I enjoyed destiny and destiny 2 but you could definitely feel them slipping, especially the fumble where they straight up removed parts of destiny 2.
Tried marathon on a free weekend and it was fine but there are so many other games that are better than fine and doing similar things. The only thing it had going for it was the bungie gunplay which is still as solid as ever.
Them removing stuff from Destiny 2 is why I stopped playing… Took me awhile to get the expansion and by the time I did they removed the content that expansion added, making it impossible for me to catch up with the lore and wasting my money.
Infinite was a solid base that they just didn’t do anything with. The campaign felt incomplete and the multiplayer took years to get to the number of features that Halo 3 launched with, but the bones were good. If it had launched in a more complete state and the new campaigns were actually developed, it probably would have been great. However, Microsoft’s stubborn insistence on only using contractors and only for six months at a time made the whole concept untenable. For that matter, it’s driving the entire company into the ground.
This is what I was thinking. The short term contactor thing is also why the new Forza had the exact same issues during development and launch. Anyone with any real working knowledge is kicked to the curb as they are hitting their stride so no wonder why features are broken or missing and everything feels disconnected. The fact that they are managing ‘important’ IP with temps shows how much they care and if that isn’t changing, the corporate restructure is for nothing.
It was…ok. it had a good reception but no staying power because it was ok at best. They stopped working on updates too, i think a year into the 10 year project or whatever it was supposed to be.
I haven’t beat the story because a well-known bug with a door not opening near the end of a mission fucked me and my co-op friend, and we didn’t want to do the last 30 minutes all over again.
There are a lot of bugs in infinite - enemies not spawning (breaking missions), doors, the LOD being the minimum even though I am standing on the ground (so in addition to it looking like crayola ass, physical objects like walls don’t align with the visual representation… during a shootout… or a mission…)… and this was a year or so after launch. There are other issues too but it’s been a couple years and I’m just angry at this point. Half-assed if I’ve ever seen it.
I spent thousands of hours in CE and around a thousand in 2, on pc. MCC was exciting, since I finally got to play 3, ODST, and Reach. 4 is awful, and with the state of Infinite (and apparently 5), it’s no wonder they are recycling the good games. But it’s definitely over, like a washed-up rock band or a one-hit-wonder singer. And it’s all Microsoft’s fault.
the LOD being the minimum even though I am standing on the ground
This is why I didn’t finish it. Weirdest thing about this bug? It bakes into the save. Seems to be hardware dependent, too, I only saw a few other reports of it and they were all on AMD cards from what I could tell.
I looked it up and asked about it, and the community consensus? “It’s not a bug, your hardware is too weak!” Yeah, okay, I’ll just go play some fucking RoboCop Rogue City.
On the bright side, Activision is quite capable of making the exact same game over and over again and consistently. Their knowledge of beating the dead horse is borderline necromancy. Can’t say the same for 343.
Yeah Bungie today is a shell of their former selves. They just did a whole video basically saying “We know we suck, we’re sorry. We’ll get better and make better games.” but I ain’t holding my breath.
“what if we did halo [iteration], but with zombies? what do you mean they already have that? they did it when?! great, how the fuck do we innovate now? can’t we just add shooting some brown people and call it halo: space black ops?” -Activision ceo, tomorrow
Activision doesn’t only publish Call of Duty though. They publish all kinds of games: Sekiro, the Tony Hawk games, Crash Bandicoot, Spyro, etc.
Way more potential than what 343 had. I mean, 343 was purposefully NOT hiring former Bungie-era Halo employees. The important ones, like Marcus Lehto, Marty ODonnell, heck they only brought Joe Staten to get Infinite “back on track” and then promptly kicked him to the curb too. 343 definitely deserved this earlier, I am gonna be honest.
The games you mentioned ring in my head as mid-2000s highlights, with nothing more than blatant money grabs published in the last decade. Not very indicative of a healthy studio imo. They may have once been capable of turning out good games, but that was roughly in the era 343 was turning out good games toogood Halo games were being released as well
Appreciate the correction; I got lost in the publisher shell game. Updated my original statement to the intent behind it, not me being wrong about who published the games lol
Sekiro is the exception to that, but that’s more on FromSoft than it is on Activision, to the extent that it actually hadn’t registered in my mind that Activision was involved with that game at all.
Yeah exactly FromSoft is turning out bangers, and somehow Activision is involved? Maybe just to the extent that they aren’t involved so can’t fuck anything up?
My point is that Activision isn’t a studio. It’s a publisher. I read Activision said they are forming a new studio for Halo.
I mean, I didn’t bring up all of Activisions classic games like Pitfall, just the most recent games they have published since those are most relevant to the topic.
“the era 343 was turning out good games too”
Ok but that never really happened. Ensemble made Halo Wars and Creative Assembly made the sequel which were decent IMO (the first being better IMO). Every other game with the Halo brand under 343 was garbage. Forget about Spartan Strike and Spartan Assault? 343s first game was Halo CE Anniversary, which was horrendously bad, so I suppose it is poetic in a way that Halo Studios, which only survived long enough to drop a single game, would die with yet another rehash of Halo CE.
