Thread 719929831

This franchise deserved a better fate.

No, it did not. It's just unreal tournament with more realistic weapons and UT was outdated in 2001.

>>719929831 (OP)
It should have ended with 3 and ODST. Reach was alright, but it set the formula that 343i would follow with its own games. Dramatized as fuck. Have you noticed that not a single Halo game since ODST has featured bombastic rock music?

You're not gonna find a team of a few hundred devs who are talented and genuinely invested in furthering Halo's legacy. Bungie built the franchise, every other dev brought on board is just gonna feel like they're a prisoner having to live up to a series they don't give a fuck about. Not to mention that AAA game dev hiring is just nepotism and DEI anyway

Now it's in the Konami vault, never to be seen ever again.

>>719930117
Reach and the campaign was very good. There is nothing similar in the storytelling of Reach versus "the Didact" and drama queen Cortana in Halo 4

>>719930272
You are coping.

>>719930117
>Have you noticed that not a single Halo game since ODST has featured bombastic rock music?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eM8V8B-_PPg

>>719930272
I thought the Cortana stuff in 4 was fairly well handled, and a great send-off for the character. The problem is Halo 5 retroactively ruined everything about it. To the point where Infinite had to pull a fat retcon on it.

>>719930581
And this is bombastic to you?

>>719930430
You are retarded.

>>719930678
Reach was pre-Halo Combat Evolved, so it was going for a mix of the series' known tone and military shooter vibes. I dunno what to tell you, anon, but not every game was going to have an instrumental version of Blow Me Away or Follow. And even Halo 3 was more subdued in breaking out its guitars only for the biggest moments it needed to emphasize them with. If your idea of Halo sucking because it doesn't have electric guitars breaking out of its soundtrack is your baseline, then you need to go listen to more music and figure a more rounded palette for soundtrack engagement and grading.

>>719930117
Where in Reach would such music even fit? It's a story about sacrifice and loss.

>>719929831 (OP)
The series killed itself when it didn't capitalize on its singleplayer. Halo going for multiplayer for peak popularity starting with Halo 2 is what killed it in the long run. The series is now going to be a singleplayer-only series starring Master Chief, Infinite was the last Halo game to ever have a multiplayer again. This may be a good thing for the series because it'll have less budget, have a third party AA studio working on it with Halo Studios just leading. Multiple games due to every asset being in Project Foundry, can now just focus on full-on FPS singleplayer gameplay allowing them to do things with Halo they couldn't do before with an audience on Xbox, PlayStation, PC, and Nintendo while being a new start for the series showing that it's a Master Chief series. Expanded universe stuff will remain in novels now and other characters will just be toys and crossover material. Halo of old is dead and this is a new start. Also, interesting enough, there was a multiplayer-only Halo game in the works but the moment Microsoft fully acquired ABK, the project was canceled and they went straight to the other projects Halo trilogy remakes and Halo Infinite sequels and dropped multiplayer altogether. HCS won't be coming back, that will be the major update at the end of next year.

>>719929831 (OP)
In retrospect it's insane how shit 343 was at handling the franchise, they fucked up EVERYTHING, from the music, to the enemy AI, to the enemy variety, to the weapon sandbox, to the art style, to the story, to the characters, to the music, tp the gameplay. They basically had to admit all their shit sucked and went full 'member berries for Infinite, when was the last time you saw shit like this from an multimillion dollar IP? And even then they fucked it up, the game released with literally less content than mother fucking Combat Evolved, and just to make this shit sting even more, Helldivers had more Halo weapons with new animations in one update than Halo Infinite had after 4 years.

>>719931614
It wouldn't, as I said, it set the standard that 343i would follow, when they made Halo 4, they were trying to pull a Reach with it.
>Boo hoo, Cortana dying
>Boo hoo, Chief is getting older
>Boo hoo, I can't feel the real sun
>Boo hoo, the captain won't let anyone help space jesus
>Boo hoo, it could be a while until we can go home
>Boo hoo, lots of people died on a station
>Boo hoo, we have to personally deliver a nuke
>Boo hoo, Chief has to sacrifice himself for earth
>Boo hoo, Cortana died
>Boo hoo, soldiers are people too
It was all very dramatic and sad, just like Noble dying one by one, get it? Do you see? It's very deep and hits hard, please cry now. Then Halo 5 continued on with it, made Cortana yandere and evil for some reason, and they continued to stick with it for Infinite with Cortana's little messages and all her regret.

Reach is the source of all that, that's the game they used as a case study for how to make a Halo game in terms of its tone. Reach was fine on its own as a prequel to the original trilogy, but it made for a terrible foundation for every other game that came after it.

>>719930163
>Not to mention that AAA game dev hiring is just nepotism and DEI anyway
This is the main issue.

>>719932227
I'm glad they finally switch to Halo CE as the foundational game and are sticking with it going forward.

>>719932082
>Helldivers had more Halo weapons with new animations
Reload in first person, they're not new animations, they're all straight from the games. A Sony associated studio honoring Halo's legacy better than the fucking successor studio itself is wild.

