I loved Bungie’s Halo. When it moved to 343 it completely fell apart in every way. The base multiplayer play is still ok, but everything else is lost on a path to irrelevance.
This should be the series you can still sit down and play with four people in the same room in addition to the online play. That’s one thing that made the Bungie games special. No one else offered that and it made it unique.
I didn’t know you could create this kind of detail in Forge.
A million times yes. Split screen Halo is still super fun and while I’m sure there’s data somewhere that indicates it’s not “worth it”, I miss it terribly and it’s made the newer Halo games single quick playthroughs for me rather than lasting titles. Me and some friends still play split screen H3 whenever we can all manage to be together (and Super Monkey Ball!).
I miss split screen games.
Even more disappointing is we have these giant ass TVs in our homes that are begging to be used for four player splits where everyone actually has an almost 32" TV all to themselves on a single screen with four players. We also have consoles that can accept more controllers than they ever could in the wired days.
Some developer is going to figure that out eventually and have a big hit on their hands IMO. They’ll make sure you can play over Internet or LAN with four player split in one home and it will be glorious again.
Looks like those rumors of an engine change to Unreal may have been true, the end of an era for Halo:
On one hand, Halo’s story has been flailing since Bungie left.
On the other, multiplayer-only? Ewwwww.
I gotta admit, that’s the part that bums me out. I dinked around in Infinite’s multiplayer while I was waiting for the campaign to release but I’m probably going to bail out on future Halo games if that’s all we can expect.
It’s a multiplayer focus for the “near future” so that could just mean maintaining Halo Infinite’s MP until they can pivot with a new team and engine for the next mainline game.
I shouldn’t speak and make people upset, but i have no knowledge of Halo aside from Halo Infinite - i’ve generally been a not-an-Xbox guy until this generation.
The story in Infinite is so kiddie that i couldn’t really play it for an hour before bailing. Giant apes that swing giant hammers? This evil enemy that destroys all our forces, but are really chuckling gremlins that pop when you shoot them?
What i played in Multiplayer was pretty decent though.
Yeah, but who knows when that will be.
The story in Halo games has always been nonsense, but they’ve generally had very strong gameplay in their single player campaigns. If you have Game Pass it’s worth checking out the Master Chief Collection for the first three Halos - ODST and Reach are also really good. Those are the original games from Bungie. I don’t think 4 and 5 are as good, but they’re at least decent. Those games were handled by 343, not Bungie, and the difference is very apparent.
Nothing, nothing, can compete with Unreal Engine 5.
Nobody has even announced anything competing with Nanite. Just some endusers trying to write plugins to Unity, good luck.
Lots of engines support ray-tracing of course, but Lumen works in software too. Why does that matter? Because you don’t have to render lighting anymore, you place a light and it just works. On software it looks decent, and in hardware it’s amazing. Fortnite has this in, live, and working today.
Possibly. But it also has the benefit of being ubiquitous in the industry, so new devs probably don’t have to do as much work to get up to speed. And if you’ve read Jason Schreier’s books, it’s pretty evident that the Halo engine carries some serious tech debt.
Yes, that’s another major advantage.
With UE5’s huge technological steps forward and free licensing on the Epic store, it feels like we’re in real danger of a game engine monoculture. Even if you’re an indie, why would you choose Unity?
Years probably. Then again, it was going to be years if Halo Infinite had been a big hit and they were making mad MP season pass money anyway.
Jeezus. Just goes to show how leaderless 343 has been. Who is minding the store?
None of this is surprising. It’s really hard to continue franchises with entirely new teams of people. They approach it from perspectives that don’t jive with the original developer’s vision and often rub fans the wrong way because that’s what fans also expect.
Look at Battlefield, which is suffering the same brain drain but from the original studio and how those left behind didn’t recognize what made it great.
This is why since long before this era I wouldn’t regard the publisher of a game but rather the developer. People who do the making who are successful you can trust. Once a franchise moves to a publisher, it really takes the right new blood to have it stay relevant.
I would argue that Infinite was pretty damn good all things considered. Definitely can’t be compared to the mess that is BF 2042. It’s almost unbelievable that a game that was seemingly envisioned as a live-service game was supported so poorly, especially with multiple successful models to imitate in the market.
I think it’s almost certainly a management issue. Several poor decisions were made early in the development cycle and not enough resources were allocated to fix them later on. The engine issue is a key example of this.
The fact that 343 wrote about how they were staffing up their multiplayer team after the game launched and players complained tells you everything.
They delayed the game a year, and it was designed to be “as a service” from the getgo, and yet the time you announce you’re staffing the team is after launch?
Complete clown show.
I’m max level in all three battle passes thus far (Seasons 1 & 2 and the Holiday pass), so I guess I’m in.