Except for maybe Fireteam Raven, only because I never had the chance to play it, 343 never had an “era of making good games.” Halo 2A was pretty good but it launched in the very broken MCC which took them years to fix.
4,5, and Infinite were the absolute low points of Halo, with Infinite being the best of the three only because of the art direction. But they are all far below Bungie-era Halo games.
I would argue that it probably does give better odds for it at Activision. They already have CoD. They don’t need to turn Halo into CoD. They can just use Halo to do something new.
I think I remember that they made a CoD with like mech suits or something, and a lot more movement mechanics, and it wasn’t received well. That’s basically what Halo is. Now they can go fully into that without CoD players complaining that it isn’t CoD.
I don’t have much faith in this, but I do think there’s better odds for a better Halo with Activision probably. 343 didn’t get it. Activision may not, but doing something new has to be better than continuing to fuck things up over and over.
343 has been trying to do “something new” (chasing trends, mostly) every time they didn’t remaster an existing game, it’s not necesssarily going to work out.
At this point Halo is just a brand, a franchise, a trademark to be slapped onto whatever the IP owners want to do with a popularity boost - the story (/ lore / narrative) has been brought to hell and back and to hell again, and the gameplay has been bent so much with each title that it doesn’t really have an identity anymore either.
CoD players won’t like it because it’s not CoD, Halo players will play it for a few hours because At Least It’s Kinda Fun I Guess™, everyone else will be like “Halo? Like, the one Jesus had?”, and whatever contractors Microsoft/Activision will hire won’t be given enough time, space or resources to cook something that is more than mediocre.
I mean something new as in let someone else have a try. 343 has been failing constantly. Letting them keep trying probably isn’t going to solve the issue. It’s worth trying literally anything else than having them keep at it.
Activision in charge of Halo? That’s a deathblow if ever I heard one.
At this point a deathblow would be a kindness for the Halo franchise.
Post bungie halo has been like watching a train wreck in slow motion, the series has survived the last 16 years on reputation alone.
Post Halo Bungie hasn’t fared much better…
I enjoyed destiny and destiny 2 but you could definitely feel them slipping, especially the fumble where they straight up removed parts of destiny 2.
Tried marathon on a free weekend and it was fine but there are so many other games that are better than fine and doing similar things. The only thing it had going for it was the bungie gunplay which is still as solid as ever.
Them removing stuff from Destiny 2 is why I stopped playing… Took me awhile to get the expansion and by the time I did they removed the content that expansion added, making it impossible for me to catch up with the lore and wasting my money.
Halo infinite was pretty huge though, wasn’t it? Granted one being the only stand out isn’t saying much.
Infinite was a solid base that they just didn’t do anything with. The campaign felt incomplete and the multiplayer took years to get to the number of features that Halo 3 launched with, but the bones were good. If it had launched in a more complete state and the new campaigns were actually developed, it probably would have been great. However, Microsoft’s stubborn insistence on only using contractors and only for six months at a time made the whole concept untenable. For that matter, it’s driving the entire company into the ground.
This is what I was thinking. The short term contactor thing is also why the new Forza had the exact same issues during development and launch. Anyone with any real working knowledge is kicked to the curb as they are hitting their stride so no wonder why features are broken or missing and everything feels disconnected. The fact that they are managing ‘important’ IP with temps shows how much they care and if that isn’t changing, the corporate restructure is for nothing.
It was…ok. it had a good reception but no staying power because it was ok at best. They stopped working on updates too, i think a year into the 10 year project or whatever it was supposed to be.
I haven’t beat the story because a well-known bug with a door not opening near the end of a mission fucked me and my co-op friend, and we didn’t want to do the last 30 minutes all over again.
There are a lot of bugs in infinite - enemies not spawning (breaking missions), doors, the LOD being the minimum even though I am standing on the ground (so in addition to it looking like crayola ass, physical objects like walls don’t align with the visual representation… during a shootout… or a mission…)… and this was a year or so after launch. There are other issues too but it’s been a couple years and I’m just angry at this point. Half-assed if I’ve ever seen it.
I spent thousands of hours in CE and around a thousand in 2, on pc. MCC was exciting, since I finally got to play 3, ODST, and Reach. 4 is awful, and with the state of Infinite (and apparently 5), it’s no wonder they are recycling the good games. But it’s definitely over, like a washed-up rock band or a one-hit-wonder singer. And it’s all Microsoft’s fault.
This is why I didn’t finish it. Weirdest thing about this bug? It bakes into the save. Seems to be hardware dependent, too, I only saw a few other reports of it and they were all on AMD cards from what I could tell.
I looked it up and asked about it, and the community consensus? “It’s not a bug, your hardware is too weak!” Yeah, okay, I’ll just go play some fucking RoboCop Rogue City.
Interesting - my friend is on an amd card (don’t remember the model, want to say 6700/XT) and I’m on the 7900 XTX.
It literally doesnt matter. Halo died with Bungie and Bungie died with Halo.