>>719932270
The main issue is the fucking kikes behind these decisions, we wouldn't even have to deal with DEI if it wasn't for them, fuck me jogging this shit was over since Dodge vs Ford

>>719932296
Nah, it's just 343i rebuilding some good will so they can fuck something else up. Do not fucking fall for it again.

>>719932330
I mean new animations as in arrowhead devs went through the trouble of animating them, when 343 couldn't because somehow this multimillion dollar dev team doesn't have the skills nor the tools to make a single fucking animation

>>719932381
I think they're under strict mandates now, so they can really do anything but lead projects. Even Halo MP is dead now that Microsoft has COD with Microsoft no longer funding it.

>>719930163
>AAA game dev
This right here is the problem, always has been

>>719930117
Blaming Reach for what happened to the series under 343 is quite unfair. Reach was amazing as a whole with how it showed the inevitable fall of Reach and how every single Noble died one after the other, it had a very bittersweet ending and the whole OST fit the game like a globe. 343 using it as a template for their fanfiction trash is its own separate case.

>>719934003
>Blaming Reach for what happened to the series under 343
Again, no, I'm blaming 343 for using Reach as their foundation.

>>719933881
not true at all

>>719934498
It has always been true, you don't need a team of 100 people, game development teams should not be corporate, you do not need a huge budget to make a game, games aren't meant to emulate movies but be video games first and foremost.

>>719933881
You might be too young to remember this, but AAA games used to be good.

>Halo 3, FINISH THE FIGHT
>anyway, here's another fight

>>719935452
When, I always thought they were shit especially when they killed AA games for a time during the 7th gen.

>>719935452
No. AAA is a marketing buzzword that industry gaylords started using in the mid 2000s for big money games. AAA was never good.

It really did,
remember just before Halo 4 when 343i and frankoconnor were like "dont worry guys we're gonna keep halo like old halo!" and then they dropped 4 to everyone's bewilderment?

>>719929831 (OP)
>Master Chief story arc is finished
>Have the Rookie, a very acceptable replacement for the Chief
>Also make Reach, showing prequels with other characters can work too
>Kill the Rookie and keep the story going ahead with the Chief
Sometimes you gotta wonder how somebody can fail so hard

>>719934797
Halo, gears of war, MGS series, Dark souls, early COD and Battlefield, Titanfall, Grand Theft Auto. etc are all AAA and have some of the best games ever made. I agree with you I hate corporations but big budgets don't mean bad games you need money and talent to make amazing things.

it's baffling that they had an entire galaxy of worlds to explore and they squandered it on politics and ideologies. fucking hell just let me see at least a few more worlds and races more extensively. showing the covenant take them in as pawns was whatever, but showing a revolt visually on a world would have been cool. but instead it's just dialogue and expositions.

>>719936090
no dude you stupid faggot
odst and reach just proved taht you CAN have different protags and the games were fine

the issue were microsoft jewing out and shoehorning chief into every single game cover for promotional reasons
and then 343 went full fucking retard and kept adding to the fi re with their god awful games

>>719929831 (OP)
You will like this

>>719936328
yikes

>>719936328
The animation was stiff as fuck, and it looks like cartoonish AI generated slop

>>719936090
>could have picked Noble Six with the excuse that he somehow survived getting piled on by Elites at the end of Reach
>or even Jun who we don't see again after he splits from the rest of the team to bodyguard Hailey
>Rookie had no reason whatsoever to die

Hell, I would pick a game exclusively featuring the Arbiter at this point. Chief's story was over a long time ago, but no, he's THE CHOSEN ONE.

>>719936090
Honestly, at this point? Just give us a different central character and make Chief our mentor or CO or something that he technically should be by this point in the franchise. A Rookie or Noble Six successor, their own thing, mute or not, I dunno. But Steve Downes is 74 years old now and they can't have him endlessly be Chief even with the proclamation that he and Jen Taylor can have their voices used by Microsoft for AI shit. The one good idea they could've had with Infinite overall was having a custom Spartan start their own little adventure on the side to build up to bigger shit, and that got entirely abandoned because the game fucked itself, not to mention squandered on an annoying Banished AI in one dude's head fucking with the base.

>>719936164
All these games suck ass and were better when they were just AA mid-budget series. AAA destroys everything and leads to a lack of creativity. There was never a select few set of games during the 3rd-6th generation of games, this shit started during the 7th generation because those retards kept spending money because for some retarded ass reason, they wanted to make video games on the level of films instead of keeping it niche. Fuck Sony and Microsoft for pushing that.

>>719936405
Christ, we could have gotten Reach from the Chief's point of view, or First Strike. I'd even take a game about Ghosts of Onyx showcasing how the Spartan IIIs got started. There was so much material to go over from the human/covenant war.

>>719936328

>Rendered in Unreal Engine 5

>>719935452
No they didn't.

>>719936090
Chief never needed a replacement, Chief never needed a character, he was the perfect blank slate to shove into anything. Something no one figured out until 2021. They should have made his game have that power fantasy of old FPS while spin-offs could have focused on other characters doing other things. Chief's games would be gameplay chaos while spin-offs could experiment. Bungie nor 343 did none of that with Bungie jumping off the path right after Halo 1 and 343 not getting it until Infinite somewhat but really didn't get it until Microsoft put a shotgun at their heads telling them if they fuck up one more game, they're killing them and the series.

