Is 343 independent from Microsoft? If not I don’t really think that the figureheads at the studio have much say in how the game development process should go. Almost all of Xbox’s in house releases are unfinished and buggy. The purchase of Activision Blizzard has also probably increased the parent company’s Microsoft to micro manage anything game related since it is (or was) Microsoft’s largest transaction.
I’m pretty sure you’re aware but this is all how tech companies are run these days for some reason. Though not sure how that can be expanded into video format without it being a video essay.
Its just so upsetting to see when they have the literal golden goose in their hands and they underfeed it, neglect it, under staff its care and then throw it out into a circus expecting countless golden eggs. Its such a shame.
Literally. This is what happens when megacorps own everything, and treat their workers like slaves, and refuse to let people be creative. Capitalism is ruining the world
I am reminded of a section in the halo 3 making of documentary where an environmental artist and an engineer are talking about how the water physics allowed the artist to create really beautiful water scapes, which the engineer then saw and was amazed at what the artists had done with his system and set out to create an even better physics model for the artists to use. They don’t make ‘‘em like that anymore.
It’s the difference between a dev team that is made up of people who just want to passionately create things and a team that churns out employees on a monthly basis and said employees have little to zero passion due to the stringent demands of the management team/workplace.
What's strange to me is that Microsoft specifically created 343i to be a dedicated team that exclusively develops Halo games. But if that dedicated team isn't actually a team for more than 18 months at a time, then it's basically just a group of fans doing the best they can with someone else's work, not a AAA game company.
343 is the publisher they outsource to contractor studios that basically exist exclusively to develop halo so it seems like some legal loophole for them to it this way.
The problem is that from the beginning 343i wasn't dedicated to continuing to make and develop Halo. They were dedicated to "fixing" it and remaking it in their image. They specifically hired (and still do hire) for people that hate Halo.
Granted this would have only been the campaign though? That was the part everyone actually liked. I'd say there wasn't enough content to justify a $60 price tag, but otherwise it was a solid experience at launch. I'm still of the opinion that Microsoft should expand 343 so they can have a dedicated team that continues infinite for multiplayer and another that builds new complete and stand alone campaign experiences..
Ex 343 contractor here. The 18 months of contract with a 6 month gap is required by law, but 343 actually had a weird workaround where they could make you an "external contractor" for those 6 months, so if they liked you enough you could remain on a project for more than 18 consecutive months. And of course because everyone was WFH in 2020 and 2021, being an external contractor was virtually the same as being an onsite contractor. And they were also able to give us +90 days in 2020 due to the plague. Edit: Sorry, NDA still prevents me from answering questions about past/current/future projects beyond what's already public knowledge
Do we know if Halo Infinite is going to move to Unreal Engine or are 343i going to wait till their next Halo game? Also thank you sooo much for your work on Halo Infinite the game is the best Halo game we had in years it's such ashame Xbox is giving up on it.. God dam hate higher ups! 😢
i'd love to hear if 18 months was infact enough time to become fully competent with working on halo infinite, this idea is constantly spread by people who have no technical experience whatsoever it took me about a month to reverse engineer halo infinites game engine and put out modding tools made from scratch, i'd be surprised if it took anything close to that to become quite familiarized with your area of specialty, especially considering you'd likely be quite good at what you do
I live in California and nearly every single company has changed to contract only because they don't have to pay for health insurance and they can fire people at any moment without being liable by employment protections. Corporations will always find the loopholes.
Joe was the captain 343 picked up along the way. And when the icebergs hit, him and the devs were the one who had to go down with the ship. While the higher ups hit the lifeboats.
Do you really think people who play Halo 4 don't know who Joe is? That's not "new fans", what you're talking about are people who don't really delve into the games development and just play the game. @@Deep_Armageddon
@@JesusRaveTTVwrong one of the 343 devs said “halo at its core is competitive” halo isn’t made for those people it’s made for the people who enjoy good games
This won't change anytime soon. I have been a contractor in IT and other fields; Much like subscriptions infesting everything, more companies are switching to this model for cost saving among other reasons. If you're disposable from the start they aren't obligated to giving you benefits, retirement, stock options, etc... I don't expect *every* company to offer all of these, but employees have been seen and treated as more of a financial burden as time goes on. A lot of companies hiring as contractors also file you under a W2 and not a 1099 as a legal loophole for taxes in addition to other scummy reasons. All to save *that much more money. They don't care.
And this is why is won't change, but at the end of the day every Halo is release is profitable lol the amount of campaigns they sell everytime at launch trumps the expenses. Unreal should help this team be more competent, 343 isn't off the hook, they made some pretty insane Decisions too
Contracting actually has huge benefits for both the company and the employee due to how light the relationship is generally you make more money vs being hired on etc) The demerits are from what you are describing, very short term contracts, that typically never produces something great as the work style often becomes "just make it work" vs "do it well"
Eventually this will hit them in the wallet and we'll see a change. The problem is it will take a long time and too many will suffer until then. Capitalism...such a scourge
This is one of the biggest problems with Microsoft Games Studios and it pretty much sums up why Xbox games don’t have that same level of polish compared to a PS game. Microsoft doesn’t allow a dev team to grow and learn. These contracting policies will only continue to hinder their developers and their games quality will show for it.
Mostly of international studios from Japan or China or Asia doesnt have that bullshit... Thats why their games release on the pointed date and already finished. Studios need to know who they make partneship nowdays!
On top of all of this, the game originally only had 2 years for this game, 2 YEARS Imagine if it was released in 2020, it would be the original Redfall.
Apparently, the segregation of teams is also why equipment like the grappling hook kind of breaks the campaign because I guess the MP team made the equipment, and the campaign had no idea until later in the process and had to add it in. Also, this really isn't a 343 vs. Bungie thing because it wasn't seemingly an issue during Halo 4, which did launch and was cohesive and content complete
I remember H4 shipping with 1 free season of spartan ops and already had like 4 more completed but locked behind a paywall. Halo has been garbage since bungie left, just keeps getting worse with each game.
@anouaressanoussi Not a hundred percent sure which way it went, but it makes some sense because of how useless vehicles are made by the grappling hook in the campaign for exploration.
@@stickyfing3rs534 literally, the only vehicle that the Grappleshot didn't made useless in campaign were the Banshee and the Wasp (and just for the land mass north of Outpost Tremonius)
For years I have been explaining this to people. It’s a policy problem not exactly a dev problem. When it comes big companies it is almost always leadership or executives who are at fault not the individual devs.
But there are some devs that caused issues as well. Like that one guy who basically said that halo was only a MLG type game and not a sandbox. But that’s just what I think too
Usually mixed bag. Not retaining people for long means more rolling the dice on hiring potentially problematic people due to the higher volume of hiring. By problematic mean unwillingness to compromise, follow basic orders, do competent work, bad communication, etc
@@Atsuma890 I get your point here but that one dev shouldn’t have been a problem to begin with. Whoever was hiring should have noticed that in the interview. While yes one dev could slow everyone else but that is the problem in organising structure. 343 teams were very fragmented. It really comes down to that policy. They wouldn’t have hired people like that so easily if everyone wasn’t disposable.
