The 343 Industries shooter exclusive to PC and Xbox consoles is at its worst on the Valve platform with a considerable drop in players compared to its premiere.
I’m not really surprised. I feel like Halo has been losing steam for a while and Infinite had the vibe of the devs doing everything popular because it makes money not because they had an awesome idea.
This right here. I think the popularity of Battlebit proves this point. If devs make a game that they themselves would want to play, they create a great game. If the game is made via committee and how much profits the suits can squeeze out of it there is a good chance the game sucks.
While that’s self-evidently true for some of Infinite, Halo also actively avoided a lot of the dark patterns that would’ve kept people playing. It was, unfortunately, kind of the worst of both worlds. The battle passes stick around forever, events repeat, almost all externally-advertised cosmetics were free. It’s supposed to be a system that works for the players, and it more or less does (in comparison to, say, Fortnite), but it also means that you don’t have a reason to sign back in every single day and grind through something to get enough currency to buy the new skin you like, and most people aren’t financially investing themself much in playing it.
The game feels so hollow, like it’s only job is for you to unlock cosmetics.
This whole thing is especially heartbreaking because at its core, the game is great. Running around and shooting feels better then Halo has in a long time. It was just ruined by corporate fuckery.
343 has never been good at managing a Halo game. Not sure what OP is referring to specifically but 343 has made tons of awful decisions with the franchise. One thing that always bothered me with infinite is from what I remember the game has an enormous amount of tech debt because Microsoft loves to hire temporary contract workers so by the time a new contractor was hired and brought up to speed on the new engine they were developing/had developed, they barely had time to do much before having to be replaced with another contractor, which makes me feel awful for the poor developers hired on these temp contracts.
343 has never been good at managing a Halo game. Not sure what OP is referring to specifically but 343 has made tons of awful decisions with the franchise.
Agreed 100%. Halo 4 was the beginning of the end for Halo, imo. I thought Reach was fun, but I was never a big fan of the sprinting, armor classes and weapon bloom. It still felt like Halo overall, though. I remember playing Halo 4 on launch day and immediately being disappointed. I still probably put 100+ hours into it at the time, but I remember thinking it didn’t truly feel like Halo — at least not like its predecessors.
In a nutshell: corporate greed. The only part of the game that was live service was the paid cosmetics.
At launch, their entire idea of more ‘content’ was just visual cosmetics. If you look at their communications at the time it will all make sense.
They constantly referred to an internal ‘live service’ team separate from the rest of the game, and that team was effectively the ‘cosmetics team’.
People talk about contractors, but this was the real problem. They thought they could get away with barely adding any real content and selling tons of cosmetics.
In this case, 343 management (since replaced) used 18-month contractors to perform the engine overhaul and build the game across the several years it was in development in order to save a buck, which in turn meant there were countless holes in engine knowledge and the engine was spaghetti code. That resulted in unfinished tools for months after launch and slow game development as a result, as well as major desync issues where you could be in an entirely different area on your screen than you were according to the server. The monetization and FOMO was also off the rails, with absurdly difficult and annoying weekly challenges that were necessary to grind the battlepass and unlock anything for free. Basic color sliders were taken away in favor of “armor coatings,” and as such, to date I still cannot recreate my Halo Reach Spartan even though I have all the armor pieces necessary thanks to the Season 1 battlepass (which is the only battlepass I own, since I bought it during the honeymoon period and it doesn’t contain any credits to buy the next battlepass). They did successfully commit to having battlepasses that don’t expire, but only if you paid for it, otherwise it still expires and this was only mentioned for the first time like a week before Season 2.
The list kinda goes on and on, but the tl;dr is that devs and players alike both got hyper-fucked by Bonnie Ross.
It’s so sad because the base gameplay is fantastic, but the way 343 chose to do playlists with so few weapons, maps, and game modes available it absolutely killed the game.
I don’t know why people feel surprised xyz game lost 99% of it’s playerbase. Yeah, that shit happens to literally every single game, only really freaking popular games like Fortnite or Apex Legends maintain a solid playerbase for years, people will get tired of most games and move on after a while. In fact, I’d be surprised only if Infinite somehow still maintained a really big playerbase since release.
The claim was that all Halo content for the next decade would be released as updates to Infinite rather than separate games, and past Halo games that haven’t been supposedly kept fresh with new content haven’t had a drop-off this aggressive. There used to be plenty of people who’d mostly play whatever the latest Halo game was, but they’re clearly not playing Infinite.
I think specifically in the case of Halo, the surprise is because it was such a powerhouse of a franchise in the 2000s into early 2010s. Halo was the Fortnite and Apex Legends before Fortnite and Apex Legends in terms of player retention.
Halo 2 and 3 had thriving playerbases for years after release. Infinite came out just over 1.5 years ago and has already lost almost all of its players. The Master Chief Collection currently has more players than Infinite with 5,200 to Infinite’s 3,000 on Steam.
I spent countless hours in high school playing Halo 3, and even a few years after release, you’d have hundreds of thousands of players online. Two years after release in October 2009, Halo 3 had close to 759,000 players online in the span of 24 hours, plus about 129,000 playing ODST, which had just come out a month prior.
I’m not a fan of gaming as a service, but it clearly can be a successful business model for sustained success, so you’d think that one of the most iconic gaming franchises of all time would be able to harness that.
Halo was a legit competitor to cod just past a decade ago.
Now you can’t even compare them because COD is bigger than ever while halo is a shadow of its former self.
Infinite really could have been a partial comeback for halo if they had a steady stream of content after launch, but somehow they added even less than most non-live service games.
I knew Infinite would be shit when they started that whole thing about armour coatings and whatnot.
Customising your Spartan has been a key of the games for years. To slap that behind a paywall is (in my eyes) totally unforgivable.