>>719936462
>halo was never good
>cod was never good
>the idea that GTA has ever missed
>from soft has ever missed
>elder scrolls was never good
>fallout was never good
Its just not true the issue isn't big money games dude its the leadership and women/DEI shit 100%

>>719936527
akko will be rendered in ue5

>>719936265
>odst and reach just proved taht you CAN have different protags
That's what anon said, that rookie was an acceptable replacement. You are illiterate and aggressive. Calm down. God knows this board would be better without you jeets intentionally misinterpreting people's posts just as an excuse to sperg out at someone over the internet.

>>719936619
Everything was better when it was AAs and studios will less budget, put out more games of different IPs, AAA which should have led to more of that by making multiple teams to focus on different games, didn't do that. AAA instead shoved over thousands of people on 1 single game which killed creativity and innovation and pushed gaming towards this realism garbage. When I stopped playing AAA trash and went back to indies and AAs I ended up having the fun I used to have as a kid again. The problem is AAA and always has been. This industry needs to condense and lose a lot of money.

blame frankie

>>719929831 (OP)
what do you mean? it ended with on high note with reach

Hello here I am with the correct opinions

>CE: Really good
>2: Godly
>3: Fucking amazing when it was in the zeitgeist but hasn't aged super gracefully
>ODST: Great atmosphere but basically a H3 DLC
>Reach: Awesome
>4: Call of Halo, the beginning of the collapse
>5: Decent multiplayer if it wasn't Halo
>Infinite: Good enough but horribly mismanaged

>>719936768
Skyrim, fallout 3, COD MW1 MW2 Black ops, Halo 1-3, Assassin's Creed 1-2, Darksouls elden ring, blood borne, Uncharted 2-4, all GTA games. The list goes on they are all really good AAA games. You cant point to money being the problem

>>719929831 (OP)
I've been playing halo infinite recently because I have a free month of gamepass. I think they were trying to reference Combat Evolved a bunch to try to win back old fans but the missions on the overworld all play like something generic from a Ubisoft game, and when you head underground into a proper linear fps level it's generic and repetitive hallways like every level is The Library. Also the story is mostly MIA so far (haven't finished the game yet)

>>719937195
real af infinite is boring and forgettable. Multiplayer is ight but again nothing remarkable.

>>719937018
>3: Fucking amazing when it was in the zeitgeist but hasn't aged super gracefully
What do you mean? It still looks good and plays good to this very day

>>719937023
All these games were better as AA games, also 6th gen Prince of Persia games were better than the Assassin Creed games. Bungie canned multiple projects including new IPs just to work on Halo 2. AAA has never been good, it has always been shit, for the studio, the franchise, and the industry.

>>719937549
No it hasn't. The impact of all weapons feels shitty, the shading is dogshit, the only good non-power weapon is the BR, and the movement feels like molasses. It's fun, but I don't enjoy the core gameplay as much as I could.

>>719937765
How do you feel about Quake?

>>719930272
Reach sucks

>>719929831 (OP)
Halo 5 multiplayer was based

>>719929831 (OP)
It's really weird this franchise went from being the dudebro defining game into absolute faggot slop.

>>719937618
They were all AAA anon.

man

>>719937820
I'm not autistic enough to play that at the level it can be played at.

>>719932049
>Halo will never have multiplayer again and only ever be single player moving forward

Bahahahahahahaha everyone laugh at this unfathomably stupid faggot

>>719938035
Women wanted to humanize the Chief, that was one of the biggest pushes 343i insisted on. Chief performing any emotional labor at all is cringe.

It deserved to end with Halo Reach.

>>719932049
It is Infinitely(bazinga) more intensive to make single player levels and cutscenes than just slapping together some maps to kill each other in.

>>719929831 (OP)
It already finished. Xcucks needed a brand new franchise not continually milk the tits off Halo till they became bags on sand.

>>719938337
Woman deserve to be in life threatening situations instead of being coddled to get their reality checked.

i have played about 5 minutes of halo
if i had to, for some reason, play halo 4, like it's an obligation to specifically play halo 4, which i think everyone says is one of the bad ones, do you think it's better to play 4 entirely in isolation or is it something to build up to with the preceding games?

>>719929831 (OP)
>1, 2, and 3 are amazing
>Most, if not all, of the books in that time are great
>Then Reach came out, ruined the games, ruined the story of that period that was handled perfectly in the book
It's depressing to think about. Doubly so since shortly after Reach came out I had a falling out with my cousin who would coop the games on legendary with me and do goofy shit and just have fun online. Fuck Reach.

>>719938059
They were all AAs during the 6th generation, Halo became AAA around Halo 2, and it didn't need to be that big. Video games didn't need super franchises, just good fun games.

>>719929831 (OP)
Why? It's been dogshit since 3

>>719937018
Reach was the actual first Call of Halo you shit.

>>719932227
>chief is getting older

Okay I need to point out. 343 fucked up the lore. Chief is TECHNICALLY 43 years old yes. But he's BIOLOGICALLY like 22 because Cryo stops aging. Johnson was 72 time-wise but only in his 30s in actuality because he spent most of his life in Cryo because Slipspace takes months. Fucking 343.