@@patrickiamonfire965 Sadly, it does. When that guy was a high position and not like a regular worker dev (like the animation worker or something). That guy basically had a high position and made calls in places. So, I know not one person can ruin things; however, if one has power. Those who have similar views will follow, which is what happened here
343 definitely still had a lot of issues. But it was all because of leadership and not the amazing devs who sound like they did everything in their power to give us a good game. Mint said the execs refused to play their own game during playtests which shows a level of laziness and incompetence I can’t even begin to wrap my mind around. That statement alone shows the character of these execs so well.
@@mylittlepkle1714 343 shares some of the blame, but Microsoft should shoulder the vast majority of it for being the root of all these problems to begin with.
As someone who writes code for a living, you get to a point, let's call it what it is, seniority where you can do amazing things with the tech you have and can really push it to it's limits. All that comes with experience and if you never let devs get to that point no wonder everything is just mediocre and doesn't reach for the stars. It takes time to get the real wins out of an engine. Just like all those games that pushed UE 4 to it's limits. Once you master an engine or code base you can really see some smart people make it shine even brighter.
Im a developer as well and I would agree that 18 months on a new engine is not enough time to do your best work. Sounds like they would have been settling in and starting to have a decent understanding of it just in time to be let go.
I’m so glad MintBlitz and so many others are making content about what needs to happen to halo. This franchise must survive, there are so many possibilities of what genre the halo games could be made into.
You know they make these videos and talk about it but we all know 343 does not listen so sitting around and not doing anything and just talking about it isn’t gonna do anything, we need to physically do something like boycott 343 and Microsoft or force them to comply to the fans who essentially OWN the game
As much as I love your videos, Mint, I can't watch more than a minute into this one... it brings up so many frustrations from working in the software field in general, locking down silos of communication, draconian policies that lose your best people, etc. And even though I'm very new to Halo, it's disappointing to see it happening to something that I've discovered and realized is really cool.
I had a buddy on the Campaign team for Halo Infinite. When it launched, he asked me for feedback, knowing I'm a serious Halo fan. I played much more multiplayer than I did campaign, so I gave him more feedback about that than story mode. He said he'd talk to the multiplayer guys about it, only to come back a couple days later and say that he was going to talk to them but someone informed him it'd be very unlikely to get anywhere. I remember when his contract ended, and he was unceremoniously kicked out the door. He knew the limits of it, and didn't even have the energy to try to push back and stay longer. Such a shame.
Great video, Mint! We need to have more conversations about how treating people like they're disposable leads to work that feels disposable. Keep it up!
I'm ngl, their monetization really left a bad taste in my mouth and I haven't played in months. Taking away the season passes which I was happy to pay for, and shoving everything that could be in a pass into the shop was just disrespectful.
And to think that 90% or more of the fanbase just yell at 343 with blind hatred while the actual culprits are laying back in their chairs and counting their cash
18 months thing is across all temp jobs in the USA.. my company does it as cost for temp are cheaper then full time. after 6 months you can bring back the person if they want to come back.. 18 months thing started in 1998...
100% true but to his defense the previous leadership was responsible for all the kinect, no reselling of hardcopy's and all-in-one xbox vision which ruined xbox after the 360 era so he had to clean up BIG DAMAGE but its already so long past and he didnt even manage to bring xbox back on track
Like the level of incompetence you had to have in order to lose the brand power you build with Xbox 360, that guy before Phil was the worst, and those who elected him even worse…
My only hope is that the new 343 execs will fight MS harder on this. Pierre was heading the MCC team so he should know first hand how difficult the contractor model is. Also hopefully they’re gonna pay better attention and set things up so they can compensate the contractor rotation.
Dsync and related issues are still a problem, at least on PC. I just played a match, and I see bullets come out of thin air from across the map and start hitting me, and then a moment later the opponent showed up. It validated a suspicion I had that there was this tiny delay between firing inputs and projectiles. Even from my perspective, when I'm shooting with the bandit, before the firing animation/sound, my projectile would be registered as a hit.
I've literally been saying for YEARS that Microsoft and their crappy leadership is the reason Halo is in the state it's in now. Ever since 5, the rushed release that squeezed the campaign down to what it was, and forced burnout on the teams to "save" the game after it was launched. Now we have Infinite, which, while a better game, was so skeletal upon release it hardly qualified as more than a tech demo / beta for over a year. And yes, the 343 leadership was making bad decisions, but they were given IMPOSSIBLE situations to work with by Microsoft.
Yeah... Very few intelligent gamers with there take on 343.... I have been sayn this shit since the very frickn beginning. Smh, how else do you fuck your golden goose repeatedly? You want it to be great you will make it great! They dont give a damn about us halo fans
ive always found it weird how Microsoft and the 343 executives treated halo after seeing what bungie did. bungie's halo was only what it was because bungie was a group of passionate talented assholes willing to lock horns on every issue in the pursuit of making a game whilst being crazy enough to be willing to do it. and then 343 and microsoft just went "nah lets be a bunch of suits and be corporate as hell". i wouldnt call what bungie did the ideal of what every studio should want to be, but it works a hell of a lot more than what 343 ever did
They had years of feedback. They can't pretend the community didn't give feedback from Halo reach, Halo 4, Halo 5. Halo Infinite. The original creators knew what made the experience good. At this point 343 is still better off fixing their Halo Infinite game like they did with MCC and just branching out like what Warhammer does.
This is why I don’t hate 343. All of the reasons why halo is the way it is because of Microsoft and the former top brass at 343. The actual devs do great work for the most part.
I see that the news is slowly starting to spread. GOOD. I feel more people need to see into the games industry, and where the full blame needs to go for decisions. It's often not the associate designers or even leads. It's the higher on the chain leadership that tells them what to do and signs off on it. You either follow through with it, bad design decision or not, because its a paycheck. Not a lot of dev voices are heard in some studios like this. Bungie also being one of them for Destiny 2. If devs spoke about the Concord firestorm, that'd be something. But due to NDA's they are prohibited from doing that. 343I being just one of these cases.
this really underscores why unionization is so important. the AAA game industry is going through a real nightmare period of big publishers gobbling up smaller studios, shutting them down, and laying everyone off. It's driving talented people out of the industry and it's really not sustainable. We're not going to get the next Hideo Kojima if they have to toil away as low-level contractors their whole lives.
Unfortunately I no longer have a dog in this fight as I have given up gaming for the foreseeable future. However, it really is a shame how common the problem of having higher ups make decisions on matters that they have never personally handled a day in their life. Nearly every job I’ve had that was with a company has been this way. Corporate is always so detached from reality that everything they do is completely nonsensical. Great examples of this are all over the entertainment industry.
Sadly, nothing will change as long as the checks keep hitting for these Microsoft execs. All we can do is hope that the dev teams are able to do some magic with the time and tools they have available.
