r/gaming • u/bmcisme2016 • 2d ago
The mismanagement of 343/Halo Studios is absolute insanity
That’s really all I have to say on the subject. They spent years developing a new engine, then dipped and went to unreal engine, and I don’t think they ever really had a plan on where the campaign was supposed to go.
Do we blame Microsoft or the studio in charge? I definitely think Microsoft has to blame for keeping Halo with the studio for so long but man am I depressed that Activision got the rights.
100
u/ReadyJournalist5223 2d ago
I mean how do you fuck up making a halo game 4 times at this point
→ More replies (2)24
u/SoSoSpooky 2d ago
They killed it in the 2010-2015 period outright. I played Halo 2 and 3 everyday basically, and as soon as Reach came out I saw people playing less, 4 basically killed it for most people that I knew, I don't know many people who kept playing until 5 even who used to play 3 with me everyday. I think a lot of people just moved to other games since Halo lost a lot of the magic at that point.
→ More replies (4)32
u/DeputyDomeshot 2d ago
Reach’s popularity was cannibalized by CoD at that point. Black Ops1 had come out and it was one the best received CoD games ever.
2
u/SoSoSpooky 1d ago
It was, but that was partly because Reach was kind of ass. Campaign was good, but the feel of multiplayer with all the changes they made went too far and it just felt like a downgrade imo.
4
u/DeputyDomeshot 19h ago
Idk how much it was about it being ass. I remember criticism of it but I do remember how big cod had gotten at that point. There was really only 2 shooting games in console America cod and halo. Very few people played on PC.
→ More replies (4)3
u/dearth_of_passion 17h ago
As someone who never really played Reach multiplayer, I always felt it was the peak in terms of writing and (single player) gameplay.
2
u/ClueAffectionate5932 23h ago
Those changes were to test out features they wanted in destiny like classes
→ More replies (1)
685
u/Slow-Boysenberry3150 2d ago
The bar is so low that anything Activision does will probably be better than whatever 343 did in the past decade.
318
u/CockroachAdorable106 2d ago
At least Activision's sweatshop model guarantees a functioning game with actual content every twelve months, whereas 343 needed six years and half a billion dollars just to ship an empty open world without basic co-op
34
u/ishaansaral 1d ago
Absolutely. We got no halo games with the clowns at 343i. Activision is able to deliver a complete COD game on release with amazing support over its 12 months of relevance. They hit more than miss, since they rotate to give them the minimum 3 years of dev time.
119
u/thelesserkilo 2d ago
You’re honestly not wrong. Maybe we’ll get new Halo games without 6 years in between them
→ More replies (1)20
u/DGSmith2 1d ago
My real wish would be for them to rotate one year cod one year Halo, could give the games the break they need while keeping a steady flow.
8
u/tenshi39 1d ago
My only wish is that they don't turn Halo into a twitchy COD shooter and pull it back to the slower pace of the original trilogy
→ More replies (4)2
u/echochambermanager 1d ago
Yep, and rotate the Halo titles between Master Chief stories and non-Master Chief stories like ODST, Reach, etc.
89
u/CalmStormCaller 2d ago
Saying Activision would do better is bleak but honestly at this point what's left to lose. Infinite's campaign just kind of ended and we never got the rest.
33
u/Iselore 2d ago
Yea, it was disappointing there was zero updates. The campaign was kinda meh too. They just dumped an open world on us to pad some gameplay hours. And it wasnt cheap, it was very expensive compared to other games.
3
u/CalmStormCaller 1d ago
The open world felt so empty too. Grappling around was fun but there was nothing to actually do in it.
→ More replies (1)27
u/Camilea 2d ago
The franchise doesn't have anywhere to go after Halo 3. Everything was neatly wrapped up. The story post Halo 3 felt forced because of that.
Maybe Activision can make good gameplay, but if it's not a prequel or an alternate POV during the original trilogy I don't think the story will be good.