>>719938816
That not true

>>719938312
This is true though, Halo is not seen as big to Microsoft anymore and they don't plan to push it. HCS is dead, this has never happened, it started with H2A, then it moved to H5G, then Halo 3 MCC, from there, Infinite, but it's been canceled completely for next year with just an "update". Halo Studios already made a statement last year about not developing Halo games like they did in the past, that's over. There was a rumor that they were working on a multiplayer-only Halo game codenamed Project Ekur but that project went dark the moment Microsoft acquired ABK. Now the only rumors are coming up are a singleplayer-only Halo CE remake that will expand to Halo 2 and 3 remakes, and a singleplayer-only indirect sequel to Halo Infinite which will expand to more singleplayer games beyond that. All the Halo crossovers, COD being pushed as the main multiplayer FPS game from Microsoft each year, Certain Affinity is now working on new IPs, do the math. 7th gen era is over, and Halo will never be that big again.

>>719938908
To be fair he's also going through some of the most intense, life-threatening shit any human being has ever documented in their entire life, so for what amounts to a biological 22 I can at least see why he's covered in scars and his body might look older than it really is.

>>719938312
>he doesn't know
Kek, you truly underestimate how retarded and incapable 343i actually is.

>>719938419
It's better for Halo, the multiplayer expansion is what killed it in the first place. Being a singleplayer game would have allowed it to keep doing a lot of cool things joining the other unique FPS games that came during its time. It would still be alive, it's dead now because it chose to be the top game which never lasts.

What's that Plank? Plank says FPS games are for midwits with no inner monologue.

>>719939189
Hey planky boy, what's that you said about the FPS genre?

>>719929831 (OP)
This franchise did unfathomable damage to the industry as a whole. It kickstarted the dudebro aesthetic, it opened the door for casuals, normalfags, and "gamer girls" to come into the hobby and act like they were part of some "us gamers huh" counter culture. Emphasis on multiplayer, graphics, marketing, DLC, so much that went wrong over the course of the industry as whole has its roots in Halo.

>>719938981
>AI
Opinion discarded, Bungie had like 20 people making CE, it was AA. AAA didn't get coined until around the 7th generation, but I think it started earlier with FFVII.

>>719936090
>>719936405
could've very easily just had Noble Six pop up and say "oh, Reach? yeah he survived that" to fit with the "being lucky is a genuine superpower" thing Chief has going on.

>>719939189
>>719939256
Amazing I can still read this in their voices to this day.

I remember running as fast as i could home from school to see this cartoon premiere

>>719939296
This, I can't really put the blame on CE because no one knew it would be a hit, but its problems could have been fixed in Halo 2. I blame Halo 2, it was the first Halo game that was given a budget near that of Final Fantasy VII. As you stated, this is when Halo started all the problems you see still to this day, glad that shit is finally dying.

>>719929971
3 hours 21 minutes ago. I hope you're here. I want you to know you are a retard.

>>719939342
It was a first party Microsoft game for Microsofts console as the consoles main title but I guess you get to decide what big budget games are. You have not addressed any of the other games I listed either. Do you not think DEI and progressive's ideas being forced into games is not real or the problem?

>>719936328
>UE5 slop
>chromes, shine, vibrant colors gone in favor of realistic slop

>>719939825
Microsoft was picking and choosing what they wanted to push and killed everything else, this stupid mindset of theirs is why they don't have any games now. You don't push one to two games, you let the games speak for themselves and say these are the types of games you'll find on an Xbox. Because they put so much into a small number of series, it's why Microsoft became the Halo, Gears, Forza, and Fabl... the Halo, Gears, and Forza guys.

>>719936328
I may like it since they finally dumped the multiplayer.

>>719929831 (OP)
Not really. It's sci-fi Call of Duty. They should have stopped after Reach if they wanted it to end it with dignity.
What did you expect when the owners see it as a business?

>>719929831 (OP)
If Halo got raped today, we'd have a bunch of tourists saying shit like "Why are Halo fans mad about getting more games? Shouldn't you be happy? Would you rather Halo stay dead?" And the answer is YES A THOUSAND FUCKING TIMES YES IT ENDED WITH 3 WE DON'T NEED ENDLESS SEQUELS

>>719940814
Halo predates Call of Duty

>>719939825
NTA but for context from moby, from the games that came out during the 7th gen you have a range that roughly ends up around 800 on average with games earlier on in the gen being closer to 500 and the end of the gen being closer to 1200.
But also it depends on he kind of game, with the 3rd person games having larger credits lists than the others.
Really a 3rd person shooter just seems to be the most inefficient kind of game to make overall in terms of needed manpower.

>>719941112
>Shoot aliens
>Press E to progress
>Shoot more aliens
The game is overrated.

>>719942341
You can distill literally every shooter ever made to that formula

I know amongst the fps purists theyll scream babbys first fps but even you have to admit halo is the biggest dropped ball of all time, i mean the level of disaster 343 has been is honestly quite unbelievable.

>>719942386
That's my point. The writing doesn't carry it either. Sci-Fi is a very generic genre, it is not Halos fault.

>>719943462
The writing absolutely carries it. You're in straight denial of how big Halo was back in the day.