I really think the proper move would be to return to the Blam engine and upgrade it similar to how CoD has upgraded the IW engine over time. Slipspace was the biggest misstep 343 has taken and it doesn’t feel like Halo in physics, lighting, etc
@@343Films 4 was a gem, there was literally almost nothing wrong with it outside of killstreaks, Halo 5's campaigned went up in smoke like the Hindenburg, true, but it's multiplayer as arguably one of the best in the series.
@@megaman37456 Halo 4 lost 95% of its playerbase within 3 months for a reason. It wasn't very good. And the campaign level design was atrocious. People still play and talk about the original trilogy's campaign. Can't say the same about Halo 4. Which game is the least popular in MCC matchmaking? Oh yeah... HALO 4 😂
the game launched well? the game launched under developed and with less content and more in the shop than any previous halo game even with a year of a delay on top of the years of development. Im going to continue not playing infinite and i wont play the next game until its been out for a while so info can come out about it, then ill consider playing it.
Even senior developers get canned for suggesting that things need to be different or better. Not going with the vision of those above you, even if that of corporate executives, you’re deemed uncooperative. I’d never tell my boss that his plan sucks, most people wouldn’t at risk of being fired. So you can’t expect Devs to speak up like you suggest, those that do often get canned for ‘not being a team player’. Like the dev who tried to suggest they don’t do the lionized in BF2 before launch. He was fired immediately
You'd think at the very least they'd rotate out contractors after the game was "finished" ...it must actually cost a lot to retrain new guys and take time away from actual productivity. It's actually not uncommon to pit employees against eachother to weed out the less productive... But it creates a bad environment. They hit short term goals and end up losing long term as no one wants to stay.
unfortunately, in it sector its becoming more and more prevalent. Not just microsoft and 343... all in the name of cost-saving. save a buck to boost quarterly profit. who cares about the long term success of the company.
It’s sad but thoroughly understandable given everything we’ve seen over the years. It’s sad. Because it was very avoidable to ver multiple years. Really all it would need to make a great Halo game is self reflection, actually learning instead of paying lip service, looking at what has worked, celebrating and creating a platform for the community, and not gutting the soul of the game in the name of MTX. The game would literally sell itself. The community would explode and be praising it, bringing new and old players alike. Greed and mismanagement. Halo hasn’t been the same since. The contracting is just part of it, but still based in greed.
I can speak about knowledge transfer firsthand. This is a problem in every company. Usually how it happens is the company or the project is overloaded with work and no one really has time to stop to create a knowledge transfer page on confluence or something. So people keep working, then people either leave or get fired and that knowledge is lost. So you have to relearn everything. Which is essentially starting over from scratch. I’ve seen that first hand in companies and the only advantage Bungie had back in the early halo days is that they were a small company and people generally stuck around so the knowledge stayed in house. It’s only when Microsoft took over and 343 started to grow that this started to become an issue.
the point about the disconnect between executives and developers holds so much weight because the execs dont care, they fundamentally dont respect the art of games or the countless hours of work that goes into it, all they see is dollar signs and attempt to please shareholders and themselves they dont care about the customers as long as they line their pockets the devs never set out to make bad games, but with this coming out its only becoming clearer exactly why having these out of touch greedy monsters at the top if big studios and development companies means the death of media as art
I think the first mode that should be developed in the next game should be Firefight KOTH so they can build the multiplayer and campaign sandbox simultaneously. Test the AI in a variety of encounters while testing pathing, and help tune multiplayer maps at the same time.
Crazy to think Bungie might have made H2 in one Developer contract cycle but these cycles are now so small in comparison to completion that infinite's developement took AT LEAST 4 waves of contracts, Microsoft should at very least shoot for only 2 contract cycles per game so around 3-4 years if secrecy is so important or 1 cycle per game if they want a live service because that would have had more than 8 different cycles for ongoing support of a decade.
We just need more people to share this , then once the opportunity comes , per se : microsoft under scrutiny for whatever reason , someone should sue them in the counts for everyone to make multiplayer free on xbox , from there , make statements about their business and their employee politics so that whatever organization takes this case to confront microsoft , they could force them to make some changes in general
I’m at the point where I want Microsoft to sell this franchise to someone who is actually going to treat it with the respect it deserves. I love Halo, I love Xbox, but I can’t stand Microsoft. If they treated Windows the way they treat Halo, their business would crumble.
Here’s the thing I was so pumped for infinite I played it for like 2 years consistently but nowadays it’s hard to get into a quality match… there’s not enough people wanting to even play the game or improve at it. Every good halo player I know moved onto other stuff mostly apex legends cause there’s some sort of familiarity between the two games but apex does it right for the most part with a few negative recent updates to the game regarding the greedy and aggressive shops and currencies but the game itself is amazing! And the population is crazy high!
I think halo moving to ue5 is gonna be a huge flaw in the future of Halo. Sure it's easier to hire people, but moving to an incompetent engine that can't make efficient and optimized features yet advertises them as the next generation of graphics & optimizations pisses me off. I get that in-house engines make it harder to hire people, but if it wasn't for 343's leadership & team isolation as well as microsoft's hiring policy, the engine could've been fantastic. If my opinion mattered in this discussion, I would personally say just move back to an older version of Blam! and upgrade it's rendering features to modernization, and don't isolate teams as well as no contracting; hire them for the long run.
So much of what you’re describing reminds me of what I’d read about Microsoft under Steve Ballmer. Particularly the lack of interaction between departments reminded me of the infamous “licking the cookie”legends. I wonder if that’s just embedded into Microsoft as a corporate culture, given how long Ballmer’s been gone.
I reckon if Microsoft give up on the I.P we can only hope a better one comes along some of the ideas 343 had for Infinite was genuinely good. and would of made the game so much better.
The problem is, everyone that cares about halo watches these critique videos and feels bad (343i included). Everyone that doesn't care works at Microsoft.
I've been telling people for years who hate 343 it all stems from Microsoft and I love halo infinite but it has so much more potential they should just re release it on Unreal Engine 5 so it can reach that full potential
I just am sorry for 343 and hate microsoft at this point. I cant believe they still are doing shit like this. As a hardcore halo fan, im so fucking disappointed in where it went.
We've known the contract worker system that M$ uses was a mistake for years now. Though now knowing the extent of how bad it really was is really upsetting as a long time Halo fan.
This absurd policy applies to other studios too, from what I've heard and read Turn 10 were/are in the same situation with Forza Motorsport which released in an arguably even worse state and continues to be well behind both current peers like GT7 and even previous FM games. Hopefully someone at Microsoft exec level wakes up and realises they can't make quality games with a staff turnover like this.
My life goal has always been to create a game studio like Bungie, but without the Microsoft. We'd make games that you care about, and work hard on them because we'd know someone out there is waiting in the most hyped anticipation for it.
