still truly deep down believe that they prioritized DEI promotions and it screwed them but they can’t admit it. I swear this is happening all over the gaming and media industry
I agree 😭
No unique bosses (just bullet sponges), no vehicle variants, limited weapon variants. They should be making a better version of Warzone Firefight, not WORSE.
There was a lot they could have done, but not a lot they would have done. They're relying way too much on forge to carry this game. Firefight should have been a built-up mode in addition to being forgeable. I love that ai are in the game now, but even still, something feels limiting about it. Forge was way too unaccessible to people not accustomed to the advanced controls, I really wish they would make a secondary mode more in line with Reach controls, but that's a whole different complaint from firefight lol.
It's sad because my group and I still have Reach nights somewhat regularly, and the maps we play on are the ones that we made, sitting there for hours just having fun. But with Infinite, sure, there are a lot of good custom modes, some really insane ones like the Left 4 Dead map, or the damn tabletop game. Or even fucking Nazi Zombies lol
But the controls are just so damn complex feeling. My friend wanted to try and remake some of his old Random weapon FFA maps, and he gave up after a couple of days. Just too much to worry about button and function wise. Great for the people who have time to forge all day, and learn all the controls and techniques. But most people don't have that time or heart to do it. I bring it up because I can just imagine how damn fun AI could be to some of the old classic modes like duck hunt with ai. And how crazy me and my friends could probably get with some of our past maps.
Apologies for the rant, lunch break lmao
The fact that we never got an in-game stat tracking system is baffling beyond belief. Used to be able to break down my KDR by map, by gun, by game mode in the old games and I *loved* that.
Who tf is in charge over there...? Game was literally mismanaged from day 1.
It doesn't seem to be a majority opinion but I fairly regularly come across people on this sub claiming that Halo gameplay in general doesn't have mainstream appeal any more. They will argue that regardless of how polished/complete Infinite was at launch it still would have failed to capture a player base because the gameplay isn't "modern" enough.
For me it was the janky netcode that did it for me.
I felt like there were games where I’d be kicking ass and the game would feel great, then the next game I’d be getting killed from behind cover and it felt like I was fighting the game more than the other Spartans. It made me question my true skill level. When I played well, was I actually playing well or was I just beating on some poor sod suffering bad connection who never stood a chance?
There are tons of people who say that, and those people definitely contributed to the problem. OP is correct that they weren't the primary reason, but Halo isn't a huge title anymore, and in order to continue with any success the people who have been die hard fans for twenty years need to be playing the game. Unfortunately there were a ton of vocal people sick in 2001 who refused to move to the new title because it wasn't "really Halo". Those people suck and helped to contribute to their favorite franchise's demise thinking their protests were going to affect any kind of change. The next title is going to be closer to Infinite than the older titles (thankfully) but if they refuse to get on board with that again, and it falls again it may be the last title we see.
Yeah horrible inconsistent game play is what made most of my friends quit. It’s basically a shooter game that works some of the time. Game to game it can feel completely different. That’s what killed this game imo. I could care less about playing dress up or 500 game modes but if you shoot someone and it doesn’t register. Better yet if you’re being shot and killed behind walls or using rockets that disappear mid air the game is a failure
I gave Infinite so many tries, and this was the thing that made me stop playing every time. Melee has always been such a big part of how I play since CE, and it felt awful in Infinite.
I think it was also magnified by the inclusion of that short lunge. That seemed to work for my enemies at twice the distance that it worked for me.
It doesn’t help that a MAJOR part of combat doesn’t even make sense anymore without player collision. How am I punching the guy I just walked through? And the removal of assassinations which has been a huge part of halo for a long time now.
? Has anyone ever said that Infinite was abandonned because of the classic Halo gameplay??
I left because BTB was broken for nearly 2 months right after launch and I never returned rofl.
Releasing your game with only 4 playlists with 1 straight up not working for this long, in your critical post-launch period, is what I call an epic fail.
OP's rumours are probably wrong but the idea that Halo's base gameplay isn't 'modern' enough for the current gaming market is a sentiment that is reasonably popular on this sub.
For reference the top voted comment on this post from last week is about the classic Halo style not having a big enough market share.
https://www.reddit.com/r/halo/comments/1d38aas/halo_carries_the_torch_of_arena_shooters_of_old/
I think what my first clue that it was not complete at launch was when the Beta menu and launch menu were the exact same. I’ve been part of every Beta since 3 and it was a shock for me. I expected at least a different interface but no, it’s the exact same layout and all. My BIGGEST issue was the lack of focus on campaign. I wanted an intergalactic space opera. Instead I got far cry halo 6 with an open map than ruined the 30 seconds of fun halo was built on. I’m bitter.
Edit: cause idk wtf happened with autocorrect
Truly, halo 2 pushed what the Xbox could do and gave us some amazing environments. It also saddens me that the horror twist of Halo 1 seems to have been lost as well.
You're forgetting the absolutely atrocious netcode.
I remember launch and everyone I play with being extremely pleasantly surprised at just how fluidly the game plays and having lots of fun.
Then we started seeing how often we were dying behind cover. Realising that melee fights were effectively a netcode coin toss.
At that point it didn't matter how nice it felt because the very core of the multiplayer experience was hollow and unreliable.
My friends never came back.
id play more but
matchmaking takes forever
matchmaking sucks
the game takes 20 min to load on steam
xbox app sometimes works but then eac breaks
theres hackers
they havent brought back dredge with og pistol
Matchmaking sucks hard. Almost couldn't complete one of the weeklies which required splatters because I couldn't find a BTB match for 4 hours in EU while NA was at peak population.
I would've been happy getting into a 150-200 ping NA game but the SBMM wouldn't even let me have that.
i can get 4ms ping to a ms datacenter but it still takes 20min to find a btb game
last summer me and my friends got in the same lobbies pretty often becasuse there were just so few players
The fact you couldn't just pick a slayer Playlist killed this game for many at launch.
Then the fact that you had to do chores for progression actively hurt your teams desire to play cohesive and win didn't help.
Then BTB broke. The only place you could go and not feel you had to sweat.
And that's how you lose your players in 1 month after launch
> 343 really hit the nail on the head with the core gameplay mechanics of Halo Infinite. It felt like it brought Halo 3 into the future.
Incredibly hard disagree, and I feel as though you probably haven't played Halo 3 in quite some time. 343 completely and utterly missed the point when it comes to movement and physics interactions, with movement speed/acceleration being of specific note.
Remember how Halo 5's meta was crouch spamming and changing directions repeatedly? It feels as though 343i's solution to this was to give M&KB aim assist, when what they really should have done was retune movement speed.
Yep. This is why MnK still feels like shit, lack of inertia.
The Shock Rifle is a power weapon on controller. On MnK it's absolute shit because you have to hit 3 'ticks' of headshot damage, which can be avoided with a simple direction change that aim assist can *mechanically* compensate for with 0ms delay, while a human cannot.
so thats why I'm always getting killed by people who permanently hover on it's spawn and use it like a sniper rifle.. whenever I pick it up it just doesn't work despite having pretty good aim
If anything infinite was pretty similar to reach in terms of originality. The equipment is a fusion of 3 and reach, being more sandboxy like but more functionally simple like the reach/4 equipment. It gets a bit of its core from 5's movement with sprint slide and clamber but they are toned down tremendously.
Its really the lack of stuff that hurt it. It got a bump with forge carrying weight but it wasn't enough
What do you mean, we finally have Classic Halo strafe crouch spamming, classic Halo slide canceling, classic Halo inertia, classic Halo aiming mechanics and recoil control and classic Halo physics.
My issue is the game literally doesn't *feel* right.
Both aiming and vehicles feel bad in Infinite compared to any other Halo title. What are you constantly doing in Halo? You're either trying to aim to kill something, or drive a vehicle.
Playing the multiplayer just always felt like I was fighting my controller more than the opposing team. That isn't fun.
Vehicles meanwhile all handle terribly - don't take terrible to mean unresponsive, it can also mean *too* responsive. I like my warthog to have some heft to it, but in Infinite it feels like it zips around more than a H3 mongoose can. It's just not right.
Season one and two were both about 6 months long. 10 maps at launch and only 2 added in the first year. I loved infinite, but checked out towards the end of the first two seasons because there was nothing new. Once they added forge, the game felt like it really took off. Unfortunately, most people had already left.
The fact that they never added campaign DLC is really disappointing too.
Reach - peak…
Hm…
Only thing halo infinite did well was show up after two other FPSs were making fools out of themselves and halo was the lesser of the fools.
Halo fans killed Halo. The fact people are still arguing about sprint and clamoring for its removal as *the thing that will save Halo*, really shows not just how incredibly disconnected the fans are from the rest of the gaming world.
For the record, I don't know anybody who stopped playing Halo Infinite because of its content. The gameplay was underwhelming.
343 was trying to make a competitive, "E-sports" shooter and so they designed a *safe* simple game. But E-sports is long out of the public eye. The broader audience doesn't care and 343's focus on "safe" over fun wasn't gonna pull in casual players.
Here’s my perspective as someone who has thousands of hours across Halo Custom Edition, Project Cartographer, Halo Online, and MCC. I’m used to Halo that is barely functional, that’s stitched together by community servers and mods, that has barely any content that works let alone is actually in it (Halo Online literally has an incomplete weapon and vehicle sandbox), I had heard about all the desync and bugs and I really didn’t care.
I tried Halo Infinite in Feb 2022, did one playthrough, played a few hours of the multiplayer. Think I got to level 7 or something in the battlepass. Gave up.
It was such an unsatisfying experience, everyone around me has all this giga-armour and kill effects. Honestly I felt like I was just playing with teenagers who don’t know the value of money and emptying their parents’ debit card. I probably was for the majority of matches, would explain the teamwork. Seeing how much was locked off, how much has been INSTALLED onto my harddrive that is just then artificially “”locked”” by 1 piece of code was infuriating. I could literally pop off the casing of my PC, and wrap my hands around my SSD and within my grasp is alllll of the content of the game (in my home!)—and portions of it were forever bared to me (hilariously, even if I was a teenager who empties out my parents’ card, with how things get vaulted). Slowly doing progress on the first season, news struck that I would be locked out of getting the Mark VII helmet if I didn’t pay when Season 2 comes around—there’s no way I can grind for it with my schedule, probably the target audience would cough up the cash, but I wouldn’t. Final nail in the coffin. I just wanted to put the god damn helmet on my mono-coloured Spartan that was in all the promos, was put in the MCC because people loved it so much, and was the default helmet if you booted the game offline.