>>719930117
>ODST
>good

>>719942341
Shooters before Halo already did what Halo did better, Halo just had Xbox going for it and was propped up by Microsoft's ad money.

>>719943558
Elaborate. Or is thinking beyond you?

>>719932082
>when was the last time you saw shit like this from an multimillion dollar IP?

>>719936328

What the fuck is Halo Studios planning exactly? A reboot of Combat Evolved? Last reboot they did was such such complete garbage that I basically have to play the game on its original graphics and don't even bother touching the new ones.

I had Halo CE on Xbox, on release. I'd played a ton of FPSes on the PC, but Halo was like a breath of fresh air. The graphics (those who played on PC missed out, that port looked like shit), sound, music, dialogue of your enemies and marines. Even the AI was pretty good, in the big open vehicle sections, you could play them a variety of ways. I loved it.

Halo 2 completely dropped the ball for me, what a disappointment. The graphics pop-in issue was pretty horrible, clearly the game was just overambitious in scope. New enemy types were just not fun to fight, the fucking jackal snipers? Brutes are lame compared to elites. The story felt all over the place. There's no level i would play again in 2, but I'd play Silent Cartographer, AotCR and Two Betrayals over and over.

3 attempted to get the magic back, 4 player co-op was fun, but again I can barely remember it because I didn't want to play it again after completing it. The only positives I get from 2 and 3 are the music.

ODST feels a lot more like Halo CE to me and I liked that. I only played through half of Reach, a few years after release, because I thought the art style looked really bad in trailers. But when I got round to it I thought it was ok. I haven't played the other games except for free Infinite multiplayer.

So yeah for me Halo peaked at CE and it's been a dead franchise for a while. Mulitplayer in 3 was great I cant deny, but only because I could play with 3 other people on the same tv against other people doing the same thing and voice chat with them.

I watched an autistic video about 343 retcons including the UK being retconned out of existence in Halo's timeline. It just makes me scratch my head on how this happened.

>>719943790
All leaks are proclaiming they're remaking Combat Evolved for a full franchise reboot from the start, in due part to put it on Playstation as a fresh olive branch. And other rumors are abound that multiplayer will effectively be a separate entity of future campaign plans, akin to a centralized thing that updates more like Call of Duty as an evolving live service title. Whether any of that is actually capable of panning out with the notorious incompetence of 343, even with the rebrand and supposedly axing all their old management, has yet to be seen, though people are saying that "Halo Studios" is also only overseeing the main stuff and they'll be trying to branch the IP out to other developers more now.

I hope to fucking god that this "reboot" doesn't try to further justify 343i retardation.
It's not just the "Humans are forerunner" thing.

>>719943928
> And other rumors are abound that multiplayer will effectively be a separate entity of future campaign plans, akin to a centralized thing that updates more like Call of Duty as an evolving live service title
that sounds like their just trying the halo infinite plan again.
Infinite was indented as a platform for future campaigns and multiplayer maps to be purchased for, but its lackluster reception killed the plans for more campaigns.

>>719943595
>dumped the Battle Rifle for a fucking useless suppressed SMG with ripoff CoD4 red dot sights (and yes, I tested the suppressor and found that it's basically fucking worthless at avoiding detection)
>all the Elites get killed off-screen, have to spend the whole campaign fighting Jiralhanaegroids
>annoying characters
>snore-inducing plot compared to Halo 2 and 3
>rechargeable health makes the reintroduction of medkits redundant
>Bungie had the gall to sell it at full price

The gravest sin though is that for a game that's all about the Helljumpers, there's very little actual ODST stuff in it. You get a really cool cutscene in the first five minutes of the game and it's never fucking brought up again. The fucking one ODST mission from Halo 2 did it more justice. It was a massive missed opportunity for introducing new gameplay mechanics. Imagine if they added insertion by drop pod as a feature in PVP multiplayer or even regular campaign and you could actually choose where you landed on the map and even crush unsuspecting opponents to death by landing on their heads.

>>719936328
No I wont. At this point I do not care, I've spent more time playing MCC than I have playing any new 343-slop. The only reason I think anyone was semi interested in 6 was because of f2p.

I really dont understand why anyone has been interested in halo since 4.

>>719944313
They just need to make Battlefield 2 sized maps and have tons of vehicles. Why is that so hard?

>>719944313
I figure a lot of this is basically "okay we got some STEPS right for Infinite but we fucked up the landing so badly, lets try again but this time now that we took that failure and pretend we've got a genuinely fresh start, for reals this time"

>>719944339
Lmao, you're fucking retarded. Your complaint about the SMG is about the only valid thing here.
>drop pod PVP
Fuck off battle royale nigger.

>>719944339
>this game about spartans sucks, where’s my riot control scene? Why is there only one of me?