This explains the campaign getting bugs and problems when the multiplayer was the only thing really being updated, if the campaign team can't communicate with the other teams, they aren't going to be able to fix problems as smoothly.
providing any type of service requires a coordinated effort... the team was huddled in a small studio in footage from when bungie was developing halo 2. the magic that made halo was corportized on every level
Infinite hasn’t been in a good place for a long time, but those first 2-3 months of playing the game are a fucking sacred memory for me. It FELT like Halo was back, even if the future was going to bring disappointment. I have never been so hyped for Halo as when Infinite multiplayer dropped early, and for a couple of months I was in Halo heaven. It’s shit how Infinite turned out, but god damn did this game hit hard when it released. Sacrilege how it turned out in the end…
I love Infinite, the Campaighn and gameplay are and at launch were great, great characters, story, open world was great. THe problem in the end was that the story feels too small in scope and doesn't end in some way hinting at the future to come or the current state of the Galaxy aside from the Created maybe defeated, the Banished crippled on leadership, and the Endless likely to appear soon. But man these ideas in the video would have made Halo Infinite so amazing. They have the open world but there's barely much to do aside from replay old missions and like pretend the enemy's retaken a base, or your reattacking a facility, or just go around killing named bosses again randomly killing enemies. THe game should have had Chief make contact with a crashed Infinity, Laskey, Palmer, Halsey, Blue Team, and then the Campaign ends with a couple UNSC ships arriving at Zeta Halo and we hear Spartan Agrenna contact the resistance, after that the Multiplayer would either for a time flesh out the time between December and the present leading up to that contact, and then they could have added in open world replayable missions against the Banished you could do. Firefight canonized as us deploying to certain distant places of importance and fightign the Banished there, and the open world of the Campaign would have us as our Spartan or the team leader if they want as Chief fighting the Banished in the essential part of the Ring where the story took place. ANd over time they update the game with new enemy types, new open world encounter combinations like pulling in Banished and UNSC vehicles from Halo Wars 2. Maybe even new factions like an outbreak of Flood, or Promethean remnants under the Warden Eternal that are looking for Cortana and arrived with the crashed Guardian we can see in the distance.
Did you actually say "why didn't Frank O'Conner know better?"? As if he isn't the SOLE source of 343i's intentional mishandling of Halo? The last thing he wanted was for 343i to be anything like Bungie. Imagine being that schmuck. Leaving one of the GREATEST legendary developers of the golden age of gaming to gamble career success on a proven IP like Halo. That, and right before Bungie becomes independent and released ANOTHER genre defining IP with extreme monetary success. He must have been sooooo pis sed that all the evidence points to him being an incompetent fool who ruined Halo.
Microsoft has brain worms known as investors and business analysts. I would run an understaffed studio of 20 people who have no plans to leave over a studio with 2000 talented devs that we can't keep. You contract for positions that are non-essential or not at all. I can almost guarantee that if 343 only had 100 full time devs, the idea of segregating them into isolated teams wouldn't even be a thought, the game would have shipped on time, and there wouldn't be 3 years of cut content leaving the players confused about what happened in the story.
This is very typical in tech right now. Some states have laws that limit how long contractors can be employed before getting converted to full time. Otherwise they get fined. The model is somehow more profitable than providing their employees benefits.
I don't get fired up often but holy shit.
We cannot go through ANOTHER dev cycle where 18 month contractors are the norm.
Please do a new cheating video for halo infinite. I feel like everyone needs a reminder of how bad it still is. MCC too. Thx ;)
Is 343 independent from Microsoft? If not I don’t really think that the figureheads at the studio have much say in how the game development process should go. Almost all of Xbox’s in house releases are unfinished and buggy. The purchase of Activision Blizzard has also probably increased the parent company’s Microsoft to micro manage anything game related since it is (or was) Microsoft’s largest transaction.
Never mind lol, you do mention Microsoft as the culprit
@@ollieblass9370you should have watched the whole video before commenting.
I’m pretty sure you’re aware but this is all how tech companies are run these days for some reason. Though not sure how that can be expanded into video format without it being a video essay.
Its just so upsetting to see when they have the literal golden goose in their hands and they underfeed it, neglect it, under staff its care and then throw it out into a circus expecting countless golden eggs.
Its such a shame.
Nah, this isn't neglect, they slapped the shit out of that golden goose.
Literally. This is what happens when megacorps own everything, and treat their workers like slaves, and refuse to let people be creative. Capitalism is ruining the world
@@Crossfirev "we hired people who hate geese"
@@BoeBinslmaoo
Well said. The original concept of banished bases truly looked outstanding. Sad
I am reminded of a section in the halo 3 making of documentary where an environmental artist and an engineer are talking about how the water physics allowed the artist to create really beautiful water scapes, which the engineer then saw and was amazed at what the artists had done with his system and set out to create an even better physics model for the artists to use. They don’t make ‘‘em like that anymore.
genuine reward loop
It’s the difference between a dev team that is made up of people who just want to passionately create things and a team that churns out employees on a monthly basis and said employees have little to zero passion due to the stringent demands of the management team/workplace.
product vs passion project
What's strange to me is that Microsoft specifically created 343i to be a dedicated team that exclusively develops Halo games. But if that dedicated team isn't actually a team for more than 18 months at a time, then it's basically just a group of fans doing the best they can with someone else's work, not a AAA game company.
it was the same with ea and ghost games/Dice
343 is the publisher they outsource to contractor studios that basically exist exclusively to develop halo so it seems like some legal loophole for them to it this way.
Crazy how those “I had 10 devs make a game without communicating” projects turn out better than this
Theyre not fans that were hired when they bragged about how they purposely hired people who hated the original 3 halos to create 343
The problem is that from the beginning 343i wasn't dedicated to continuing to make and develop Halo. They were dedicated to "fixing" it and remaking it in their image. They specifically hired (and still do hire) for people that hate Halo.
I made the mistake of pre-ordering halo infinite so I ain’t touching Halo until I see that it can actually be a competent game again
Never preorder brother
Never under Microsoft/343i.
Halo will never be great again
Granted this would have only been the campaign though? That was the part everyone actually liked. I'd say there wasn't enough content to justify a $60 price tag, but otherwise it was a solid experience at launch.
I'm still of the opinion that Microsoft should expand 343 so they can have a dedicated team that continues infinite for multiplayer and another that builds new complete and stand alone campaign experiences..
@@ToNyToNy141 It's not 343 it's Microsoft. Watch the video
Ex 343 contractor here. The 18 months of contract with a 6 month gap is required by law, but 343 actually had a weird workaround where they could make you an "external contractor" for those 6 months, so if they liked you enough you could remain on a project for more than 18 consecutive months. And of course because everyone was WFH in 2020 and 2021, being an external contractor was virtually the same as being an onsite contractor. And they were also able to give us +90 days in 2020 due to the plague.
Edit: Sorry, NDA still prevents me from answering questions about past/current/future projects beyond what's already public knowledge
Boy would I like to pick your brain on what goes on inside 343i lol
Let the picking begin lol jk
Do we know if Halo Infinite is going to move to Unreal Engine or are 343i going to wait till their next Halo game?