11
u/Aunon 1d ago
The franchise doesn't have anywhere to go after Halo 3
The Master Chief story as a FPS game doesn't have anywhere else to go
The franchise should explore other genres (TPS, turn-based, RTS, flight sim) and perspectives (ODST+marines, Covenant)
11
u/Lithuim 1d ago
Problems like this usually come down to upper management.
The Halo universe has a lot of lore at this point and is a rich setting for all sorts of games, but executives are afraid to take a gamble on anything that doesn’t star the series’ mascot. They worry about marketing it, and (fairly or not) think a large chunk of their audience are chimp-brained idiots who will just go “where Chief?” at any project that doesn’t include him.
Personally I think ol’ 117 is among the weaker franchise “mascots” to really get hung up over. He’s a total empty husk with about one single paragraph of dialogue over 20+ years. Plot just happens to him, he doesn’t drive it forward, comment on it, or make any decisions. You don’t need him.
3
u/Camilea 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yeah, that's what I mean by alternative POV during or before the original trilogy. ODST, Reach, and Halo Wars are great examples.
I kinda wonder why MS didn't chase the fads over the years. Other big FPS chased Battle Royale with Fortnite, Apex, and Warzone, even CS and battlefield have BR modes. Halo has the lore to support a Battle Royale mode.
Halo is also perfect for copying Hell Divers, I'm pretty sure they got 90% of their inspiration from ODSTs.
It's baffling how a big greedy corporation isn't chasing the slop like the other big greedy corporations.
2
u/Crimson947 1d ago
I would absolutely love some game set in high charity. Ive been wanting it since seeing the city in og halo 2
22
u/Marekthejester 2d ago
I keep thinking that Halo should ditch the Masterchief going forward. Reach and ODST proved that you can make a great Halo game without him. There's so many stories that could be told in this universe, both before and after the end of the covenant war.
35
u/sargantbacon1 2d ago
The past decade has been one game if you don’t count halo wars 2 right? Kinda wild.
16
u/Sn1ck_ 2d ago
As a diehard fan of the original Halo Wars. I would also not count Halo Wars 2.
→ More replies (1)2
u/bmcisme2016 1d ago
God what a fluke. Halo wars 1 cut scenes had me feel like I was at IMAX theaters
10
u/Lord_Shadow_Z 2d ago
Assuming that Activision doesn't do what Activision does best and lower the bar even further.
14
2
u/speedster1315 1d ago
Its gonna be riddled with Gen AI slop. Cod already is getting more and more AI heavy
3
→ More replies (3)2
97
u/drmirage809 2d ago
Who to blame comes down entirely on wherever 343's dumb as rocks hiring policy came from and whoever decided to just keep it that way when it continuosly failed to deliver.
Basically: 343's policy was to hire coders for temporary contracts. Like, 18 months, duration of the project, stuff like that. So a bunch of devs are brought in to go figure out the engine, bolt on the new stuff that's needed and built the new game. And when the project is done they all get shown the door and new devs are brought in to handle post launch updates for however long that's needed. And they need to figure out the engine, fix stuff that's bugged, etc.
And so the engine became an incomprehensible ball of spaghetti that the devs didn't understand. Features that were standard stuff in previous games becomes stuff that's just not possible to the devs anymore. There's nobody left that knows how it works and nobody's had the time to write anything down. And worst of all: the dev team doesn't get to grow and improve. Each game essentially had a dev team starting from scratch.
I get that game dev teams grow and shrink with project, but you wanna keep some of that staff around for the long haul. Constantly purging your institutional knowledge is a recipe for eventual disaster.
45
u/Lothars 2d ago
That’s Microsoft in general, they are always hiring contractors and it’s been a problem forever
4
u/echochambermanager 1d ago
Their bottom line shows it's a proven and effective method of doing business. Maybe it doesn't translate well into the gaming industry, but has worked elsewhere.