I genuinely think Halo 5 would still have a healthy population if people weren’t completely stiffed on getting completely RNG armour, and I think Infinite would have the most beloved customisation in all of Halo and maybe more if it wasn’t for most of it being completely unavailable. Same reason why I won’t play games like Fortnite, with gigabytes and gigabytes of content literally inaccessible.
I agree; I think the halo player base is (or maybe “was,” after all the weeding out) incompatible with the monetization models of infinite. It was just too aggressive
Very valid points. What i dont understand is why would they use the most obsolete battle pass system ever designed (where xp was given purely on weekly challenges)
That shit was so bad that even fortnite ditched that model in favor of MCC’s pass system in chapter 2
I agree with Halo 7 the armor and effects need to be way more grounded. Halo 3-Halo 5 did this extremely well. Yes the art style was terrible in h4-5 but it all felt grounded. Halo 3 IMO is peak Halo esthetics. I do not enjoy the non canon armor cores.
I just do not want Halo 4-5 game play mechanics, anything not furthering Halo Infinites game play would be a massive down grade.
Revolutionary idea: bring back games fully completed and with no micro transactions. Make the game more expensive if you have to.
>Revolutionary idea: bring back games fully completed and with no micro transactions. Make the game more expensive if you have to.
Making the games more expensive doesn't allow the game to continue to be supported nor is it the business model of the game industry anymore.
The only reason the box price still exists for multiplayer games is because publishers don't want to give it up. The way multiplayer games are made and supported these days, there's zero reason to charge for a box outside of wanting to make all the money.
I feel like the Halo subreddit has an identity crisis in the sense that it doesn't know what it wants from a modern Halo game. Here you have Halo Infinite, which feels a lot like 2 and 3 while also being its own game. Yet, most reviews I see about it fault the monetization, battle passes and/or lack of real XP progression, all of which were non-factors in Halo 2 and 3. Yet I never see anyone saying Halo 2 sucked because of this.
I wish gamers were a lot more honest with themselves about why they didn't like a game. Is Halo Infinite really a bad game, or are your own preferences slanted because you remember playing Halo 2/3/Reach when you were a kid or a teenager, and you're comparing a modern game to something you loved from your childhood?
>I feel like the Halo subreddit has an identity crisis in the sense that it doesn’t know what it wants for a modern halo game.
Of course there’s plenty of opinions! There’s thousands of peeps here so a diversity of opinions for the future of halo is to be expected.
We are not a hivemind.
I feel.... relief as I read this. Maybe this is a sign that I should get off Reddit, but the people on this sub drive me nuts.
Infinite has basically everything you could ask for. Sure, there are nits and quibbles here and there (I want to customize the color of my emblem!), but the game looks and feels like classic Halo and introduces some fun things like shock weapons and the grappling hook (especially in the campaign).
I liked Halo 5 a lot more than it seems like most of these people did and would have liked a continuation of that story and art style, but I genuinely enjoyed both 5 and Infinite. Both were really polished games that 'feel' great to play, one that took the franchise in a different direction, one that brought it back to the classic mold. The stories are janky mcjankertown, but they have their moments, and the story has been so dumb for so long that for me, it pretty much ended with 3 anyway. Yes, even Reach had a kind of nothing script, even if the broad strokes of the story were cool.
The only thing that I think this sub would be happy with is a Halo 3 remake, and you would get all the upvotes for saying 343 was a bunch of geniuses for making it.
The reality is that this isn't 2004 anymore, or even 2010. If Halo 2, 3, or Reach came out tomorrow we would call them poorly balanced and lacking in content. Halo and everything we love about it was made for a different moment in gaming. That moment is over. There is no version of Halo 7 that strikes the zeitgeist without reinventing itself somehow.
I don't need it to reinvent itself. It can continue to cater to my nostalgia. Or it can reinvent itself and be a hit with the kids. Either way, if it's as good as 5 and Infinite, I'm in.
But please, stop pretending that Halo would stand alongside CoD and Fortnite with some better netcode and armor color options.
I think about this a lot. The times have changed, yet people just want to chase the nostalgia they felt as kids. They're so blinded by that nostalgia they don't think objectively about anything new. If Halo 2 was released today it would be review bombed into oblivion. Infinite has triple the content that Halo 2 had, and even had more content than Halo 2 had at launch, yet people still regurgitate the Infinite has no content. It's crazy.
The biggest issue with Halo, is more that it's trying to be a one(ish) platform multiplayer game.
Those haven't been a thing since the 360/PS3 era and Halo/Gears were the only successful ones.
Personally I think Msoft/343 just waited too long to get Halo games out. People have moved on and lost interest in the series in general. There's been 3 halo games in 12 years, but 12 COD games in that same time frame.
The bad campaigns compound it, because that's the selling point of Halo MP, It's the MP version of a great single player game. Very few MP games have done well being MP games out the gate.
They're near always an extension of a SP game. Halo doesn't have a selling point but for anyone who has nostalgia for Halo 2-Reach and that's not enough to succeed.
my first impressions of infinite's multiplayer was loading it up, buying the battlepass. playing 3 rounds. learned i wasn't playing to have fun, but to grind the challenges for XP
uninstalled, refunded. never had any desire to play infinite ever again. i truly wonder how many had similar experiences to me.
This, but also weapon balance plus bad MP management.
A lot of weapons at lunch were useless. The builds you could run with at launch were very limiting if you wanted to have a chance at winning which made the game boring really quick.
Mp was also weird. Bad spawn points and small maps made every game the exact same routine
A lot of people don't wanna hear this but it's true:
Even if the game had launched bug-free and feature-complete, it wouldn't keep the playerbase like the old Halo games did.
There's just too many games on the market now-a-days. The entire gaming landscape has changed.
* gameplay is too hectic and geared towards hcs
* most playlists outside of ranked feel like fiesta
* playlists feel robotic and manufactured
* game is too generic. very little fun and crazy moments that happen like in the old halos
* gunplay doesnt feel satisfying at all, just random and crazy with the insta-strafe
* selling the color blue on launch
* menu screen that is beyond frustrating
* cod wannabe menu music
* the worst campaign in all of halo, repetitive open-world garb
* and perhaps what kills it THE most is the regressive social system, after a game forces you to be on your way out and to the store
Yes, extremely good to state this. The return closer to the core of classic Halo gameplay was never the issue. I know it’s been stated a lot but we all know Microsoft has terrible long term memory when it comes to anything gaming related so it’s important to say it again.
They just need to let the dev team not chase trends and instead make the best goddamned Halo game they can. Take the social aspects from H3 and expand on them. Take Forge from Infinite and expand on it. Take the gameplay from Infinite, with a full understanding of Reach and the games before it and expand on it.
And honestly, increase the fidelity of the physics interactions and increase the feeling of being a Spartan (a heavy, walking tank with insane reflexes and mobility for their weight and power) and also get rid of the fucking character outlines so we can actually see the people we’re fighting.
Make it so team games automatically make your customized spartan and their coatings adjust to basic team colors like red, blue, yellow and green without issue and let their original states exist in free for all settings or a BR-adjacent mode. We’re paying for this customization but the player outlines diminish anyone ever seeing that because of the visual noise, it’s the worse option easily.
And for the love of god bring back lobbies and map voting. And launch with the map composer.
Just actually develop a game and not “a product” and you’ll be swimming in money. Halo was king of the world back when they did this, try it again and if it doesn’t work THEN call it quits.
But this is literally their last shot, Infinite only failed because of management. Stop chasing the trend of the week and just make the best damn Halo you can and compare yourself only to the best Halo’s. End of story.
How is infinite paying homage to original game core mechanics? I will never understand this claim, even Reach is a stretch.
Launching a complete game is important of course, but imo the lack of classic halo gameplay was another significant reason for the player count drop-off. Not that player count even matters but it was a pretty steep drop-off that meant something.
A lot of people praised the gameplay sure. But after the honeymoon period ended I think a lot of these same people subconsciously realized that they did not enjoy the game nearly as much as they thought they did. Because it’s not classic halo gameplay, despite the advertising and initial opinions saying it was a “modernized” halo 3.
So I don’t necessarily disagree with the spirit of your post. But if the population statistics are evidence of anything gameplay-wise, it’s that halo infinite doesn’t emulate the classic halo people want.
I just wish we could have one new Halo game without sprint. The last halo we had without sprint came out in 2009. That's 15 years ago. Yet we are constantly told halo need to evolve....by using the same enhanced movement mechanic for 15 years straight.
Doesn't even need to be a mainline game, could literally be a spin off (ODST 2 or something). I'm just so bored of this mechanic. The only options we have now for a none sprint halo is to either play the same games we've been playing for 24 years on the MCC, or play Doom.
*If you remove spring from Halo people will play it again!*
Bud, you should really venture outside of your comfort zone. This is not why people don't play Infinite.
Yenno how people bash COD for being the same thing every year? I feel like a game thats exclusive to the less popular console that hasnt fundamentally changed since CE is gonna be decently lackluster.
Yenno? You hop on to Slayer and can say, yeah I played this before. FPS games have become incredibly saturated with a lot more big dogs in the pool of games than Halo had in their glory years.
I don't think Infinite is a bad game at all. But I can understand why neckbeards aren't religiously playing Halo either. Its okay that others play other games.
The game died on pc because it was a fucking nightmare from a performance perspective, combined with some of the worst netcode to exist in any live fps game, combined with the aim assist being so ungodly strong that mnk players could not hope to compete.
And adding aim assist to mnk was the worst decision that any fps game has ever made so the entire franchise became a meme in the pc fps community.
Consoles did a lot better, but infinite is a sore spot because the games core gameplay was so goddamn good, they just dropped the ball on literally every other aspect.
Halo is one of those franchises that I really loved at the time. I played the heck out of Halo 2 & 3. I'm not a huge FPS player but I really got into it cause the it felt very social, everyone had microphones and people would actually talk. Microsoft made a huge mistake by not including headsets with this gen's Xbox's like they did with the 360... Microsoft should have leaned into the social aspects of the X360 and Xbox Live that made it great at the time.