Also thank you sooo much for your work on Halo Infinite the game is the best Halo game we had in years it's such ashame Xbox is giving up on it..
God dam hate higher ups! 😢
@@THEJSB360it's very much the worse but im not gonna take it out on this guy.
i'd love to hear if 18 months was infact enough time to become fully competent with working on halo infinite, this idea is constantly spread by people who have no technical experience whatsoever
it took me about a month to reverse engineer halo infinites game engine and put out modding tools made from scratch, i'd be surprised if it took anything close to that to become quite familiarized with your area of specialty, especially considering you'd likely be quite good at what you do
So this is gonna be executives and most of all HR's fault?? Wow, who have guessed it
I live in California and nearly every single company has changed to contract only because they don't have to pay for health insurance and they can fire people at any moment without being liable by employment protections. Corporations will always find the loopholes.
Well them and the incompetent devs they hired. Sure there is plenty of talent at 343 but there was also tons of Halo haters and fools.
Maybe gaming companies should drop the Fortnite model?
@@jpineapple9495 im just amazed it took them that long
no they will place the blame on the gamers
Joe was the captain 343 picked up along the way. And when the icebergs hit, him and the devs were the one who had to go down with the ship. While the higher ups hit the lifeboats.
Nah bruh, lower staff and higher ups are all to blame. Contractors are the least to blame
Joe was just a PR to quell the fans because he was there with Bungie during the original trilogy... Nothing more.
@@RantRadioNewer fans (Halo 4 and up) have ZERO CLUE who Joe Staten is unfortunately.
Do you really think people who play Halo 4 don't know who Joe is?
That's not "new fans", what you're talking about are people who don't really delve into the games development and just play the game. @@Deep_Armageddon
@@JesusRaveTTVwrong one of the 343 devs said “halo at its core is competitive” halo isn’t made for those people it’s made for the people who enjoy good games
Its always the greedy executives doing this and its always the actual developers and players who suffer from it.
Exactly. It’s always about how much f*cking money their gonna make
Some of the actual developers are also at fault for the way halo is especially story wise
Only thing left to do is let Old Yeller go. Halo is over.
Frank O Conner always came of in interviews as a weasel of a fella. Not surprised to see issues with him in a lead role.
Never forget “shut your pie hole! The grown ups are talking”
This won't change anytime soon. I have been a contractor in IT and other fields; Much like subscriptions infesting everything, more companies are switching to this model for cost saving among other reasons. If you're disposable from the start they aren't obligated to giving you benefits, retirement, stock options, etc... I don't expect *every* company to offer all of these, but employees have been seen and treated as more of a financial burden as time goes on. A lot of companies hiring as contractors also file you under a W2 and not a 1099 as a legal loophole for taxes in addition to other scummy reasons. All to save *that much more money. They don't care.
And this is why is won't change, but at the end of the day every Halo is release is profitable lol the amount of campaigns they sell everytime at launch trumps the expenses. Unreal should help this team be more competent, 343 isn't off the hook, they made some pretty insane Decisions too
And to take it further: from a company’s perspective, AI is the next step in solving their “employee” problems.
Contracting actually has huge benefits for both the company and the employee due to how light the relationship is generally you make more money vs being hired on etc)
The demerits are from what you are describing, very short term contracts, that typically never produces something great as the work style often becomes "just make it work" vs "do it well"
Eventually this will hit them in the wallet and we'll see a change. The problem is it will take a long time and too many will suffer until then.
Capitalism...such a scourge
Crazy how Halo has the potential of a cultural giant. Microsoft keeps it tied down.
This is one of the biggest problems with Microsoft Games Studios and it pretty much sums up why Xbox games don’t have that same level of polish compared to a PS game. Microsoft doesn’t allow a dev team to grow and learn. These contracting policies will only continue to hinder their developers and their games quality will show for it.
Mostly of international studios from Japan or China or Asia doesnt have that bullshit... Thats why their games release on the pointed date and already finished.
Studios need to know who they make partneship nowdays!
Corpos not caring about their staff and team morale? Impossible!
Silverhand is that you?
Corpos are corpos choom no matter how close the shit hits the fan.
i don't even care about halo anymore I just enjoy watching ur content
I appreciate it Zeke
Same. And I used to live and breathe Halo. It’s sad that my love for it is completely gone.
On top of all of this, the game originally only had 2 years for this game, 2 YEARS Imagine if it was released in 2020, it would be the original Redfall.
Apparently, the segregation of teams is also why equipment like the grappling hook kind of breaks the campaign because I guess the MP team made the equipment, and the campaign had no idea until later in the process and had to add it in.
Also, this really isn't a 343 vs. Bungie thing because it wasn't seemingly an issue during Halo 4, which did launch and was cohesive and content complete
I remember H4 shipping with 1 free season of spartan ops and already had like 4 more completed but locked behind a paywall. Halo has been garbage since bungie left, just keeps getting worse with each game.
Sounds unbelievable that the grapple was a MP thing instead of campaign
@anouaressanoussi Not a hundred percent sure which way it went, but it makes some sense because of how useless vehicles are made by the grappling hook in the campaign for exploration.
@@stickyfing3rs534 literally, the only vehicle that the Grappleshot didn't made useless in campaign were the Banshee and the Wasp (and just for the land mass north of Outpost Tremonius)
@MrAvakstone92 exactly, for moving around the map, there's no reason to enter a vehicle
I will never stop saying Bonnie Ross is the worst thing to ever happen to Halo.
Don't forget Frank
@@zombiekillo61704 and Kiki Wolfkill
All 3 are just terrible
thank god shes gone
And Frank O'Connor
Thanks for the shout out! Stay tuned for more reports.
Nintendo would never let mario, metroid, or zelda stoop so low and for so long.
*Looks at BoTW and ToTK* You sure about that?
@@megaman37456 troll
There’s a difference between a bad video game and game you don’t personally like
For years I have been explaining this to people. It’s a policy problem not exactly a dev problem. When it comes big companies it is almost always leadership or executives who are at fault not the individual devs.
But there are some devs that caused issues as well. Like that one guy who basically said that halo was only a MLG type game and not a sandbox. But that’s just what I think too
Usually mixed bag. Not retaining people for long means more rolling the dice on hiring potentially problematic people due to the higher volume of hiring.
By problematic mean unwillingness to compromise, follow basic orders, do competent work, bad communication, etc
@@Atsuma890 I get your point here but that one dev shouldn’t have been a problem to begin with. Whoever was hiring should have noticed that in the interview. While yes one dev could slow everyone else but that is the problem in organising structure. 343 teams were very fragmented.
It really comes down to that policy. They wouldn’t have hired people like that so easily if everyone wasn’t disposable.
@@joeb6750 exactly a policy problem. They are treating the devs like disposable staff.
@@patrickiamonfire965 Sadly, it does. When that guy was a high position and not like a regular worker dev (like the animation worker or something). That guy basically had a high position and made calls in places.
