That gives me absolutely 0 confidence that any passion is going to go into the development of this game. It’s just another big IP microsoft is determined to extract value from on a regular basis. I guess that’s what happens when you don’t deliver and microsoft comes knocking. But microsoft doesn’t even care if you deliver.
To be honest, Halo has already been in that state since 343i took over. With how bad Halo Infinite was, it would be an impressive feat for most developers to do even worse.
To its credit, Halo Infinite was probably the best art style 343 has ever done. So I do hope to see the art style continue. Though I wasn’t a fan of the hexagons on the ring, that felt very lazy to me.
The outsourced studios might actually do better than 343, to be honest. 343 has so terribly mismanaged Halo. Its ridiculous how bad of a job they did. They were given charge of Xbox’s biggest IP and the fumbled it. Halo Infinite was meant to be a glorious return to form, and it landed with a flop. Its like they did nothing but hire people that hated halo. They had the formula laid out by Bungie. All they needed to do was more of that and people would gobble it up.
They let Bungie go independent because Bungie was tired of making Halo. If they had stayed with MS, they’d be relegated to churning out Halo titles for eternity.
343 started off with top talent. They had Corrine Yu as their lead programmer. But it’s almost like the studios directors got a blank check to fuck around, thinking anything with the halo branding would sell like crazy.
I don’t think they’re outsourcing Halo to save money. They’ll likely outsource it to more experienced studios with better track records of achieving good results, because 343 is a lost cause. I wonder if their acquisition of Activision was in order to get some studios that could handle the Halo IP? Like Infinity Ward and Treyarch.
I think a great example of what 343 should have done is treyarch taking over COD from infinity ward. They’ve converted infinity ward’s COD into a behemoth. They maintained what worked. They knew living upto IW’s standards wouldn’t work. They split the COD brand up to MW, BlackOps & the World War stuff, to mitigate any creative risks they could now take. This allowed them to grow COD including going into newer platform & modes e.g. Warzone.
I know it’s not an apples to apples comparison, but it does show how management of a studio is as important as the creative vision. 343 clearly lacked both.
Glad to see other folks have noticed this as well.
As a longtime Destiny fan, I was so excited to have Halo come in and take the spotlight and giving Bungie’s lazy ass a run for their money.
Instead halo flopped almost as hard as Anthem. Fucking sad.
…and that’s the end of Halo.
For all its flaws, Halo 4 did have some intrigue. Which they then completely abandoned for Halo 5’s story. Which they then, again, completely abandoned for Infinite. It’s just like the sequel trilogy!
It’s such a mess.
I just hated the introduction of a new enemy. The Prometheans sucked, and so did their weapons. 343 clearly did that so they could put their own stamp on it. The new weapons sucked for the most part. They also Call of dutied up a bunch of parts of the multiplayer which was lame.
Infinite was when they gave up. No story, lazy maps, broken online, barebones multiplayer. My personal grievance is abandoning the Promethean storyline and Cortana’s story. Bringing her back was a mistake. But they should have followed through once they did it.
These days it’s like rpgs and first person shooters just evolved into the same genre. The boomer shooter isn’t dead, it just lives on as a game mechanic that plays a part in larger games. Remember that turn based shit in kotor? This was before putting first or third person combat in every game was normalized and it sucked. Imagine if Skyrim had turn based combat instead of direct control real-time combat, no one would still be playing it. I’d be willing to play a halo starfield like rpg maybe but they’d probably enshittify it too much so never mind.
From insider leaks overuse of contractors was what put infinite in the mess it was in the beginning… so they’re just doubling down on using contractors instead of listening to the actual workers. It’s a huge shame because right as 343 started to pick up steam with updates Microsoft started firing everyone.
As an engineer who has worked with and led offshore teams, I bid farewell to Halo. The time is over.
I have seen some of the worst code from offshore teams. Not saying everyone is like that, nor am I saying you have to be in these countries to make food code. But, I know how they drive the people over there, and I know what their company’s priorities are. Get the next contract, do the minimum to maintain the contract. Lowest bidder, and for the companies you get what you pay for.
I now have zero expectations for Halo. It’s too bad because the open world in Infinite was a lot of fun, but of course they wanted season passes and live services, and gamers are obviously surrounded by those. Plus with Microsoft if it isn’t extremely insanely profitable then it’s not worth continuing. Moderately profitable won’t cut it for them.
So, so long halo, it was fun, but I’ll have fun replaying the originals.
My heart goes out to the few engineers left who will now be babysitting contractors full-time.
I did that job. I lost all of my engineering time to them, a team of “senior engineers” who I had to teach git, pull requests, basic unit tests, developing along non-happy paths, deployments, and getting nothing but pushback the entire time.
Me, PR comment: “Hey this is going to throw an exception. Can you handle that?”
Them "It won’t throw an exception "
Me: yes, it literally will, look, if that’s null it will throw. Look it’s fine, just handle it gracefully, I’m. Not saying it’s bad that it will throw, just make sure the app doesn’t crash
Them: This is a waste of time, just push the code.
Just constant battles like that. Like I said it’s not their fault, it’s the culture differences of development, but man does it fuck up a software application.