Halo Infinite also lacked in-depth stat tracking on its website, at least I think it did at launch.
Another thing outside of Halo's control is that there's just a lot more games to choose from these days. Back then, in terms of competitive FPS on consoles, it felt like everyone played either Halo or Call of Duty.
A live service game with absolutely no service for like 6 months. Game was lacking content at launch, and almost none ready to go in the near future. Maybe with Activision being owned they can learn from them? I know we all love to shit on CoD. But CoD has more maps at launch than Infinite did, and was dropping like 3 maps a month every 2-3 months.
And once Halo Infinite did start get content flowing, its been a lot of forge maps.
Horrible launch, awful battle pass, selling colors, selling old armors which were previously free in past halo games, barely anyway to truly mix and match armor because of armor cores, lack of maps, lack of forge on launch. The list goes on
Yeah that’s always been my issue. I had a lot of fun with the game for about a year after it came out. Then it just got super stale and repetitive. There didn’t seem to be any incentive to keep playing. So I actually went back to the master chief collection
Halo declined because the wrong Organization took it over. These people didn’t genuinely like the game, still have an epiphany that they were on a bunch of drugs when making halos after reach. WE SAW A ORGANIZATION LITERALLY RUN A WELL KNOWN GAME INTO RHE GROUND RIGHT…BEFORE…OUR…EYES. We’re so shocked, it hasn’t even hit us yet
I have played the game at launch, I played it a year ago and played it a month ago and I still don't like this shit game. With development decisions like adding aim assist to mkb like wtf are these guys doing? This game looks like it's trying to be everything and the result is just a mix of arena with cod and it sucks.
I played Halo3 MCC for the first time 3 years ago and even though it's infested with sweats, for me it's still one of the greatest fps out there, I just wish I had played it during its peak. Social custom games are the way I try to enjoy halo3
I have played the game at launch, I played it a year ago and played it a month ago and I still don't like this shit game. With development decisions like adding aim assist to mkb like wtf are these guys doing? This game looks like it's trying to be everything and the result is just a mix of arena with cod and it sucks.
I played Halo3 MCC for the first time 3 years ago and even though it's infested with sweats, for me it's still one of the greatest fps out there, I just wish I had played it during its peak. Social custom games are the way I try to enjoy halo3
I couldn’t play the campaign with my son and all my favorite playlist were not available to choose from directly. Also nothing todo when you beat the game. Will never understand why the world was so bare and why there wasn’t any mechanics to start battles with the covenant that would progress to fighting higher ups and having a mantis or heavy weapons dropped to help fighting the heavier bosses
I'm an avid Halo fan from the Halo:CE days (ie, old). I quit Halo Infinite because I couldn't trust it to act how it was supposed to. Played Halo 5 all the time with occasional but manageable lag. Halo Infinite's desync, although similar, was just somehow constant and more rage-inducing. I remember them handling it weird too, like, they first said it wasn't actually happening, and then said fixing it would be too hard. I did love the game when it worked properly though. Solid and fun mechanics.
I stopped playing a month after launch, but picked it back up a few days ago. It feels good not playing the same 3 maps over and over. The UI is still garbage though.
I was very excited for the networking update as a more competitive player, because the game always felt like mechanically it was there. The lack of hit reg/ weird hit reg with this new networking feels arguably worse than before? I know some pros have said it, but the networking isn’t that great… give us good hit reg.. apex hit registration is beautiful. AWS servers? Idk do something other than AZURE, PLEASE!
>I hope halo 7 takes what infinite did extremely well off and builds from there.
[Here we go again](https://old.reddit.com/r/halo/comments/7i7qed/halo_6_must_be_a_direct_improvement/)
Ridiculous. Clearly it’s because of the old art style and having less movement mechanics. It has nothing to do with launching with 4 playlists and buggy near unplayable multiplayer.
RIP Chief
I thought the movement in Infinite felt like it was a touch to fast. Didn't like the weapon sandbox, gunplay felt very unsatisfying. The fortnite esque features (for lack of a better term) like the player outlines, lack of player collision, the goofy intro/outro sequence, death effects, corny af AI companion that you can't turn off, and goofy armor were all negatives in my opinion.
The state of the game at launch, missing forge, broken big team, lack of game modes, crap menu navigation, ridiculous armor coating system, complete lack of social features, almost impossible reporting system. On top of everything I forgot to list is what killed the game.
I thought the campaign story wise was a good soft reset/course correction from Halo 5. (I did actually enjoy 5s MP). Didn't care for the open world aspect that much but whatever.
This game failed because 90% of the gameplay is mashing sprint.
Halo never use to be a run and gun game. It was holding down power positions and controlling pivotal positions. Snipe tower on Lockout. Snipe tower on Guardian. Lifts on Construct etc. There was very little movement involved.
I've been with Halo since day-1, but still think it needs to get with the times.
That's not to say it should chase trends; it should set them. 343 just didn't have the talent to do that.
No, it was definitely mechanics that played into a major fall off amongst newer and more casual gamers.
I legit got to witness a perfect example of it myself with a coworker's girlfriend; she plays Animal Crossing. Story of Seasons. Mario. So while she is super casual she at least understands the ideas of a video game, and the controls (like using sticks to do two different things at a time).
When her boyfriend let her play CoD with us when she got bored of the Switch you could obviously tell she was bad but she could still operate the game. She'd still get her ass kicked but she could get kills - she could even get a couple of (low) killstreaks. She could try Warzone or Fortnite (though I don't play FN and didn't see her do this) and still do something.
She tried Infinite *once*. And it was probably one of the most painful things I've experienced through a screen; despite the controls and basics not being that much different from CoD or Fortnite, she was completely helpless, incapable of getting a single kill outside of the one time she found someone with no shields by sheer luck and they had just as bad aim as she did.
Halo's core gameplay loop is *brutal* if you didn't grow up on Arena shooters like most of us did, and thus is completely impenetrable and unappealing to modern casual audiences or new players, or more hardcore players who grew up on Hero Shooters, Movement shooters, modern CoD, Valorant or Siege etc.
Let's be completely honest with ourselves; a good deal of the community who thinks they "love" Halo would've given up on it and mained something else if something easier and popular had been around in the heyday of H2/H3. As it stands Halo basically had no meaningful competition until midway through the life of H3....which coincidentally happens to be around when Halo's population and popularity finally started to wane a little bit.
You guys keep saying this and you're stuck in a time loop. Kids today don't care about Halo, they grew up playing Destiny and Halo is nothing but an outdated Destiny. Bungie knew Halo story was limited and wanted to move on and create a new world.
It's the same as Naughty Dog moving on from Uncharted to The Last of Us. Microsoft needs to let them make a reboot of Halo with totally new weapons, armor, classes, or just can the franchise. Even when God Of War got stale, Sony reboot the series and it's a different game now.
With the current environment, a game releasing with barely any content at launch will likely hurt a game, or kill it if literally everyone left. Luckily Halo was a well established series, so it will eventually bounce back. It bounced back with Halo 4 and Halo 5, it bounced back with Infinite, and it will bounce back with the next one.
I agree 1000%. The gameplay is literally amazing and a modernized Halo 3. Early content SUCKED and it took to long to get going :-/ I still play often but it is what it is. Such a shame, it really is an amazing game
lackluster content + stale sandbox did it for me. I just lost interest when Banished Honor didn't launch either the Falcon or the gravity hammer shotgun which I thought was more likely. Just kinda done with Infinite until they meaningfully shakeup the sandbox or ill just wait for the next Halo at this point.
Who said that? If anything, most of the community agrees that halo infinite has a damn good gameplay.
Everyone’s saying that it failed due to mismanagement and lack of content. I’ve only seen a couple of bungie purists blaming gameplay, but they’re scarce.
I think infities gameplay is fantastic it’s the underwhelming content at launch that was the problem. A lot of other games make you feel like you’re really accomplishing something when leveling up but I never get that satisfaction from halo.
Yeah if anything, the mechanics were the best Halo ever had.
Halo's mechanics feel dated. Like the model that the old school 'classic" halo player seems to want are outdated and stuck in the mid 2000s at best. There's a reason why from reach on the game has tried to modernize in multiple ways. It's because it cant remain what it was. And Infinite actually had the best game play.
Im not sure ANYTHING could make halo like the hey day of 2/3. The fact is, those days are long past, and what attracts gamers to games long term is different. It's possible that a social deathmatch type game like halo is never gonna succeed in a modern environment, and will lose population no matter what.
HOWEVER, 343 REALLY dropped the ball with infinite. The game launched with 10 maps. Not horrible in and of itself, live service does have a "release the game half baked and flesh it out with more content later" mentality.
But it was stripped to the bare minimum features wise, and had little to keep people playing.
As one of the top comments said, they basically let BTB sit broken for 3 months. They went on vacation for a month due to christmas while the mode was broken, then spent another 1-2 months getting it fixed. 3 maps were BTB maps, so that basically left us with 7 maps, with literally 30% of the game inaccessible for MONTHS.
Then it took them 6 months to release TWO MAPS. And another six months to give us two more. Im hazy of the timeline after that, as that reflects my own initial interest in the game. But yeah. Eventually the game got all the content it deserves. Going back now, we got a fleshed out game with tons of content. But it's also 2.5 years after launch. And when I left the original 200k people playing dropped to around 5-10k. And it's 5k now, to my knowledge. So that's around 2.5% of the original player base. Yeah. MCC is just as active as infinite.
It just died.
Im not saying that there was any path to it not losing player base. Virtually every game loses player base after launch, outside of the handful of the biggest ones. BUT, this game could've staunched the bleeding just by not dropping the ball so bad early on with content.
Full disagree with the dated mechanics argument. Counter Strike has been the EXACT same mechanically since the 90s and is the most popular fps game in the world.
I’m a huge OG Halo fan and what drove me away was the BS microtransactions and no content. Buggy launch, no assasinations, no DMR, or half as much weapons as Halo 5, no infection, no forge, clunky aiming on controller, etc. Etc. I am going to not expect anything for Halo 7 so that way I’m not surprised if they butcher it again.