So, I know not one person can ruin things; however, if one has power. Those who have similar views will follow, which is what happened here
So its mainly Microsoft being a problem and not 343 Industries (343 still has some faults)
343 definitely still had a lot of issues. But it was all because of leadership and not the amazing devs who sound like they did everything in their power to give us a good game.
Mint said the execs refused to play their own game during playtests which shows a level of laziness and incompetence I can’t even begin to wrap my mind around. That statement alone shows the character of these execs so well.
no 343 still shares some blame, they never understood halo at any point from gameplay all the way to its art direction and story.
@@mylittlepkle1714 343 shares some of the blame, but Microsoft should shoulder the vast majority of it for being the root of all these problems to begin with.
yeah, 343 still shares some of the blame but it is ultimately up to microsoft what happens to Halo, for better or worse
As someone who writes code for a living, you get to a point, let's call it what it is, seniority where you can do amazing things with the tech you have and can really push it to it's limits. All that comes with experience and if you never let devs get to that point no wonder everything is just mediocre and doesn't reach for the stars. It takes time to get the real wins out of an engine. Just like all those games that pushed UE 4 to it's limits. Once you master an engine or code base you can really see some smart people make it shine even brighter.
Im a developer as well and I would agree that 18 months on a new engine is not enough time to do your best work. Sounds like they would have been settling in and starting to have a decent understanding of it just in time to be let go.
I’m so glad MintBlitz and so many others are making content about what needs to happen to halo. This franchise must survive, there are so many possibilities of what genre the halo games could be made into.
You know they make these videos and talk about it but we all know 343 does not listen so sitting around and not doing anything and just talking about it isn’t gonna do anything, we need to physically do something like boycott 343 and Microsoft or force them to comply to the fans who essentially OWN the game
As much as I love your videos, Mint, I can't watch more than a minute into this one... it brings up so many frustrations from working in the software field in general, locking down silos of communication, draconian policies that lose your best people, etc. And even though I'm very new to Halo, it's disappointing to see it happening to something that I've discovered and realized is really cool.
I had a buddy on the Campaign team for Halo Infinite. When it launched, he asked me for feedback, knowing I'm a serious Halo fan. I played much more multiplayer than I did campaign, so I gave him more feedback about that than story mode. He said he'd talk to the multiplayer guys about it, only to come back a couple days later and say that he was going to talk to them but someone informed him it'd be very unlikely to get anywhere.
I remember when his contract ended, and he was unceremoniously kicked out the door. He knew the limits of it, and didn't even have the energy to try to push back and stay longer. Such a shame.
Great video, Mint! We need to have more conversations about how treating people like they're disposable leads to work that feels disposable. Keep it up!
I'm ngl, their monetization really left a bad taste in my mouth and I haven't played in months. Taking away the season passes which I was happy to pay for, and shoving everything that could be in a pass into the shop was just disrespectful.
And to think that 90% or more of the fanbase just yell at 343 with blind hatred while the actual culprits are laying back in their chairs and counting their cash
343 has had so many opportunities. They had record budgets and near free reign over Halo 4 and Halo 5. Look how those "gems" turned out
@@343Films as a result of poor management and Microsoft's insistence on contract work
@@343Films halo 4 was good
Mate it’s 50/50 both are at fault
18 months thing is across all temp jobs in the USA.. my company does it as cost for temp are cheaper then full time. after 6 months you can bring back the person if they want to come back.. 18 months thing started in 1998...
I hate it when people glaze Phil Spencer because he plays games. Just look at what’s happened under his leadership. 🗿
The one before him was lots worse , he scr*wed Xbox One … so I’m glad Phil was put in his place even if he isn’t the best.😢😢😢
100% true but to his defense the previous leadership was responsible for all the kinect, no reselling of hardcopy's and all-in-one xbox vision which ruined xbox after the 360 era so he had to clean up BIG DAMAGE but its already so long past and he didnt even manage to bring xbox back on track
Like the level of incompetence you had to have in order to lose the brand power you build with Xbox 360, that guy before Phil was the worst, and those who elected him even worse…
@@zy2239 both are bad
Tell me you're on your last 5 braincells without telling me you're on your last 5 braincells
My only hope is that the new 343 execs will fight MS harder on this. Pierre was heading the MCC team so he should know first hand how difficult the contractor model is. Also hopefully they’re gonna pay better attention and set things up so they can compensate the contractor rotation.
Dsync and related issues are still a problem, at least on PC. I just played a match, and I see bullets come out of thin air from across the map and start hitting me, and then a moment later the opponent showed up. It validated a suspicion I had that there was this tiny delay between firing inputs and projectiles. Even from my perspective, when I'm shooting with the bandit, before the firing animation/sound, my projectile would be registered as a hit.
the fact Halo Infinite didnt end up the same way Gollum did is a goddamn _miracle_
They say this is the year of revelations. Everything from every industry is exposed
I've literally been saying for YEARS that Microsoft and their crappy leadership is the reason Halo is in the state it's in now. Ever since 5, the rushed release that squeezed the campaign down to what it was, and forced burnout on the teams to "save" the game after it was launched.
Now we have Infinite, which, while a better game, was so skeletal upon release it hardly qualified as more than a tech demo / beta for over a year. And yes, the 343 leadership was making bad decisions, but they were given IMPOSSIBLE situations to work with by Microsoft.
Another clear reminder that Microsoft is the true issue with the franchise, not 343.
Yeah... Very few intelligent gamers with there take on 343.... I have been sayn this shit since the very frickn beginning. Smh, how else do you fuck your golden goose repeatedly? You want it to be great you will make it great! They dont give a damn about us halo fans
Nah 343 is complete trash too
Yes. While 343 has made a lot of mistakes, Microsoft really is a big reason behind the scenes for things turning out the way they did.
Fam 343 literally hired people that hated Halo or never heard of halo before..
@7kingly241 that was Frank, Kiki, and Bonnie, not The small teams that bust their asses off who gave us the beauty and fun gameplay that's Halo Inf.
Mint I played Infection with you the other day! Hectic your video is in my feed. Salute!
ive always found it weird how Microsoft and the 343 executives treated halo after seeing what bungie did. bungie's halo was only what it was because bungie was a group of passionate talented assholes willing to lock horns on every issue in the pursuit of making a game whilst being crazy enough to be willing to do it. and then 343 and microsoft just went "nah lets be a bunch of suits and be corporate as hell". i wouldnt call what bungie did the ideal of what every studio should want to be, but it works a hell of a lot more than what 343 ever did
Man, if 343 would pay the forgers I’m sure Microsoft could fire them too….
They had years of feedback. They can't pretend the community didn't give feedback from Halo reach, Halo 4, Halo 5. Halo Infinite. The original creators knew what made the experience good. At this point 343 is still better off fixing their Halo Infinite game like they did with MCC and just branching out like what Warhammer does.
Love hearing the passion behind your voice. Def makes the videos more fun to watch. Keep up the grind bro!
Bro your background clips are so insane, you might be one of the most creative Halo players of all time
This is why we need to Unionize the Video games industry.