On the bright side, Activision is quite capable of making the exact same game over and over again and consistently. Their knowledge of beating the dead horse is borderline necromancy. Can’t say the same for 343.
Tbf if you were to give Halo back to Bungie they too would fuck it up nowadays.
Yeah Bungie today is a shell of their former selves. They just did a whole video basically saying “We know we suck, we’re sorry. We’ll get better and make better games.” but I ain’t holding my breath.
Oh it is straight up necromancy and Black Ops might be necrophilia.
“what if we did halo [iteration], but with zombies? what do you mean they already have that? they did it when?! great, how the fuck do we innovate now? can’t we just add shooting some brown people and call it halo: space black ops?” -Activision ceo, tomorrow
If you already done zombie, what left is really alien, simple as that.
Mummies. They’re zombies and brown people rolled into one.
Halo Black Ops
That was ODST
ODST Black Ops
Activision doesn’t only publish Call of Duty though. They publish all kinds of games: Sekiro, the Tony Hawk games, Crash Bandicoot, Spyro, etc.
Way more potential than what 343 had. I mean, 343 was purposefully NOT hiring former Bungie-era Halo employees. The important ones, like Marcus Lehto, Marty ODonnell, heck they only brought Joe Staten to get Infinite “back on track” and then promptly kicked him to the curb too. 343 definitely deserved this earlier, I am gonna be honest.
This isn’t publishing. This is development. Halo will be an Activision developed game.
The games you mentioned ring in my head as mid-2000s highlights, with nothing more than blatant money grabs published in the last decade. Not very indicative of a healthy studio imo. They may have once been capable of turning out good games, but that was roughly in the era
343 was turning out good games toogood Halo games were being released as wellWhat, HALO 4?
Halo 1-3 were 2001-2007, which counts as early- to mid-2000s. Halo 4 was 2012, in the early 2010s
Bungie made 1 2 3 ODST Reach, 343 made 4 5 Infinite. 343 is established to handle the IP when bungie separated from microsoft.
Appreciate the correction; I got lost in the publisher shell game. Updated my original statement to the intent behind it, not me being wrong about who published the games lol
Sekiro is the exception to that, but that’s more on FromSoft than it is on Activision, to the extent that it actually hadn’t registered in my mind that Activision was involved with that game at all.
Yeah exactly FromSoft is turning out bangers, and somehow Activision is involved? Maybe just to the extent that they aren’t involved so can’t fuck anything up?
My point is that Activision isn’t a studio. It’s a publisher. I read Activision said they are forming a new studio for Halo.
I mean, I didn’t bring up all of Activisions classic games like Pitfall, just the most recent games they have published since those are most relevant to the topic.
“the era 343 was turning out good games too”
Ok but that never really happened. Ensemble made Halo Wars and Creative Assembly made the sequel which were decent IMO (the first being better IMO). Every other game with the Halo brand under 343 was garbage. Forget about Spartan Strike and Spartan Assault? 343s first game was Halo CE Anniversary, which was horrendously bad, so I suppose it is poetic in a way that Halo Studios, which only survived long enough to drop a single game, would die with yet another rehash of Halo CE.
Except for maybe Fireteam Raven, only because I never had the chance to play it, 343 never had an “era of making good games.” Halo 2A was pretty good but it launched in the very broken MCC which took them years to fix.
4,5, and Infinite were the absolute low points of Halo, with Infinite being the best of the three only because of the art direction. But they are all far below Bungie-era Halo games.
CODification here it comes. Couldn’t be worse than the current state of Halo though?
Halo became what it is now because they tried to turn it into CoD, so it couldn’t be better either
I would argue that it probably does give better odds for it at Activision. They already have CoD. They don’t need to turn Halo into CoD. They can just use Halo to do something new.
I think I remember that they made a CoD with like mech suits or something, and a lot more movement mechanics, and it wasn’t received well. That’s basically what Halo is. Now they can go fully into that without CoD players complaining that it isn’t CoD.
I don’t have much faith in this, but I do think there’s better odds for a better Halo with Activision probably. 343 didn’t get it. Activision may not, but doing something new has to be better than continuing to fuck things up over and over.
343 has been trying to do “something new” (chasing trends, mostly) every time they didn’t remaster an existing game, it’s not necesssarily going to work out.
At this point Halo is just a brand, a franchise, a trademark to be slapped onto whatever the IP owners want to do with a popularity boost - the story (/ lore / narrative) has been brought to hell and back and to hell again, and the gameplay has been bent so much with each title that it doesn’t really have an identity anymore either.
CoD players won’t like it because it’s not CoD, Halo players will play it for a few hours because At Least It’s Kinda Fun I Guess™, everyone else will be like “Halo? Like, the one Jesus had?”, and whatever contractors Microsoft/Activision will hire won’t be given enough time, space or resources to cook something that is more than mediocre.
I mean something new as in let someone else have a try. 343 has been failing constantly. Letting them keep trying probably isn’t going to solve the issue. It’s worth trying literally anything else than having them keep at it.
I may be in the minority, but I think Halo should just be allowed to die.
shrek_not_gonna_happen.gif
Probably, but that’s not happening anytime soon.