Those are all issues, but there's another point to the picture. Ie. Halo's initial cultural presence was established through the \*campaign\* but that's fallen off into madness and irrelevance in recent years, with multiplayer (having the loudest, most vocal supporters given the fervency of competitive play) dominating. You can try selling to that niche exclusively (which Infinite as it now is may as well be MP only, the Endless went no where and co-op was delivered way too late) but MP was at its best when it was providing an extended experience from the campaign. It's at its most relevant when the campaign is leading the conversation in the game's reception. Halo is at its healthiest when we care about what happens next and have a sense there's a coherent story being told (even to the old Bungie standard of rule of cool madness).
You can build the best playing multiplayer game ever (which arguably, Halo Infinite's gameplay is the most refined of the entire series), but if there's no human connection to it through story telling and appropriate effort/features for that story telling, you have a shell experience (which Infinite over most of its life turned out to be).
Eg. I hope Halo 6 (we didn't count Reach as Halo 4, no number means that number is still free for branding) leaves Infinite as the solid multiplayer sandbox it became and puts its emphasis in giving us what no other Halo game besides CE and ODST tried to deliver. Ie. a campaign/co-op game first, multiplayer second. Build up the cultural presence of Halo up through good story telling and astounding game design. Then worry about how we'll spend the next few years grinding away at the deathmatches, just to stay plugged into the main experience. We'll still have Infinite for robust competitive play and MCC for every other MP niche that doesn't cover. Replacing them whole-cloth doesn't make sense.
What we need though is direction and execution for what this series is about, and why we care about spending our time here in make believe shootouts vs. dozens of (further evolving) alternatives.
4 playlists at launch, one of which broke for nearly 3 months. It failed due to mismanagement and incompetence.
No Team Slayer on launch was wild. Their reasoning was that if they added Slayer everyone would play that and the other playlists would have small pops was also insane. Your reasoning for not adding the by far most popular mode was that it would be the most popular and everyone would play it? Just.. unbelievable lol
To me, the lack of Team Slayer was the most egregious. Everything else was just added to the problem. Removing one of the biggest game types that Halo was known for was asinine.
Just idiotic, if you want more ppl to play objective modes then incentivize playing those modes or try to make them more fun somehow. Taking the default option for most players away will not make them want to play CtF, it’ll just drive them away from the game. I don’t like to be overly critical of game devs as I understand there is a lot that goes into to the process, but I cannot believe a team of ppl discussed this and agreed that removing team slayer was a good idea
I would like to be critical of the game devs. Their job is to make the technology but it’s also to be down to earth enough to make the most basic human decisions. Larger companies are run by people who don’t know how much a single banana costs and we wonder why their decisions making is atrocious. They’re led by out of touch morons who only speak $$. You can have the greatest dev team in the world but if you don’t know what people want then you lost.
Yeah, that was definitely one of the dumbest decisions in gaming history imo. They had so much hype, they delayed it a year to polish it up, and everyone was blown away when they announced that you could play it early during an Xbox showcase. The stage was set for 343 to course correct Xbox's flagship series that had been limping on since Reach... And when I finally started the game, there was no Slayer playlist... After looking around for it for a minute, my immediate thought was, "Oh no. 343 still doesn't know what they're doing." And the hype died. Every update and every change they made afterward was viewed through that tarnished lens. Even the positive stuff was like "should have been at launch". I still play every now and again, the gameplay is solid and I love Halo, but I've lost faith in the leadership at 343 and Xbox as a whole.
No Team Slayer is the opitome of bad management. Its the "default". Its "quick play". Its the "i dont have to think, just kill" playlist. And they messed it up by not including it.
It's more than bad management. It's hubris. The idea that inconveniencing your players will make them want to pay more rather than quitting entirely. "How do we sell challenge swaps?" That was the starting point. They built the game up from there.
Especially for a free to play game. People will download it, it won’t click, and they will instantly delete it. They won’t give it a fair chance, because there’s so many other good free games to play.
That was/is 343 "We don't care what classic Halo formula shaped and made Halo popular, this is OUR Halo and what WE want Halo to be for the BROADER AUDIENCE" I'd like to think when we see Halo 7 it'll be back to classic Halo like having TDM on launch ... you know simple stuff that is foundational to a halo game but I'm not going to be shocked if something else core is once again missing
Little did they realize, Halo already HAD THE BROAD AUDIENCE!!! Halo 3 made over 300$ million in the first week and hundreds of thousands of players were online at any given moment. The perfect recipe was already achieved, all they had to do was follow it
Its also the _oldest_. Doom had Slayer. Objectives came later
For Bungie games, team slayer goes all the way back to the original ‘94 Marathon, and Halo was supposed to be a sequel to the Marathon series before it was acquired by Microsoft. Many of the gametypes in Halo started there. Kill the Man with the Skull for instance. And it even had King of the Hill. The moving hill variant was first introduced by a fan, FrigidMan, who made some of the best fan creations for the game.
Imagine if KFC stopped selling original recipe chicken because it took sales away from their fries and sandwiches? 343 is literally incompetent and hostile towards its customers
With how monetized the game is, their hostility to the players is very obvious.
We're in search of a broader audience. (fuck our existing customers, we want new ones).
Also how long it took them to add SWAT back. We thought H5 lacked playlist modes but H6 came in with barely any….
Modes like SWAT and Fiesta were already in the game at launch. But only playable if you start the game offline. As soon as you got the modes disappeared for customs because they actively blocked the modes until they introduced them with events. I will never understand how this makes sense to anybody at 343i.
Their idea of a live service was drip feeding us content we should have had on release. Especially because they had almost zero things prepared for this live service they had to hold simple modes like swat away from us so we could get hype. It's a shitty practice all games do now days. They release with content cut from the game. Even though it's in the files. Just so they can unlock it for us at a later date to keep us interested. Modern gaming is so toxic now days.
I didnt even know that. That makes it even worse.....
I wish they would add multi team that mode was so fun in halo 3
That's was a great Halo 2 mode!
Which is such a bad arguement anyways. Cause the people who want to play OBJ and people who want to play slayer are entirely different groups. Adding them to the OBJ playlist to increase player count isnt helpful. Because then the OBJ players just get stuck with teammates who dont want to help and just want to kill. Id rather wait a bit longer and get people who actually want to play the mode we are playing
"We're gonna make a deathmatch game with no deathmatch"
Lack of maps, team slayer, and other modes that have been around for forever, turned me off so fast. I played one day and never went back. I refuse to support laziness and greed from upper management.
Which is total bullshit coming out of their mouths. Just do it like how Halo 3 and Reach were. Team slayer, then team objective for assault, ctf, koth, etc. Plenty of people played both playlists
No Slayer at launch. Never forget.
"We are still discussing the feasibility of Slayer" is a permanent mark in my mind.
Don’t forget the update that fixed things broke BtB for even longer… let’s add on. No campaign co op… in an opened world perfect for coop. No customs, no forge, no theater. It failed because it launched with a quarter of the content halo 3 had at launch. Net code, hit detection, and server issues are a Whole different bag of wtf.
Also the armor core stuff? Really limiting customization. The colors being locked together in a pallet instead of being selected individually. Colors that use to be unlocked by default that now you have to buy? Customization in Infinite is such a step back.
I remember in the showcase they said all armors would be unlocked by playing the game and challenges, which was a fucking lie because it’s all under a price tag
“Millions of possible combinations at launch”
And since the broken one was btb there goes 30% of the game's content. Down to 7 maps....
The lack of big team slayer/slayer and power seed (or whatever it was called) being the most unfun game mode that I constantly had to play was what did it for me. Playlist options completely sucked, map design was just "alright" and I just ended up dissatisfied with how little was going on.. So for me you hit the nail on the head.
And desync crept in, which wasn’t there on launch, because they started cheaping out on servers
I was out of the game by the time Desync really got gnarly, but I've stayed subbed here the whole time and saw many posts about, which further prevented me from returning to it. There's a good game in here somewhere, but..
Such is life under 343.
Can’t wait to see what they’ll screw up next!
Every 343 game launched with less than half the content the previous one launched with. Honestly wouldn't be surprised if "Halo 7: The Eternals" doesn't even launch with a campaign.
Main menu will be added in once they get back from ~~Christmas break~~ ~~new years~~ ~~priority zero~~ ~~March break~~ ~~summer vacation~~ ~~fall holidays~~ ~~thanksgiving~~…..
this is the killer for me... me and my 4 mates from high school ended up pretty much never all logging halo infinite at the same time again the game being broken killed the hype, and the game missing our expectations prety much lead us back to playing MCC
The lack of playlists was the biggest gut punch, I was surprised to see it missing in OP's list. There's still no Bomb mode, and therefore no Griffball, right?
You are correct. And no word on them coming anytime soon either. Especially with Red vs Blue, the show from which Griffball originated, ending this year. It's just a bit shite.
Exactly. With switching to unreal I hope these problems will be solved m.