Great Video and I'm very shocked about the news
This is why I don’t hate 343. All of the reasons why halo is the way it is because of Microsoft and the former top brass at 343. The actual devs do great work for the most part.
I see that the news is slowly starting to spread.
GOOD.
I feel more people need to see into the games industry, and where the full blame needs to go for decisions. It's often not the associate designers or even leads. It's the higher on the chain leadership that tells them what to do and signs off on it. You either follow through with it, bad design decision or not, because its a paycheck. Not a lot of dev voices are heard in some studios like this. Bungie also being one of them for Destiny 2. If devs spoke about the Concord firestorm, that'd be something. But due to NDA's they are prohibited from doing that.
343I being just one of these cases.
this really underscores why unionization is so important. the AAA game industry is going through a real nightmare period of big publishers gobbling up smaller studios, shutting them down, and laying everyone off. It's driving talented people out of the industry and it's really not sustainable. We're not going to get the next Hideo Kojima if they have to toil away as low-level contractors their whole lives.
Im gald you and Hiden is bringing this up! thank you guys! This need to be said and they need to change!
Unfortunately I no longer have a dog in this fight as I have given up gaming for the foreseeable future. However, it really is a shame how common the problem of having higher ups make decisions on matters that they have never personally handled a day in their life. Nearly every job I’ve had that was with a company has been this way. Corporate is always so detached from reality that everything they do is completely nonsensical. Great examples of this are all over the entertainment industry.
So it’s definitely important to bring light to this kind of mismanagement on Microsoft’s part, but the real question is what can we do about it?
Sadly, nothing will change as long as the checks keep hitting for these Microsoft execs. All we can do is hope that the dev teams are able to do some magic with the time and tools they have available.
Not buy terrible products
Nothing, hasn’t stopped other companies like Sony or Ubisoft
I really think the proper move would be to return to the Blam engine and upgrade it similar to how CoD has upgraded the IW engine over time. Slipspace was the biggest misstep 343 has taken and it doesn’t feel like Halo in physics, lighting, etc
You failed me for the last time 343. ,Darth Vader
343i was the Arbiter form Halo 2 and Microsoft still is the real problem acting as the Prophets in this analogy.
bs. 343 has had so many opportunities. They had record budgets and near free reign over Halo 4 *and* Halo 5. Look how those "gems" turned out
@@343Films 4 was a gem, there was literally almost nothing wrong with it outside of killstreaks, Halo 5's campaigned went up in smoke like the Hindenburg, true, but it's multiplayer as arguably one of the best in the series.
@@megaman37456 Halo 4 lost 95% of its playerbase within 3 months for a reason. It wasn't very good. And the campaign level design was atrocious. People still play and talk about the original trilogy's campaign. Can't say the same about Halo 4.
Which game is the least popular in MCC matchmaking? Oh yeah... HALO 4 😂
@@343Films that's 343i as the arbiter fucking up tremendously with there false ideas of what Halo is/should be.
@megaman37456 H4 had a lot of good ideas but dropped the ball on fully executing them and carrying them to the next games and then there's H5
I saw hidden's xperia video, and honestly its crazy to think what was going on 343. I hope the new leadership helps with good decisons for the future.
the game launched well? the game launched under developed and with less content and more in the shop than any previous halo game even with a year of a delay on top of the years of development. Im going to continue not playing infinite and i wont play the next game until its been out for a while so info can come out about it, then ill consider playing it.
Even senior developers get canned for suggesting that things need to be different or better. Not going with the vision of those above you, even if that of corporate executives, you’re deemed uncooperative. I’d never tell my boss that his plan sucks, most people wouldn’t at risk of being fired. So you can’t expect Devs to speak up like you suggest, those that do often get canned for ‘not being a team player’. Like the dev who tried to suggest they don’t do the lionized in BF2 before launch. He was fired immediately
Mint, I absolutely DO NOT WANT to play any "Halo" past Reach, but *GODDAMN* your gameplay makes Infinite look good!
dude these clips are absolutely insane. you put on a mf show while I listened! 😂
Halo fell so Space Marine 2 could rise.
For the Emperor!
You'd think at the very least they'd rotate out contractors after the game was "finished" ...it must actually cost a lot to retrain new guys and take time away from actual productivity. It's actually not uncommon to pit employees against eachother to weed out the less productive... But it creates a bad environment. They hit short term goals and end up losing long term as no one wants to stay.
Contracting for a staple IP like this is just silly and incompetent.
unfortunately, in it sector its becoming more and more prevalent. Not just microsoft and 343...
all in the name of cost-saving. save a buck to boost quarterly profit. who cares about the long term success of the company.
@@eight-cloudspurple5871 yes. Many sectors of the work force are doing it.
This is truly sad and heartbreaking..
It’s sad but thoroughly understandable given everything we’ve seen over the years.
It’s sad. Because it was very avoidable to ver multiple years.
Really all it would need to make a great Halo game is self reflection, actually learning instead of paying lip service, looking at what has worked, celebrating and creating a platform for the community, and not gutting the soul of the game in the name of MTX.
The game would literally sell itself. The community would explode and be praising it, bringing new and old players alike.
Greed and mismanagement. Halo hasn’t been the same since. The contracting is just part of it, but still based in greed.
I can speak about knowledge transfer firsthand. This is a problem in every company. Usually how it happens is the company or the project is overloaded with work and no one really has time to stop to create a knowledge transfer page on confluence or something. So people keep working, then people either leave or get fired and that knowledge is lost. So you have to relearn everything. Which is essentially starting over from scratch. I’ve seen that first hand in companies and the only advantage Bungie had back in the early halo days is that they were a small company and people generally stuck around so the knowledge stayed in house. It’s only when Microsoft took over and 343 started to grow that this started to become an issue.
the point about the disconnect between executives and developers holds so much weight
because the execs dont care, they fundamentally dont respect the art of games or the countless hours of work that goes into it, all they see is dollar signs and attempt to please shareholders and themselves
they dont care about the customers as long as they line their pockets
the devs never set out to make bad games, but with this coming out its only becoming clearer exactly why having these out of touch greedy monsters at the top if big studios and development companies means the death of media as art
I think the first mode that should be developed in the next game should be Firefight KOTH so they can build the multiplayer and campaign sandbox simultaneously. Test the AI in a variety of encounters while testing pathing, and help tune multiplayer maps at the same time.
Absolutely, this makes so much sense.
Crazy to think Bungie might have made H2 in one Developer contract cycle but these cycles are now so small in comparison to completion that infinite's developement took AT LEAST 4 waves of contracts, Microsoft should at very least shoot for only 2 contract cycles per game so around 3-4 years if secrecy is so important or 1 cycle per game if they want a live service because that would have had more than 8 different cycles for ongoing support of a decade.
We just need more people to share this , then once the opportunity comes , per se : microsoft under scrutiny for whatever reason , someone should sue them in the counts for everyone to make multiplayer free on xbox , from there , make statements about their business and their employee politics so that whatever organization takes this case to confront microsoft , they could force them to make some changes in general
A halo style flight sim would be so fun.