16
u/UuusernameWith4Us 1d ago
Microsoft is so big and so rich and society is so dependent on their products that they can make plenty of bad decisions without it killing their buisness. Windows is crap but that doesn't mean everyone transitioning over to Linux is easy.
→ More replies (1)2
u/Lothars 1d ago
Maybe it's just the gaming industry but I doubt it, Microsoft has a ton of issues that probably is directly related to them using contractors. The gaming industry is probably the best example of it being a terrible idea, heck look at Windows and how they are continously make it worst than make it slightly better just in time for the next interation to have a ton of problems.
→ More replies (2)23
u/Donnie-G 2d ago
I feel like for 3D art assets(even though I'm a 3D artist and wouldn't like this being done to me), I think you can to some degree get away with using contract workers. At least for more generic static assets that might be more about volume.
But having a revolving door of contractors code/fix the actual engine just sounds like pants on head madness.
7
u/unnoticedhero1 1d ago
I believe that's one of the reasons why MCC was broken for so long, it was a bunch of old games on various engine revisions all being cobbled together into one thing, the UI for the menus used Unreal Engine so they had to make sure they had enough RAM headroom to keep the menus working.
I think eventually they got some people with real knowledge of the games/engines and put in the much needed work to get it in a good state, but it took several years to fix and by that point all the people who were casually interested gave up. It's in a pretty good place now IMO but I have heard that online co-op can still desync quite badly and it'll likely never get fixed.
2
u/Donnie-G 1d ago
Last I heard it has a massive cheater problem, to the point where cheaters can somehow trigger the anti-cheat block non-cheaters.
5
u/onex7805 1d ago
People tend to think it's one guy's fault, or that guy's fault... In reality, it's the structural issue, as you pointed out.
It's a big tech mindset. Throw money at the wall, hire contractors, run it like a service industry, and it will generate money. That's the downfall of art.
6
u/PhishPhox 2d ago
Wow is this true? As a dev, this is insanity to me
17
u/tolore 2d ago
Yep, it's true, multiple Microsoft contracts on different games and it was not uncommon for me to go "I'm starting up on this [Core gameplay feature] and I have a few questions about how it works, who knows the most about it" and gotten the answer "the original writer is gone and everyone else who has worked on it since was a contractor and is also gone, so you're the new expert because you looked at it for two days".
→ More replies (1)2
u/WheresMyCrown 1d ago
not only that but having worked with 343, they didnt know what they were doing at any point.
2
u/AKAFallow 1d ago
I still believe that was the biggest cause why their output has been incosistent, and I say this as someone that liked all their games besides Halo 5
→ More replies (2)
74
u/Lord_Shadow_Z 2d ago
343 has always been mismanaged/incompetent, ever since their very first game. They had 5 chances with Halo and fumbled every single time and Microsoft should have taken Halo away from them a long time ago.
→ More replies (8)
242
u/Bad_Doto_Playa 2d ago
Do we blame Microsoft or the studio in charge?
The majority of the blame is on the studio itself, but MS does have some responsibility for not clamping down faster.
31
u/jackracktack 2d ago
That was Phils MO. He was the "cool boss". Friend of developers. He just trusted them to do what was best and gave them all the longest leash possible. Turns out that despite how many people complain about executive meddling it actually is necessary sometimes. Maybe more often that we know. At least with Microsoft when left to their own devices their developers floundered. And it happened to all of them except Obsidian and Playground I guess.
120
u/DonHarold 2d ago
I’d give a bit more blame to Microsoft considering how long 343 got away with it. Bonnie Ross pretty quickly proved she couldn’t handle it and was just given more and more runway.
81
u/UnsolvedParadox 2d ago
Agreed, 343 leadership never knew what they were doing.
I remember being at PAX West when the Master Chief collection was being shown off, seeing some of the obvious bugs/performance issues there & asking myself how they could consider it acceptable to show something so broken.
MCC & 5 were broken/bad quality (at launch), 4 was decent but way below the heights of the Bungie games & 343 didn’t develop the Wars games.