>>719944381
>"okay we got some STEPS right for Infinite but we fucked up the landing so badly, lets try again but this time now that we took that failure and pretend we've got a genuinely fresh start, for reals this time"
This is every 343 game

you guys think halo has been mishandled? check out tomb raider
>dev team is flogged like fucking slaves from the release of the first game in 1996 all the way to the release of chronicles in 2000
>the dev team splits in half for chronicles and the angel of darkness, veterans work on chronicles while the rookies work on the angel of darkness
>why did the dev team split in half, you ask? because the publisher DEMANDED a game be released every year (the next one being the year 2000) so they could earn those sweet shekels - they refused doing it any other way until the entire team were on the verge of quitting
>the angel of darkness in 2003 predictably flops because of internal chaos
>because of the flop, the franchise rights were taken from them and given to crystal dynamics who proceeded to butcher the series across 3 games, dumbing it down and deleting the things that made people love tomb raider in the first place
>last game in 2008
>fast forward to 2013 - the reboot
>literally nothing about it is tomb raider other than lara croft's name
>2 more games released in the 2010s
>last game released in 2018
>now the next game is in development hell because they don't know how to merge the reboot timeline with the original timeline since everybody has retroactively decided that they don't like the reboot timeline
>news comes out every other month that the current developer is firing employees, the tv show is in shambles, the board games, comics, whatever are all getting announced and then quickly cancelled thereafter because the fans are becoming sick of what the series has become
you have to wonder "how difficult could it be to actually make a great video game?" and then you realise why that's not possible because of the quality of the people working on them
if video games represent culture, then what does that you?

>>719939795
2 hours 32 minutes ago. i hope you're here. based

The "modern" and "broader" audience meme surely has to be dead soon right... right?

>>719929831 (OP)
Only speaking of campaigns, 4 had promise in the gameplay with the human weapons feel good, the enemies moving a lot faster and that being great and they started to fuck with enemies at odd angles with the robot dogs running up and standing on verticle surfaces. The story allowed Master Chief to have a few Master Chief moments but the overarching plot was ass. Five was an abomination, this game isn't a squad shooter and everything was retarded. Infinite had a stupid ass decision to separate the giant alien architecture segments with the open world busy work but once I embraced the chaos and started grappling around and tossing the explodables everywhere the combat encounters became a lot of fun. I think 343 had the ability to actually do well but they crippled themselves somehow with each attempt and you just can't let someone keep trying like this, even if they show hints of promise.

>>719947038
Giving a team of people who don't know what they're doing a budget of hundreds of millions was probably the main mistake.

Old devs would spend a long time making trash just for themselves before being paid for their effort. And that was without youtube tutorials.

>>719943790
Make the series singleplayer-only because Microsoft no longer sees value in the multiplayer since they have COD now, Master Chief, remake of Halo CE, Halo 7, remake of Halo 2, Halo 8, remake of Halo 3, Halo 9, no more remakes after Halo 3.

>>719943928
>>719944313
It's not a reboot, like a half step to add their lore and retcon the Bungie lore to make the first three games fit better with their games, right after the CE remake, their releasing an Infinite sequel the year after. Also, new rumors are saying the multiplayer's been canned completely. They're going singleplayer-only going forward.

Not going to stress this enough, THERE WILL BE NO MORE HALO MULTIPLAYER GOING FORWARD

>>719929831 (OP)
why did bungee go full retard?

>>719947523
Microsoft influence and money, most likely. Valve was smart enough not to take it, Gabe made Half-Life and the rest was history.

>>719947038
Halo 4 had no promise, it was dead on arrival, it was moving forward with turning Halo into generic AAA slop fully, COD style. Infinite's campaign was the only 343 Halo with promise because they actually put focus on the gameplay, shame how it turned out. Story matters as much as dirt in a video game, especially an FPS one, the moment someone brings it up, they're no longer worth listening to. Marty was based for dropping Halo 4 the moment Chief started talking during gameplay.

>>719946835
Yes, but we'll see how Sony and Microsoft takes it, many AAA western and eastern devs seem to be learning. Sony and Microsoft seem to be late to the party and are losing their influence.

>>719947523
went from 70 frat guys to like a couple hundred to make sure halo 3's development wasn't skullfucked like 2's was if i remember right, and people like jason jones and other heads like joseph staten were on temp departures or just left altogether. some of the folks that would go on to form 343i took a hold around this point internally to shift things around behind the scenes alongside microsoft influence, and bungie decided that a mix of getting away from microsoft for their own independence, and getting to do something other than halo after a decade, would do them some good.
then it turns out bungie had snakes in their plane when they headed over to activision instead, and internalized shanking ensued, while the folks that would form 343 were basically super hyped about doing things their way and then had absolutely no fucking idea what they were actually doing.

really, all of this stems from simply letting too much money flow around for too many people to catch the betrayers in both company's midst, before it was too late.

>>719947768
>Story matters as much as dirt in a video game, especially an FPS one, the moment someone brings it up, they're no longer worth listening to.
That's a little disingenuous when this is Halo we are talking about, I feel like a good story will make the gameplay feel even better, but you need a rock solid foundation first.
A bad story in a good game can be easily ignored, a good story in a bad game is dogshit. 343 games land in the uncanny valley of bad games and bad story.

All i'm saying is it didn't have to be like this, the way it is
We could've met halfway
I was willing
But no
It always has to be YOUR way and nothing else. Never anything else
Those quarters need to be 1,000,000,000, 000,000,000, more than the last

>>719947910
Now it's all ruined...
Jus sayin

>>719947889
The only good Halo was Combat Evolved, the one with the least story in the series. A game is its gameplay first and foremost, story always takes a backseat in a video game.