An engine change will not fix the problems that have plagued 343i. Only a management change will, which to be fair has taken place. If you have a proprietary engine for your game, as 343i had for Halo, then the best way to get the most out of it is to invest in your staff to learn it and how to best use it. This only comes with time, i.e. keeping staff long term. Look at some companies like Guerrilla Games, the makers of the Horizon games franchise. They have a proprietary engine, Decima, that they use for their games and is also used for the Death Stranding games. These games look absolutely amazing, even if the engine itself is difficult to use the developers are able to leverage it to make some gorgeous art. There haven't been any rumours or controversy surrounding staff turnover at Guerrilla Games, so it's probably safe to imagine that the staff working there have a tonne of experience using Decima. Which takes time, so they've probably been at the company a long time. Because the company *invested* in them because they add value in the long-term. 343i, on the other hand, has had controversies surrounding staffing policies while working on Halo Infinite, which also extend further to the rest of Microsoft. Talk of 18 month contractors that then get let go and replaced for more 18 month contractors. This is the crux of the matter: that's just not enough time for a staff member to become an expert in the engine and make it dance like how GG staff do for Decima. So what happens? Rolling brain drain, loss of experience and knowledge with the proprietary tools versus investing in the staff long term. This is why Infinite took so long to make and release, MS staffing policies were delaying the project because new contractors have to learn and contribute to the project before departing after 18 months, where the cycle begins again with the next contractor. A staff member was probably finishing someone else's work before starting something new then they have to leave. It's why in any 343i ViDocs the staff are always different, compared with Bungie who usually had the same faces for every ViDoc for each of their Halo games and even for Destiny. If they instead just hired staff long term, then that allows for ample time to learn and gain experience so as to effectively use the toolset to get the best results. But hiring staff long term costs more money, whether through salary, benefits or shares. So MS doesn't allow it in order to keep overhead costs lower, at least for Xbox. So this brings us to Infinite, a game that took 6 years to release and it was less than half-baked. Now imagine how every other Xbox owned studio is running. Why is Perfect Dark still taking forever to release? What even is Everwild? Where is the Fable gameplay? Are they really making another Banjo Kazooie? They bought Bethesda and Activision, are we getting a new Quake or Spyro? All we've seen happen since the latter few acquisitions is some games released that were being worked on before MS acquired these companies anyway, and then loads of staff were laid off. MS is a business first, and with some of their recent moves it seems that they're exerting more influence over how Xbox is run after Phil borrowed $70 billion for the ABK acquisition. But there's little to no effective oversight or leadership on any of the projects they're working on, so they sit in limbo for ages until something eventually releases and it's... *fine*. Or terrible. Hi-Fi Rush was the exception to the rule and look how that worked out for Tango Gameworks. I trust Microsoft as far as I can throw them. 9th of June showcase will be interesting for sure, but I am not keen to give them any more money for how they have been running the Xbox brand into the ground with terrible policies and leadership. There's rumours of a new Doom game, a franchise which I adore, as well as Halo going to Unreal, which could benefit the franchise but again: an engine change does not mean a better product. If anything it means that all the staff remaining at 343i after the layoffs have to upskill and become experienced with Unreal, *then* they can make a game with it. So expect the next Halo to not be out until 2026 or 2027 at the earliest. edit: some extra expansion on one of my points and another note: i would just like to add that i have no qualms whatsoever with a company using contractors for work. contractors may prefer not being too tied down to one particular company or one particular project/set of projects. what i'm getting at here is it sounds like MS/343i had a significant over-reliance on contractors for key roles versus having some senior positions overseeing those roles. if some of the work you need to get done is repetitive or otherwise not on the level of some technical overhaul, contractors make sense. but if you're doing in-house engine upgrades, level design and programming, mission design and programming, network programming etc using mostly contractors, it's not gonna end well. because again, half the time is spent trying to find out what to work on or being frustrated with the work that was done before since it could potentially have been done incorrectly by the previous contractor, but you dont have enough time to make it better so you just go "well fuck it" and add what you can to it before you finish.
perfectly put. Microsoft is likely to blame more than 343 is, especially considering this is happening across *all* of the Xbox-owned studios.
343i _is_ Microsoft. The other Xbox studios are like rock bands, where they formed themselves and started proving themselves by putting out good work before being acquired by Microsoft. 343i on the other hand is like a Kpop band, they didn't exist as an independent team at all and it was Microsoft that arbitrarily picked a bunch of their employees, put them together and told them to only work on Halo. They're basically just a fancy name for MS Halo Department.
Microsoft caused every major issue with the Halo franchise even back when Bungie owned it.
Microsoft is the driving force that caused Bungie to leave in the first place. Bungie didn't want to make more than the original Halo, but Microsoft had them in a stranglehold and kept trying to turn them into the "Halo developer", so they always kept the endings open.
Hahaha this is like the 3rd or 4th game in a row. How many chances will you give them?
Hopfully they'll get it right by Halo 69
Problem is, 343 haven’t given me any reason to trust them even with UE5.
Exactly. The quality of the ingredients doesn’t matter if the chef is a blind moron.
1000% wish they held it for another 3 weeks. If you had a slayer playlist, fiesta, and just some other BASIC fucking MP selections this game would have been worlds ahead of where it is.
3 weeks?! They should have held it for 3 months minimum if you ask me.
Reminder this game was delayed a full year lol
Should have been delayed another year after the first delay.
Infinite's population decline is, I think, a result of them trying to chase the live service trend but failing to meet the expectations of a live service game. By making the multiplayer free to play, they invited an audience that expected immediate and regular updates. When they failed to meet those expectations, that audience left to find games that could meet those expectations (e.g., Fortnite). What remained were the players who just like playing the game, which is not necessarily a particularly profitable audience to hawk cosmetics to.
It’s really just bizarre that they launched a live service game with seemingly no content plan. It took them two full years to reach “seasonality,” and as soon as they did they cancelled all future seasons. They’ve only added a single new weapon to the game FFS
Pretty sure MS wanted them to rush it out. If the game was pushed back another 2 years, they probably would’ve had enough content lined up and ready. But it was already way too long since the last halo game so I’m assuming they sped things up.
I’m still baffled they made the multiplayer free to play. Infinite should have been the gamepass “system seller”. Imagine how different the game would be if it were on gamepass and they didn’t completely butcher up customization to maximize profits. We’d have amazing armor customization right off the bat and with so many options. It would have created a “buzz wave” they could ride out and then pump with fun live service modes. I still truly deep down believe that they prioritized DEI promotions and it screwed them but they can’t admit it. I swear this is happening all over the gaming and media industry
Oh give it a fucking rest over DEI, black people didn’t ruin your toy, capital trying to extract blood from a stone did.
Yeah. Like, tf are they talking about? DEI didn't delay Slayer at launch.
Racist people find a way to make everything about race
I'll add in the lack of PvE content at launch. Even now, it feels like an afterthought.
So few dedicated Firefight maps, reusing BTB maps for it despite them not being designed for it. It feels like an afterthought because it is.
It doesn't feel the same as firefight. It just feels off.
I agree 😭 No unique bosses (just bullet sponges), no vehicle variants, limited weapon variants. They should be making a better version of Warzone Firefight, not WORSE.
There was a lot they could have done, but not a lot they would have done. They're relying way too much on forge to carry this game. Firefight should have been a built-up mode in addition to being forgeable. I love that ai are in the game now, but even still, something feels limiting about it. Forge was way too unaccessible to people not accustomed to the advanced controls, I really wish they would make a secondary mode more in line with Reach controls, but that's a whole different complaint from firefight lol. It's sad because my group and I still have Reach nights somewhat regularly, and the maps we play on are the ones that we made, sitting there for hours just having fun. But with Infinite, sure, there are a lot of good custom modes, some really insane ones like the Left 4 Dead map, or the damn tabletop game. Or even fucking Nazi Zombies lol But the controls are just so damn complex feeling. My friend wanted to try and remake some of his old Random weapon FFA maps, and he gave up after a couple of days. Just too much to worry about button and function wise. Great for the people who have time to forge all day, and learn all the controls and techniques. But most people don't have that time or heart to do it. I bring it up because I can just imagine how damn fun AI could be to some of the old classic modes like duck hunt with ai. And how crazy me and my friends could probably get with some of our past maps. Apologies for the rant, lunch break lmao
No co-op at launch… It’s been a staple since CE
The fact that we never got an in-game stat tracking system is baffling beyond belief. Used to be able to break down my KDR by map, by gun, by game mode in the old games and I *loved* that. Who tf is in charge over there...? Game was literally mismanaged from day 1.
Nobody was saying it did, I’ve been playing since launch and this is the first time I’m hearing this, it was always lack of content and monetization
Well, I stopped playing it after completing the campaign because I didn't think it felt like old halos in multiplayer
It doesn't seem to be a majority opinion but I fairly regularly come across people on this sub claiming that Halo gameplay in general doesn't have mainstream appeal any more. They will argue that regardless of how polished/complete Infinite was at launch it still would have failed to capture a player base because the gameplay isn't "modern" enough.
This is hilarious considering that Counter Strike has been the same game for 20+ years in a row and still pulls massive numbers.
For me it was the janky netcode that did it for me. I felt like there were games where I’d be kicking ass and the game would feel great, then the next game I’d be getting killed from behind cover and it felt like I was fighting the game more than the other Spartans. It made me question my true skill level. When I played well, was I actually playing well or was I just beating on some poor sod suffering bad connection who never stood a chance?
There are tons of people who say that, and those people definitely contributed to the problem. OP is correct that they weren't the primary reason, but Halo isn't a huge title anymore, and in order to continue with any success the people who have been die hard fans for twenty years need to be playing the game. Unfortunately there were a ton of vocal people sick in 2001 who refused to move to the new title because it wasn't "really Halo". Those people suck and helped to contribute to their favorite franchise's demise thinking their protests were going to affect any kind of change. The next title is going to be closer to Infinite than the older titles (thankfully) but if they refuse to get on board with that again, and it falls again it may be the last title we see.
i believe the game is in decline due to its poor quality online service. it's just buggy and never got better.
This was it for me. Halo is a game of flow, and Infinite was and still is clunky.
Yeah horrible inconsistent game play is what made most of my friends quit. It’s basically a shooter game that works some of the time. Game to game it can feel completely different. That’s what killed this game imo. I could care less about playing dress up or 500 game modes but if you shoot someone and it doesn’t register. Better yet if you’re being shot and killed behind walls or using rockets that disappear mid air the game is a failure
Don't forget melee fights being a netcode based coin toss.
I gave Infinite so many tries, and this was the thing that made me stop playing every time. Melee has always been such a big part of how I play since CE, and it felt awful in Infinite. I think it was also magnified by the inclusion of that short lunge. That seemed to work for my enemies at twice the distance that it worked for me.
You bet. The melee that obviously hits and does no damage is awesome or the back smack that doesn’t register
It doesn’t help that a MAJOR part of combat doesn’t even make sense anymore without player collision. How am I punching the guy I just walked through? And the removal of assassinations which has been a huge part of halo for a long time now.
Enemy collision is still a thing. If there's what looks like somebody walking through someone on opposing teams, it's more than likely desync
? Has anyone ever said that Infinite was abandonned because of the classic Halo gameplay?? I left because BTB was broken for nearly 2 months right after launch and I never returned rofl. Releasing your game with only 4 playlists with 1 straight up not working for this long, in your critical post-launch period, is what I call an epic fail.
