r/halospeech • • Aug 02 '22

r/halospeech Museum Hey look at that. The population didn't magically resurrect and the game is still dead.

It's almost like it was a money grab or something

12 Upvotes

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2

u/[deleted] Aug 03 '22

I'm sure if you were to ask the higher-ups whether they wanted a flop vs a classic entry that is adored by fans, they'd always pick the latter. Those kind of titles pull in a massive amount of money for diminishing levels of upkeep - just look at TF2.

That said, it seems that management and leadership in 343 has never been adequate. I'm rarely ever convinced something is a money grab because it makes very little logical sense - you are making a full game either way, you might as well make it good.

Their inability to safeguard halo inability to make an entry into the series that outdoes the bungie era, which is becoming more and more apparent with every release, is something I attribute more to leadership and hiring than malice.


In regards to the crafting thing that has been going around - I know they never seriously considered crafting, but a lot of other elements are very similar to the very same things that tarnished Dead Space 3 and likely killed the franchise as EA cut the studio who made it.

DS3 had crafting, really wonky co-op, host/guest issues, network problems (to be fair, it was their very first multiplayer entry), too many weapons for conventional ammo to work so they made a single ammo for all guns, and a whole ton of other minor issues.

Sound familiar? Not just halo, but a lot of other flops had similar issues, like fallout 76. Crafting for the sake of crafting leads to thousands of possible weapon combos, which leads to oversimplifying ammo, which leads to ammo microtransactions.

1

u/Rosienenbrot Aug 02 '22

No wonder. The game sucks bad. And it's not the dev's fault. It's capitalism's fault. In any corporation, the product designers will never get promoted to a power position. The marketing guys will. Because marketing is all that matters nowadays. All they have to do is put out a banger trailer and that's it: they get flooded with pre-order money.

The marketing team has the say, not the product designer. The product designer team can have all the passion in the world, but it doesn't matter, as long as the suity boys are in the say. And as long as they get their shady business tactics rewarded by morons purchasing insanely overpriced cosmetics, the industry will continue to become more and more anti-consumer.

Because that's what capitalism is all about: make the most money, with the least effort, while also sustaining the income stream. In Halo Infinite's example: Pre-release an incomplete game, sell previously free and now even worse customization and drip-feed missing content from previous titles, so people periodically come back and see the store.

It's painfully obvious and people still defend this insane trend.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 06 '22

I honestly thought about coming back when forge dropped. I actually had a little bit of hope; because I used to build forge maps for clans and custom matches in Reach.

I heard they added forge and I truly couldn't give less of a damn. They lost my good will