>>719947813
Really, Halo and Bungie as a whole is a cautionary tale of what happens when you bloat development studios too much. Before, you had a very chaotic development but there was a unified vision that everyone was striving for, but with more people, you have a higher chance of backstabbers or people who only want their money and nothing else.
How you go from one of THE flagship console franchises to a studio that hates the original games and a husk studio that has had all life drained from it doomed to make live service slop for eternity is honestly a case study that should be archived for all eternity.

>>719930117
>>719934041
Reach didn't have retarded CoD shit like kill streak power weapon call-ins, player loadouts seperate from the gamemode, score based vehicle spawns, level prestiging, etc.
Reach's story was character driven but subtler, using music and atmosphere and little moments of dialogue to tell its story, not in your face soap opera shit like "le chief is the machine", "let's stop and talk about our feelings" and characters screaming all the time tier trash. That's completely on 343i for thinking the logical continuation for the series with all it's potential was shrinking the scope of the story down to a poor attempt at a character analysis with zero intrigue and nuance.
Everything that happened to Halo after Reach was on the retards there not having a clue what made it good, because they certainly copied nothing good from Reach if it was their guide.

>>719948093
It's simple really, corporate structure and massive teams do not work with small development teams.

>>719947959
OH! We coulda been GREAT!!!
THE BEST!!!
.....
now everyone hates everything....
except when they don't

reach is trash and the only people who think it's good entered the series with reach

>Look up literally any discussion over the Forerunner retcon
>Hurr durr, humans being forerunners would've been cliche
First of all, while I don't doubt it has been done before, I can't think from the top of my head many sci-fi things that had humans being the precursor species. It's mostly fantasy settings that try to be cute with science-fiction sauce on top of them.
Second of all, doesn't matter if it is "boring", something being established pretty blatantly in previous beloved media should not be changed unless you have the chops to make not only your idea make more sense, but also at the same time not fuck over what came before. Where the fuck do these idiots come from? Surely 343 cumguzzlers don't actually exist.

>>719948557
seethe, 2 > Reach > 3 = 1 = ODST > feces > the rest

>>719948557
i've played all the series and was there since the first
Title Update Reach sucks, base Reach is fine. for all the people that bitch about how the base release was with reticle bloom, giving the DMR less of it basically made it a power weapon everyone was spawning with and ruined the game.

>>719948581
>Where the fuck do these idiots come from? Surely 343 cumguzzlers don't actually exist.
They read the Terminals that basically out and out contradict what Halo 2's concept ending and Guilty Spark's own words at the end of 3 were going for, never mind Contact Harvest. Since Terminal were held as some super awesome sacred lore thing only the truly dedicated mega fans cared about at the time where internet wasn't so widespread that everyone knew about them, the obsessed clung to it like a religious text, and those that stuck with 343 stuck with the bullshit.
Surprise, it was people that would end up heading stuff at 343 that wrote the Terminals separately of the main story team, basically making their own fanfic lore setup.

>>719948841
What's worse is that those terminals are written in a way that you could argue one way or another. I read them, and it seemed they were more talking about a sub-section of forerunner that made their way back to Earth before the firing of the rings. People who take that as evidence of 343 lore while ignoring literally everything else boils my blood. That and the gross misunderstanding of AI rampancy trying to say 343 Guilty Spark was just le crazy.

>>719948716
Reach also suffered mid to late in it's life when the reins were handed over to 343i and they started putting community made forge maps nobody liked into official matchmaking playlists, and Microsoft being the greedy kikes they are selling THREE seperate map packs and putting them into different playlists further fracturing the playerbase

>>719948693
2 is shit

>>719948525
Talkin bout games in general here
.
But check this
>343
>989
>both ruined beloved series with bullshit
...
Just tell me 343 isn't just the ragged remains of 989
Please
.
Tho Syphon filter and Jet moto and 2/3 extreme were pretty fun

>>719949415
And i'll admit, twisted metal 3 and 4 were ok only just cause car combat funness. Endings were shit in both tho. Just shit. Driving too. The driving was just shit

>>719929831 (OP)
Why? It's the most generic fps ever. It's a shooter for consoles before console players and peripherals had the mechanics to do anything interesting with fps. The main character is stoic faceless guy (You). The friendly faction is "marines" with modern weapons. The enemy faction is big angry guy with gun, silly little guy with gun, big brute guy, etc. The big bad was "ancient aliens" and it was just a hold w horde called "the flood". The vehicles are like humvees and tanks. The alien purple aesthetic was fine I guess. The music was alright. The only non-generic thing about it was a ring-shaped planet. I understand nostalgia but it got far more than it deserved.

>>719930662
Retcon? It was a reboot. The entire purpose of Shitfinite was to wipe the slate clean, give John Halo another AI partner, and figure out the rest later. 5 was a better game by virtue of actually having some goddamn ambition.

Spartan IV's were a mistake.