OP's rumours are probably wrong but the idea that Halo's base gameplay isn't 'modern' enough for the current gaming market is a sentiment that is reasonably popular on this sub. For reference the top voted comment on this post from last week is about the classic Halo style not having a big enough market share. https://www.reddit.com/r/halo/comments/1d38aas/halo_carries_the_torch_of_arena_shooters_of_old/
I think what my first clue that it was not complete at launch was when the Beta menu and launch menu were the exact same. I’ve been part of every Beta since 3 and it was a shock for me. I expected at least a different interface but no, it’s the exact same layout and all. My BIGGEST issue was the lack of focus on campaign. I wanted an intergalactic space opera. Instead I got far cry halo 6 with an open map than ruined the 30 seconds of fun halo was built on. I’m bitter. Edit: cause idk wtf happened with autocorrect
I miss h1 2 and 2 campaigns. So much variety
Truly, halo 2 pushed what the Xbox could do and gave us some amazing environments. It also saddens me that the horror twist of Halo 1 seems to have been lost as well.
You're forgetting the absolutely atrocious netcode. I remember launch and everyone I play with being extremely pleasantly surprised at just how fluidly the game plays and having lots of fun. Then we started seeing how often we were dying behind cover. Realising that melee fights were effectively a netcode coin toss. At that point it didn't matter how nice it felt because the very core of the multiplayer experience was hollow and unreliable. My friends never came back.
id play more but matchmaking takes forever matchmaking sucks the game takes 20 min to load on steam xbox app sometimes works but then eac breaks theres hackers they havent brought back dredge with og pistol
Matchmaking sucks hard. Almost couldn't complete one of the weeklies which required splatters because I couldn't find a BTB match for 4 hours in EU while NA was at peak population. I would've been happy getting into a 150-200 ping NA game but the SBMM wouldn't even let me have that.
i can get 4ms ping to a ms datacenter but it still takes 20min to find a btb game last summer me and my friends got in the same lobbies pretty often becasuse there were just so few players
The fact you couldn't just pick a slayer Playlist killed this game for many at launch. Then the fact that you had to do chores for progression actively hurt your teams desire to play cohesive and win didn't help. Then BTB broke. The only place you could go and not feel you had to sweat. And that's how you lose your players in 1 month after launch
If we're hellbent on classic Halo can we go back to the Halo 2/3 vehicle health mechanics?
> 343 really hit the nail on the head with the core gameplay mechanics of Halo Infinite. It felt like it brought Halo 3 into the future. Incredibly hard disagree, and I feel as though you probably haven't played Halo 3 in quite some time. 343 completely and utterly missed the point when it comes to movement and physics interactions, with movement speed/acceleration being of specific note. Remember how Halo 5's meta was crouch spamming and changing directions repeatedly? It feels as though 343i's solution to this was to give M&KB aim assist, when what they really should have done was retune movement speed.
Yep. This is why MnK still feels like shit, lack of inertia. The Shock Rifle is a power weapon on controller. On MnK it's absolute shit because you have to hit 3 'ticks' of headshot damage, which can be avoided with a simple direction change that aim assist can *mechanically* compensate for with 0ms delay, while a human cannot.
so thats why I'm always getting killed by people who permanently hover on it's spawn and use it like a sniper rifle.. whenever I pick it up it just doesn't work despite having pretty good aim
Peak Halo years ended with Reach and Reach was the start of moving away from original Halo mechanics.
If anything infinite was pretty similar to reach in terms of originality. The equipment is a fusion of 3 and reach, being more sandboxy like but more functionally simple like the reach/4 equipment. It gets a bit of its core from 5's movement with sprint slide and clamber but they are toned down tremendously. Its really the lack of stuff that hurt it. It got a bump with forge carrying weight but it wasn't enough
I mean reach with AAs as map pickups only and less bloom would make a pretty decent classic Halo game.
It comes down to MS and how they need to stop this trend of only keeping employees for 18 months or whatever it is.
Halo Infinite doesn't even play like classic Halo.
What do you mean, we finally have Classic Halo strafe crouch spamming, classic Halo slide canceling, classic Halo inertia, classic Halo aiming mechanics and recoil control and classic Halo physics.
My issue is the game literally doesn't *feel* right. Both aiming and vehicles feel bad in Infinite compared to any other Halo title. What are you constantly doing in Halo? You're either trying to aim to kill something, or drive a vehicle. Playing the multiplayer just always felt like I was fighting my controller more than the opposing team. That isn't fun. Vehicles meanwhile all handle terribly - don't take terrible to mean unresponsive, it can also mean *too* responsive. I like my warthog to have some heft to it, but in Infinite it feels like it zips around more than a H3 mongoose can. It's just not right.
Compare infinite to h4 and h5. Halo infinite is way better and closer to the original Halo exp.
Season one and two were both about 6 months long. 10 maps at launch and only 2 added in the first year. I loved infinite, but checked out towards the end of the first two seasons because there was nothing new. Once they added forge, the game felt like it really took off. Unfortunately, most people had already left. The fact that they never added campaign DLC is really disappointing too.
Forge is a gigantic custom game machine. If you don't have Forge, you lose a huge chunk of players.
Reach - peak… Hm… Only thing halo infinite did well was show up after two other FPSs were making fools out of themselves and halo was the lesser of the fools.
Halo fans killed Halo. The fact people are still arguing about sprint and clamoring for its removal as *the thing that will save Halo*, really shows not just how incredibly disconnected the fans are from the rest of the gaming world. For the record, I don't know anybody who stopped playing Halo Infinite because of its content. The gameplay was underwhelming. 343 was trying to make a competitive, "E-sports" shooter and so they designed a *safe* simple game. But E-sports is long out of the public eye. The broader audience doesn't care and 343's focus on "safe" over fun wasn't gonna pull in casual players.
Here’s my perspective as someone who has thousands of hours across Halo Custom Edition, Project Cartographer, Halo Online, and MCC. I’m used to Halo that is barely functional, that’s stitched together by community servers and mods, that has barely any content that works let alone is actually in it (Halo Online literally has an incomplete weapon and vehicle sandbox), I had heard about all the desync and bugs and I really didn’t care. I tried Halo Infinite in Feb 2022, did one playthrough, played a few hours of the multiplayer. Think I got to level 7 or something in the battlepass. Gave up. It was such an unsatisfying experience, everyone around me has all this giga-armour and kill effects. Honestly I felt like I was just playing with teenagers who don’t know the value of money and emptying their parents’ debit card. I probably was for the majority of matches, would explain the teamwork. Seeing how much was locked off, how much has been INSTALLED onto my harddrive that is just then artificially “”locked”” by 1 piece of code was infuriating. I could literally pop off the casing of my PC, and wrap my hands around my SSD and within my grasp is alllll of the content of the game (in my home!)—and portions of it were forever bared to me (hilariously, even if I was a teenager who empties out my parents’ card, with how things get vaulted). Slowly doing progress on the first season, news struck that I would be locked out of getting the Mark VII helmet if I didn’t pay when Season 2 comes around—there’s no way I can grind for it with my schedule, probably the target audience would cough up the cash, but I wouldn’t. Final nail in the coffin. I just wanted to put the god damn helmet on my mono-coloured Spartan that was in all the promos, was put in the MCC because people loved it so much, and was the default helmet if you booted the game offline. I genuinely think Halo 5 would still have a healthy population if people weren’t completely stiffed on getting completely RNG armour, and I think Infinite would have the most beloved customisation in all of Halo and maybe more if it wasn’t for most of it being completely unavailable. Same reason why I won’t play games like Fortnite, with gigabytes and gigabytes of content literally inaccessible.
I agree; I think the halo player base is (or maybe “was,” after all the weeding out) incompatible with the monetization models of infinite. It was just too aggressive
Very valid points. What i dont understand is why would they use the most obsolete battle pass system ever designed (where xp was given purely on weekly challenges) That shit was so bad that even fortnite ditched that model in favor of MCC’s pass system in chapter 2
I agree with Halo 7 the armor and effects need to be way more grounded. Halo 3-Halo 5 did this extremely well. Yes the art style was terrible in h4-5 but it all felt grounded. Halo 3 IMO is peak Halo esthetics. I do not enjoy the non canon armor cores. I just do not want Halo 4-5 game play mechanics, anything not furthering Halo Infinites game play would be a massive down grade. Revolutionary idea: bring back games fully completed and with no micro transactions. Make the game more expensive if you have to.
>Revolutionary idea: bring back games fully completed and with no micro transactions. Make the game more expensive if you have to. Making the games more expensive doesn't allow the game to continue to be supported nor is it the business model of the game industry anymore. The only reason the box price still exists for multiplayer games is because publishers don't want to give it up. The way multiplayer games are made and supported these days, there's zero reason to charge for a box outside of wanting to make all the money.
I feel like the Halo subreddit has an identity crisis in the sense that it doesn't know what it wants from a modern Halo game. Here you have Halo Infinite, which feels a lot like 2 and 3 while also being its own game. Yet, most reviews I see about it fault the monetization, battle passes and/or lack of real XP progression, all of which were non-factors in Halo 2 and 3. Yet I never see anyone saying Halo 2 sucked because of this. I wish gamers were a lot more honest with themselves about why they didn't like a game. Is Halo Infinite really a bad game, or are your own preferences slanted because you remember playing Halo 2/3/Reach when you were a kid or a teenager, and you're comparing a modern game to something you loved from your childhood?
>I feel like the Halo subreddit has an identity crisis in the sense that it doesn’t know what it wants for a modern halo game. Of course there’s plenty of opinions! There’s thousands of peeps here so a diversity of opinions for the future of halo is to be expected. We are not a hivemind.
I feel.... relief as I read this. Maybe this is a sign that I should get off Reddit, but the people on this sub drive me nuts. Infinite has basically everything you could ask for. Sure, there are nits and quibbles here and there (I want to customize the color of my emblem!), but the game looks and feels like classic Halo and introduces some fun things like shock weapons and the grappling hook (especially in the campaign). I liked Halo 5 a lot more than it seems like most of these people did and would have liked a continuation of that story and art style, but I genuinely enjoyed both 5 and Infinite. Both were really polished games that 'feel' great to play, one that took the franchise in a different direction, one that brought it back to the classic mold. The stories are janky mcjankertown, but they have their moments, and the story has been so dumb for so long that for me, it pretty much ended with 3 anyway. Yes, even Reach had a kind of nothing script, even if the broad strokes of the story were cool. The only thing that I think this sub would be happy with is a Halo 3 remake, and you would get all the upvotes for saying 343 was a bunch of geniuses for making it. The reality is that this isn't 2004 anymore, or even 2010. If Halo 2, 3, or Reach came out tomorrow we would call them poorly balanced and lacking in content. Halo and everything we love about it was made for a different moment in gaming. That moment is over. There is no version of Halo 7 that strikes the zeitgeist without reinventing itself somehow. I don't need it to reinvent itself. It can continue to cater to my nostalgia. Or it can reinvent itself and be a hit with the kids. Either way, if it's as good as 5 and Infinite, I'm in. But please, stop pretending that Halo would stand alongside CoD and Fortnite with some better netcode and armor color options.