Also we need to give up on slip space it's just a modded version of blam which has been around since the 90's
2:21 seeing this image just break my heart man
Mint Blitz uploads, I click, there's no two ways around it
I’m at the point where I want Microsoft to sell this franchise to someone who is actually going to treat it with the respect it deserves. I love Halo, I love Xbox, but I can’t stand Microsoft. If they treated Windows the way they treat Halo, their business would crumble.
Here’s the thing I was so pumped for infinite I played it for like 2 years consistently but nowadays it’s hard to get into a quality match… there’s not enough people wanting to even play the game or improve at it. Every good halo player I know moved onto other stuff mostly apex legends cause there’s some sort of familiarity between the two games but apex does it right for the most part with a few negative recent updates to the game regarding the greedy and aggressive shops and currencies but the game itself is amazing! And the population is crazy high!
I think halo moving to ue5 is gonna be a huge flaw in the future of Halo. Sure it's easier to hire people, but moving to an incompetent engine that can't make efficient and optimized features yet advertises them as the next generation of graphics & optimizations pisses me off. I get that in-house engines make it harder to hire people, but if it wasn't for 343's leadership & team isolation as well as microsoft's hiring policy, the engine could've been fantastic.
If my opinion mattered in this discussion, I would personally say just move back to an older version of Blam! and upgrade it's rendering features to modernization, and don't isolate teams as well as no contracting; hire them for the long run.
All considered image the possibility of a 343 that is actually working together not segregated. Hopefully new management fix this
this is just wild to hear. I can only imagine that this could've happened from callous and purposeful ignorance
How does it make sense for people who have no experience developing games telling game developers how to develop games
So much of what you’re describing reminds me of what I’d read about Microsoft under Steve Ballmer. Particularly the lack of interaction between departments reminded me of the infamous “licking the cookie”legends. I wonder if that’s just embedded into Microsoft as a corporate culture, given how long Ballmer’s been gone.
Your gameplay is always ridiculously good. I would hate to be on the other team 😂
I reckon if Microsoft give up on the I.P we can only hope a better one comes along some of the ideas 343 had for Infinite was genuinely good. and would of made the game so much better.
We need companies to start making games like it’s 2006-07 again. Hype it up and deliver a great game
The problem is, everyone that cares about halo watches these critique videos and feels bad (343i included). Everyone that doesn't care works at Microsoft.
I’m not surprised at how rocky the development on these games have been now knowing most of the studio turns into a new studio every 18 months
Wild.
I've been telling people for years who hate 343 it all stems from Microsoft and I love halo infinite but it has so much more potential they should just re release it on Unreal Engine 5 so it can reach that full potential
I just am sorry for 343 and hate microsoft at this point. I cant believe they still are doing shit like this. As a hardcore halo fan, im so fucking disappointed in where it went.
We've known the contract worker system that M$ uses was a mistake for years now. Though now knowing the extent of how bad it really was is really upsetting as a long time Halo fan.
This absurd policy applies to other studios too, from what I've heard and read Turn 10 were/are in the same situation with Forza Motorsport which released in an arguably even worse state and continues to be well behind both current peers like GT7 and even previous FM games. Hopefully someone at Microsoft exec level wakes up and realises they can't make quality games with a staff turnover like this.
My life goal has always been to create a game studio like Bungie, but without the Microsoft. We'd make games that you care about, and work hard on them because we'd know someone out there is waiting in the most hyped anticipation for it.
This explains the campaign getting bugs and problems when the multiplayer was the only thing really being updated, if the campaign team can't communicate with the other teams, they aren't going to be able to fix problems as smoothly.
This isn't just a Halo problem but Forza Motorsport / Horizon, and I expect to see this with Avowed and Gears of War.
providing any type of service requires a coordinated effort... the team was huddled in a small studio in footage from when bungie was developing halo 2. the magic that made halo was corportized on every level
Infinite hasn’t been in a good place for a long time, but those first 2-3 months of playing the game are a fucking sacred memory for me. It FELT like Halo was back, even if the future was going to bring disappointment.
I have never been so hyped for Halo as when Infinite multiplayer dropped early, and for a couple of months I was in Halo heaven.
It’s shit how Infinite turned out, but god damn did this game hit hard when it released. Sacrilege how it turned out in the end…
I still want the falcon! I still think about it since it was first teased!
I love Infinite, the Campaighn and gameplay are and at launch were great, great characters, story, open world was great. THe problem in the end was that the story feels too small in scope and doesn't end in some way hinting at the future to come or the current state of the Galaxy aside from the Created maybe defeated, the Banished crippled on leadership, and the Endless likely to appear soon. But man these ideas in the video would have made Halo Infinite so amazing. They have the open world but there's barely much to do aside from replay old missions and like pretend the enemy's retaken a base, or your reattacking a facility, or just go around killing named bosses again randomly killing enemies. THe game should have had Chief make contact with a crashed Infinity, Laskey, Palmer, Halsey, Blue Team, and then the Campaign ends with a couple UNSC ships arriving at Zeta Halo and we hear Spartan Agrenna contact the resistance, after that the Multiplayer would either for a time flesh out the time between December and the present leading up to that contact, and then they could have added in open world replayable missions against the Banished you could do. Firefight canonized as us deploying to certain distant places of importance and fightign the Banished there, and the open world of the Campaign would have us as our Spartan or the team leader if they want as Chief fighting the Banished in the essential part of the Ring where the story took place. ANd over time they update the game with new enemy types, new open world encounter combinations like pulling in Banished and UNSC vehicles from Halo Wars 2. Maybe even new factions like an outbreak of Flood, or Promethean remnants under the Warden Eternal that are looking for Cortana and arrived with the crashed Guardian we can see in the distance.
Did you actually say "why didn't Frank O'Conner know better?"? As if he isn't the SOLE source of 343i's intentional mishandling of Halo? The last thing he wanted was for 343i to be anything like Bungie.
Imagine being that schmuck. Leaving one of the GREATEST legendary developers of the golden age of gaming to gamble career success on a proven IP like Halo. That, and right before Bungie becomes independent and released ANOTHER genre defining IP with extreme monetary success. He must have been sooooo pis sed that all the evidence points to him being an incompetent fool who ruined Halo.
Microsoft has brain worms known as investors and business analysts.
I would run an understaffed studio of 20 people who have no plans to leave over a studio with 2000 talented devs that we can't keep. You contract for positions that are non-essential or not at all.
I can almost guarantee that if 343 only had 100 full time devs, the idea of segregating them into isolated teams wouldn't even be a thought, the game would have shipped on time, and there wouldn't be 3 years of cut content leaving the players confused about what happened in the story.
This is very typical in tech right now. Some states have laws that limit how long contractors can be employed before getting converted to full time. Otherwise they get fined. The model is somehow more profitable than providing their employees benefits.
Halo Infinite has arguably had the most brutal development journey across all the Halo games imo.