>>719929831 (OP)
>new halo trilogy (Bungie Lore)
>Master Chief and Cortana wake up in a galaxy 5-10 years after Halo 3
>The Covenant disintegrated in a series of brutal interspecies wars as every grudge suppressed by the Prophets came to light. Heavy casualties and devastation all around. Many planets glassed.
>the UNSC, still rebuilding following the Covenant War, have ironically become a powerful player in galactic politics because the former Covenant members are at each other's throats
>the UNSC uses its influence to push the species of the galaxy into a Forum that will mediate conflicts to prevent open war (the UN in space)
>as a result, with no species interested in open warfare knowing the danger to galactic civilization would be existential, warfare is now covert and done through proxies or actors with plausible deniability
>Unfortunately, Mendicant Bias has returned. Driven by a need for redemption for his role in the end of all life 100k years ago, he decides to uplift humans back to their status as the Forerunners. (Forerunners are humans)
>the problem being that Forerunners believed that the Mantle of Responsibility meant exterminating all threats to human dominance of the galaxy
>this is the reason there is no mention of other species in the Forerunner era
>it is implied the Great Sin of the Forerunners was the extermination of all alien life and the Flood was a punishment sent by God
>and so Mendicant wants to start an open war that he believes will end with humanity claiming the Mantle by exterminating all the other species
>many humans agree with Mendicant and form a cult around him
>Chief and Cortana must preserve the fragile peace achieved at the end of Halo 3 by defeating the Cult of Mendicant and they don't know who they can trust.

toss in a bunch of contrived biblical allegories and it writes itself

>>719950827
Sounds awful, here's my idea
>humans and covenant fight over large open spaces with vehicles and spaceships because they hate eachother, >please play Halo:CE and read Fall of Reach for more information

>>719949415
Honestly wouldn't be surprised if some twisted goblin DNA from old 989 got spliced into 343’s bloodline. Both took genuinely beloved series-Twisted Metal for 989 and Halo for 343-and just ran 'em off a cliff Wile E. Coyote style. Except instead of a puff of dust, we got years of mediocrity, broken trust, and enough corporate bull to fertilize a thousand Mojave wastelands.

Only difference is Jet Moto had the decency to die quietly.

And yeah, Syphon Filter was legit. Night vision goggles and tasering people until they combust will forever be peak.

>>719950827
>the problem being that Forerunners believed that the Mantle of Responsibility meant exterminating all threats to human dominance of the galaxy
>this is the reason there is no mention of other species in the Forerunner era
>it is implied the Great Sin of the Forerunners was the extermination of all alien life and the Flood was a punishment sent by God
Makes no sense, the original trilogy pretty much states that the forerunner/flood war was the inspiration for the story of noah's ark. So exterminating aliens doesn't match up with the whole 'two of every animal of the earth' deal.

The reason for the Flood, biblically speaking, was that humanity was violent and corrupt, so god used a flood to destroy all creation barring noah and those on the ark he was commanded to build. So the Forerunners who built the Ark cannot have been the same ones who were killed by the Flood.

Why does 343 seem to hate multi-player vehicles? All of their new vehicles are single drivers.

>>719944339
>>dumped the Battle Rifle
This is the best part of ODST. You're encouraged to use weapons other than a single human precision gun.

>>719949032
Forge maps were already being slowly added when Bungie was still in control, and it's only natural for them to add more maps to the playlists when Reach launched with the fewest number of default maps out of any Halo game.

>>719955121
The vast majority of forge maps it initially had were remakes of maps from previous games so they at least were following previously tried and true layouts. The community maps were often objectively shit and weren't balanced well

>>719955962
>The vast majority of forge maps it initially had were remakes
Only 3 of 5. Those remakes were shit and broken, too. You could easily break out of Asylum and Hemorrhage. There were 2 other non-remake Forge maps added very early into Reach, too. Along with Cage being remade because it was just that bad.
>The community maps were often objectively shit and weren't balanced well
So they fit right in with Reach.

>>719955962
>>719956096
One of the maps added was an in-house one, but the other was community-made.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czi_Yp-myzY

>>719956096
One last kick in the balls to Reach as this thread dies. Fuck that game.

>>719929831 (OP)
It ran its course and then the publisher kept making it.
Simple as.

>>719948386
>Reach didn't have retarded CoD shit like kill streak power weapon call-ins, player loadouts seperate from the gamemode, score based vehicle spawns, level prestiging, etc.

ngl I would have loved calling in MAC orbital rounds or Covenant glassing, especially if the environment was destructible and you could flatten entire buildings with it.

>>719948386
Just ignore the rest of the influence COD had on Reach.

>>719959796
Battlefield and/or EDF kinda game, huh? It's a shame HD2 is about the closest we'll ever get to that.

>>719929831 (OP)
Microsoft should have hired Vince Zampella instead of faggots and trannies to work on Halo

>>719929831 (OP)
It should have ended at Reach as Bungie intended, bringing the whole series full circle. Microsoft wanting to milk it forever killed it instantly. 4, 5, and Infinite are garbage and could never have been anything more because there was never any reason to continue the series past 3's ending.

>>719936405
The Arbiter is 100 times better of a character than the Chief.

>>719929831 (OP)
Yeah, it was called leaving it alone after Bungie left. They finished their series and every single game they made was fantastic. It should have remained untouched.

>>719930117
>117
Finish the fight, sir.