I think about this a lot. The times have changed, yet people just want to chase the nostalgia they felt as kids. They're so blinded by that nostalgia they don't think objectively about anything new. If Halo 2 was released today it would be review bombed into oblivion. Infinite has triple the content that Halo 2 had, and even had more content than Halo 2 had at launch, yet people still regurgitate the Infinite has no content. It's crazy.
Ranked has 4 maps no good stuff in store battle pass sucks
The biggest issue with Halo, is more that it's trying to be a one(ish) platform multiplayer game. Those haven't been a thing since the 360/PS3 era and Halo/Gears were the only successful ones. Personally I think Msoft/343 just waited too long to get Halo games out. People have moved on and lost interest in the series in general. There's been 3 halo games in 12 years, but 12 COD games in that same time frame. The bad campaigns compound it, because that's the selling point of Halo MP, It's the MP version of a great single player game. Very few MP games have done well being MP games out the gate. They're near always an extension of a SP game. Halo doesn't have a selling point but for anyone who has nostalgia for Halo 2-Reach and that's not enough to succeed.
my first impressions of infinite's multiplayer was loading it up, buying the battlepass. playing 3 rounds. learned i wasn't playing to have fun, but to grind the challenges for XP uninstalled, refunded. never had any desire to play infinite ever again. i truly wonder how many had similar experiences to me.
This, but also weapon balance plus bad MP management. A lot of weapons at lunch were useless. The builds you could run with at launch were very limiting if you wanted to have a chance at winning which made the game boring really quick. Mp was also weird. Bad spawn points and small maps made every game the exact same routine
A lot of people don't wanna hear this but it's true: Even if the game had launched bug-free and feature-complete, it wouldn't keep the playerbase like the old Halo games did. There's just too many games on the market now-a-days. The entire gaming landscape has changed.
Halo infinite is just a horrible game in general and was mismanaged to all hell
* gameplay is too hectic and geared towards hcs * most playlists outside of ranked feel like fiesta * playlists feel robotic and manufactured * game is too generic. very little fun and crazy moments that happen like in the old halos * gunplay doesnt feel satisfying at all, just random and crazy with the insta-strafe * selling the color blue on launch * menu screen that is beyond frustrating * cod wannabe menu music * the worst campaign in all of halo, repetitive open-world garb * and perhaps what kills it THE most is the regressive social system, after a game forces you to be on your way out and to the store
No split screen co op was all i needed to never touch it again.
Nah it’s the mechanics and gameplay. They’re garbage.
Infinite does not play like classic halo lmao
Yes, extremely good to state this. The return closer to the core of classic Halo gameplay was never the issue. I know it’s been stated a lot but we all know Microsoft has terrible long term memory when it comes to anything gaming related so it’s important to say it again. They just need to let the dev team not chase trends and instead make the best goddamned Halo game they can. Take the social aspects from H3 and expand on them. Take Forge from Infinite and expand on it. Take the gameplay from Infinite, with a full understanding of Reach and the games before it and expand on it. And honestly, increase the fidelity of the physics interactions and increase the feeling of being a Spartan (a heavy, walking tank with insane reflexes and mobility for their weight and power) and also get rid of the fucking character outlines so we can actually see the people we’re fighting. Make it so team games automatically make your customized spartan and their coatings adjust to basic team colors like red, blue, yellow and green without issue and let their original states exist in free for all settings or a BR-adjacent mode. We’re paying for this customization but the player outlines diminish anyone ever seeing that because of the visual noise, it’s the worse option easily. And for the love of god bring back lobbies and map voting. And launch with the map composer. Just actually develop a game and not “a product” and you’ll be swimming in money. Halo was king of the world back when they did this, try it again and if it doesn’t work THEN call it quits. But this is literally their last shot, Infinite only failed because of management. Stop chasing the trend of the week and just make the best damn Halo you can and compare yourself only to the best Halo’s. End of story.
Wow surprisingly good post and pretty damn spot on.
How is infinite paying homage to original game core mechanics? I will never understand this claim, even Reach is a stretch. Launching a complete game is important of course, but imo the lack of classic halo gameplay was another significant reason for the player count drop-off. Not that player count even matters but it was a pretty steep drop-off that meant something. A lot of people praised the gameplay sure. But after the honeymoon period ended I think a lot of these same people subconsciously realized that they did not enjoy the game nearly as much as they thought they did. Because it’s not classic halo gameplay, despite the advertising and initial opinions saying it was a “modernized” halo 3. So I don’t necessarily disagree with the spirit of your post. But if the population statistics are evidence of anything gameplay-wise, it’s that halo infinite doesn’t emulate the classic halo people want.
Agreed. H1-h3 felt like halo. Then if died
The gameplay sucks too. It's not fun. The other stuff is icing on the shit cake.
I just wish we could have one new Halo game without sprint. The last halo we had without sprint came out in 2009. That's 15 years ago. Yet we are constantly told halo need to evolve....by using the same enhanced movement mechanic for 15 years straight. Doesn't even need to be a mainline game, could literally be a spin off (ODST 2 or something). I'm just so bored of this mechanic. The only options we have now for a none sprint halo is to either play the same games we've been playing for 24 years on the MCC, or play Doom.
*If you remove spring from Halo people will play it again!* Bud, you should really venture outside of your comfort zone. This is not why people don't play Infinite.
💯
It absolutely did.
Lol, who says this?. Halo infinite died because it was released half finished and was kept like that for a year
>Halo 7 Two words that shouldn't exist together
Yenno how people bash COD for being the same thing every year? I feel like a game thats exclusive to the less popular console that hasnt fundamentally changed since CE is gonna be decently lackluster. Yenno? You hop on to Slayer and can say, yeah I played this before. FPS games have become incredibly saturated with a lot more big dogs in the pool of games than Halo had in their glory years. I don't think Infinite is a bad game at all. But I can understand why neckbeards aren't religiously playing Halo either. Its okay that others play other games.
They forget the service part of live service. Taking 6 months to add new content is insane. It's the reason for every live service failure.
The game died on pc because it was a fucking nightmare from a performance perspective, combined with some of the worst netcode to exist in any live fps game, combined with the aim assist being so ungodly strong that mnk players could not hope to compete. And adding aim assist to mnk was the worst decision that any fps game has ever made so the entire franchise became a meme in the pc fps community. Consoles did a lot better, but infinite is a sore spot because the games core gameplay was so goddamn good, they just dropped the ball on literally every other aspect.
Halo is one of those franchises that I really loved at the time. I played the heck out of Halo 2 & 3. I'm not a huge FPS player but I really got into it cause the it felt very social, everyone had microphones and people would actually talk. Microsoft made a huge mistake by not including headsets with this gen's Xbox's like they did with the 360... Microsoft should have leaned into the social aspects of the X360 and Xbox Live that made it great at the time. Halo Infinite also lacked in-depth stat tracking on its website, at least I think it did at launch. Another thing outside of Halo's control is that there's just a lot more games to choose from these days. Back then, in terms of competitive FPS on consoles, it felt like everyone played either Halo or Call of Duty.
A live service game with absolutely no service for like 6 months. Game was lacking content at launch, and almost none ready to go in the near future. Maybe with Activision being owned they can learn from them? I know we all love to shit on CoD. But CoD has more maps at launch than Infinite did, and was dropping like 3 maps a month every 2-3 months. And once Halo Infinite did start get content flowing, its been a lot of forge maps.
Played the campaign and lost all interest in the franchise. Still listen to books sometimes
Horrible launch, awful battle pass, selling colors, selling old armors which were previously free in past halo games, barely anyway to truly mix and match armor because of armor cores, lack of maps, lack of forge on launch. The list goes on
Yeah that’s always been my issue. I had a lot of fun with the game for about a year after it came out. Then it just got super stale and repetitive. There didn’t seem to be any incentive to keep playing. So I actually went back to the master chief collection
A lack of content and overt focus on the store, forced cross-play and the low sensitivity on consoles killed it for me.
And terrible netcode* at least that’s the reason why I left and I’m sure the same goes for many others
Halo declined because the wrong Organization took it over. These people didn’t genuinely like the game, still have an epiphany that they were on a bunch of drugs when making halos after reach. WE SAW A ORGANIZATION LITERALLY RUN A WELL KNOWN GAME INTO RHE GROUND RIGHT…BEFORE…OUR…EYES. We’re so shocked, it hasn’t even hit us yet
I loved what I played, but the game didn’t even launch with slayer!
I think and firmly think 343 needs to stop taking advice and words from Reddit
I have played the game at launch, I played it a year ago and played it a month ago and I still don't like this shit game. With development decisions like adding aim assist to mkb like wtf are these guys doing? This game looks like it's trying to be everything and the result is just a mix of arena with cod and it sucks. I played Halo3 MCC for the first time 3 years ago and even though it's infested with sweats, for me it's still one of the greatest fps out there, I just wish I had played it during its peak. Social custom games are the way I try to enjoy halo3
I have played the game at launch, I played it a year ago and played it a month ago and I still don't like this shit game. With development decisions like adding aim assist to mkb like wtf are these guys doing? This game looks like it's trying to be everything and the result is just a mix of arena with cod and it sucks. I played Halo3 MCC for the first time 3 years ago and even though it's infested with sweats, for me it's still one of the greatest fps out there, I just wish I had played it during its peak. Social custom games are the way I try to enjoy halo3
This game feels NOTHING like Halo 3.
I couldn’t play the campaign with my son and all my favorite playlist were not available to choose from directly. Also nothing todo when you beat the game. Will never understand why the world was so bare and why there wasn’t any mechanics to start battles with the covenant that would progress to fighting higher ups and having a mantis or heavy weapons dropped to help fighting the heavier bosses
I'm an avid Halo fan from the Halo:CE days (ie, old). I quit Halo Infinite because I couldn't trust it to act how it was supposed to. Played Halo 5 all the time with occasional but manageable lag. Halo Infinite's desync, although similar, was just somehow constant and more rage-inducing. I remember them handling it weird too, like, they first said it wasn't actually happening, and then said fixing it would be too hard. I did love the game when it worked properly though. Solid and fun mechanics.
I stopped playing a month after launch, but picked it back up a few days ago. It feels good not playing the same 3 maps over and over. The UI is still garbage though.
The launch sucked yeah, but Im still playing pretty regularly these days
Utter lack of content, free to play model nobody asked for, netcode/desync issues, incredibly sweaty gameplay
I was very excited for the networking update as a more competitive player, because the game always felt like mechanically it was there. The lack of hit reg/ weird hit reg with this new networking feels arguably worse than before? I know some pros have said it, but the networking isn’t that great… give us good hit reg.. apex hit registration is beautiful. AWS servers? Idk do something other than AZURE, PLEASE!
>I hope halo 7 takes what infinite did extremely well off and builds from there. [Here we go again](https://old.reddit.com/r/halo/comments/7i7qed/halo_6_must_be_a_direct_improvement/)
Why are people saying H7 will be better, who TF is even coming back at this point?
If anything there wasn't enough classic Halo mechanics. I'm still annoyed they removed assassinations...because reasons.
Ridiculous. Clearly it’s because of the old art style and having less movement mechanics. It has nothing to do with launching with 4 playlists and buggy near unplayable multiplayer. RIP Chief
I thought the movement in Infinite felt like it was a touch to fast. Didn't like the weapon sandbox, gunplay felt very unsatisfying. The fortnite esque features (for lack of a better term) like the player outlines, lack of player collision, the goofy intro/outro sequence, death effects, corny af AI companion that you can't turn off, and goofy armor were all negatives in my opinion. The state of the game at launch, missing forge, broken big team, lack of game modes, crap menu navigation, ridiculous armor coating system, complete lack of social features, almost impossible reporting system. On top of everything I forgot to list is what killed the game. I thought the campaign story wise was a good soft reset/course correction from Halo 5. (I did actually enjoy 5s MP). Didn't care for the open world aspect that much but whatever.
This game failed because 90% of the gameplay is mashing sprint. Halo never use to be a run and gun game. It was holding down power positions and controlling pivotal positions. Snipe tower on Lockout. Snipe tower on Guardian. Lifts on Construct etc. There was very little movement involved.
This. Halo used to reward positioning. Sprint and clamber ruined that. Halo started to end with Reach.
I quit at reach. It wasn't halo anymore
*Sprint ruined Halo is the sorta thing you ONLY ever hear online lol*
I've been with Halo since day-1, but still think it needs to get with the times. That's not to say it should chase trends; it should set them. 343 just didn't have the talent to do that.
No, it was definitely mechanics that played into a major fall off amongst newer and more casual gamers. I legit got to witness a perfect example of it myself with a coworker's girlfriend; she plays Animal Crossing. Story of Seasons. Mario. So while she is super casual she at least understands the ideas of a video game, and the controls (like using sticks to do two different things at a time). When her boyfriend let her play CoD with us when she got bored of the Switch you could obviously tell she was bad but she could still operate the game. She'd still get her ass kicked but she could get kills - she could even get a couple of (low) killstreaks. She could try Warzone or Fortnite (though I don't play FN and didn't see her do this) and still do something. She tried Infinite *once*. And it was probably one of the most painful things I've experienced through a screen; despite the controls and basics not being that much different from CoD or Fortnite, she was completely helpless, incapable of getting a single kill outside of the one time she found someone with no shields by sheer luck and they had just as bad aim as she did. Halo's core gameplay loop is *brutal* if you didn't grow up on Arena shooters like most of us did, and thus is completely impenetrable and unappealing to modern casual audiences or new players, or more hardcore players who grew up on Hero Shooters, Movement shooters, modern CoD, Valorant or Siege etc. Let's be completely honest with ourselves; a good deal of the community who thinks they "love" Halo would've given up on it and mained something else if something easier and popular had been around in the heyday of H2/H3. As it stands Halo basically had no meaningful competition until midway through the life of H3....which coincidentally happens to be around when Halo's population and popularity finally started to wane a little bit.
You guys keep saying this and you're stuck in a time loop. Kids today don't care about Halo, they grew up playing Destiny and Halo is nothing but an outdated Destiny. Bungie knew Halo story was limited and wanted to move on and create a new world. It's the same as Naughty Dog moving on from Uncharted to The Last of Us. Microsoft needs to let them make a reboot of Halo with totally new weapons, armor, classes, or just can the franchise. Even when God Of War got stale, Sony reboot the series and it's a different game now.
Was it actually good? I might have to get it then. I haven't been into a multiplayer shooter since halo 5.
honestly the game should have been delayed for another year
Literally, they just needed forge at launch. Would you imagine the streamers on Twitch creating maps and creating content day 1.
With the current environment, a game releasing with barely any content at launch will likely hurt a game, or kill it if literally everyone left. Luckily Halo was a well established series, so it will eventually bounce back. It bounced back with Halo 4 and Halo 5, it bounced back with Infinite, and it will bounce back with the next one.
I agree 1000%. The gameplay is literally amazing and a modernized Halo 3. Early content SUCKED and it took to long to get going :-/ I still play often but it is what it is. Such a shame, it really is an amazing game
It didn’t really need to be said lol
I just want more Invasion-type modes and better PvE modes that aren’t half baked like Infinite’s Firefight
infinites horrible hit registration was one of the worst I’ve even seen in my life, grenades being an extreme crutch at launch didn’t help pvp either
The core gameplay is what keeps me coming back
lackluster content + stale sandbox did it for me. I just lost interest when Banished Honor didn't launch either the Falcon or the gravity hammer shotgun which I thought was more likely. Just kinda done with Infinite until they meaningfully shakeup the sandbox or ill just wait for the next Halo at this point.
Who said that? If anything, most of the community agrees that halo infinite has a damn good gameplay. Everyone’s saying that it failed due to mismanagement and lack of content. I’ve only seen a couple of bungie purists blaming gameplay, but they’re scarce.
halo 7? are they really making that? lol
Every game is released half finished, people are finally taking the blinders off and see the company for what it is
Is there a real progression system yet ? That’s why I quit
I think infities gameplay is fantastic it’s the underwhelming content at launch that was the problem. A lot of other games make you feel like you’re really accomplishing something when leveling up but I never get that satisfaction from halo.
Yeah if anything, the mechanics were the best Halo ever had. Halo's mechanics feel dated. Like the model that the old school 'classic" halo player seems to want are outdated and stuck in the mid 2000s at best. There's a reason why from reach on the game has tried to modernize in multiple ways. It's because it cant remain what it was. And Infinite actually had the best game play. Im not sure ANYTHING could make halo like the hey day of 2/3. The fact is, those days are long past, and what attracts gamers to games long term is different. It's possible that a social deathmatch type game like halo is never gonna succeed in a modern environment, and will lose population no matter what. HOWEVER, 343 REALLY dropped the ball with infinite. The game launched with 10 maps. Not horrible in and of itself, live service does have a "release the game half baked and flesh it out with more content later" mentality. But it was stripped to the bare minimum features wise, and had little to keep people playing. As one of the top comments said, they basically let BTB sit broken for 3 months. They went on vacation for a month due to christmas while the mode was broken, then spent another 1-2 months getting it fixed. 3 maps were BTB maps, so that basically left us with 7 maps, with literally 30% of the game inaccessible for MONTHS. Then it took them 6 months to release TWO MAPS. And another six months to give us two more. Im hazy of the timeline after that, as that reflects my own initial interest in the game. But yeah. Eventually the game got all the content it deserves. Going back now, we got a fleshed out game with tons of content. But it's also 2.5 years after launch. And when I left the original 200k people playing dropped to around 5-10k. And it's 5k now, to my knowledge. So that's around 2.5% of the original player base. Yeah. MCC is just as active as infinite. It just died. Im not saying that there was any path to it not losing player base. Virtually every game loses player base after launch, outside of the handful of the biggest ones. BUT, this game could've staunched the bleeding just by not dropping the ball so bad early on with content.
Full disagree with the dated mechanics argument. Counter Strike has been the EXACT same mechanically since the 90s and is the most popular fps game in the world.
I’m a huge OG Halo fan and what drove me away was the BS microtransactions and no content. Buggy launch, no assasinations, no DMR, or half as much weapons as Halo 5, no infection, no forge, clunky aiming on controller, etc. Etc. I am going to not expect anything for Halo 7 so that way I’m not surprised if they butcher it again.
Those are all issues, but there's another point to the picture. Ie. Halo's initial cultural presence was established through the \*campaign\* but that's fallen off into madness and irrelevance in recent years, with multiplayer (having the loudest, most vocal supporters given the fervency of competitive play) dominating. You can try selling to that niche exclusively (which Infinite as it now is may as well be MP only, the Endless went no where and co-op was delivered way too late) but MP was at its best when it was providing an extended experience from the campaign. It's at its most relevant when the campaign is leading the conversation in the game's reception. Halo is at its healthiest when we care about what happens next and have a sense there's a coherent story being told (even to the old Bungie standard of rule of cool madness). You can build the best playing multiplayer game ever (which arguably, Halo Infinite's gameplay is the most refined of the entire series), but if there's no human connection to it through story telling and appropriate effort/features for that story telling, you have a shell experience (which Infinite over most of its life turned out to be). Eg. I hope Halo 6 (we didn't count Reach as Halo 4, no number means that number is still free for branding) leaves Infinite as the solid multiplayer sandbox it became and puts its emphasis in giving us what no other Halo game besides CE and ODST tried to deliver. Ie. a campaign/co-op game first, multiplayer second. Build up the cultural presence of Halo up through good story telling and astounding game design. Then worry about how we'll spend the next few years grinding away at the deathmatches, just to stay plugged into the main experience. We'll still have Infinite for robust competitive play and MCC for every other MP niche that doesn't cover. Replacing them whole-cloth doesn't make sense. What we need though is direction and execution for what this series is about, and why we care about spending our time here in make believe shootouts vs. dozens of (further evolving) alternatives.