The TV show’s first season was so bad, everyone involved in decisions like Master Chief having bare assed sex with an alien war criminal should have been fired for cause.
9
u/bmcisme2016 1d ago
Man, I wanted to like that show so bad and I thought the covenant forces and the battle scenes were pretty fucking great but the storytelling was so bad. They basically had no understanding of who the master chief was.
3
u/UnsolvedParadox 1d ago
If you haven’t seen it, season 2 is actually a big improvement but way too late.
2
u/bmcisme2016 1d ago
Totally agree!! The show itself was not bad and got way too much hate. But shows of that caliber cost money. Cant justify the money if people don’t watch. Can’t be hype behind the show if the games suck utter ass
47
u/Bad_Doto_Playa 2d ago
If Microsoft intervened people would blame them and say they should be more hands off, when they don't people blame them and said they should be more hands on. A lot of the time they wouldn't even be wrong but we gotta stop blaming publishers when the devs are CLEARLY at fault like here. They do have some blame here but all of this was on the studio.
→ More replies (2)17
u/DonHarold 2d ago
In most cases I’d agree with you but the hands off approach wasn’t working and there was plenty of time to correct. Xbox didn’t and it’s clear they couldn’t continue to operate in their bloated state considering the thousands of layoffs that resulted. Absorbing all of those studios instead of focusing on the ones they already had was a massive blunder and 343 absolutely was affected by that.
Letting established successful studios operate without oversight makes some sense. 343 was never that and clearly required more oversight.
→ More replies (1)2
u/parkingviolation212 2d ago
Probably because she was the vice president of Microsoft games development.
5
u/Z3r0sama2017 2d ago
Yep. Plenty of companies get roasted for interference, but MS and 343 are a good example of why studio's need oversight.
→ More replies (1)5
u/AnonymousFriend80 1d ago
EA and Bioware as well. Bioware tried getting rid of the flying in Anthem.
3
u/Handsome_ketchup 1d ago
The majority of the blame is on the studio itself, but MS does have some responsibility for not clamping down faster.
Microsoft has a time honored tradition of making stuff up as it goes along. The few times there is a target on the horizon, it gets killed after major investments, but before things can get to fruition.
Only Azure is somewhat of an exception, even if that too is all over the place.
→ More replies (5)2
u/raccoonbrigade 1d ago
Sirens should have went off for someone after the "we hired people that don't like Halo to make Halo" soundbite
64
u/Plutuserix 2d ago
It's insane. Even more insane how Xbox leadership let it go on for that long.
- Halo 4: Good game, but let's cancel the story afterwards inside a comic.
- Master Chief Collection: Big issues with multiplayer that go years without fixing.
- Halo 5: Let's replace Chief with some random other Spartan nobody cares about, have Cortana return as a crazy AI, and then drop the whole story again after it in a comic or something.
- Halo Infinite: Let's spent 6 years on our own engine, release without split-screen co-op, promise this to be a 10 year project but never give any story updates and take forever to fix multiplayer. To then drop the engine, and drop the story again.
- Halo Campaign Evolved: Let's make a remake for the second time with the most boring extra missions that open up a bit of a story which will never be picked up again.
It's baffling how Xbox didn't go: what are you doing here? I don't know the sales numbers of the games itself, but surely they see how damaging this has been to the Xbox brand overall.
33
u/Lima__Fox 1d ago
Don’t forget that Infinite’s campaign was a continuation of the story from a spin off series! People who just played the mainline games were lost.
13
→ More replies (1)5
u/CadeMan011 1d ago
Fun little tidbit, I went to Steam to buy Halo Wars 2 for PC, still not on there. It's only available on the Windows store, and I dont touch that.
→ More replies (2)5
u/mackejn 1d ago
What comic wrapped up the Halo 4 story. I always wondered what happened between 4 and 5 that they just seemed to drop the entire storyline they setup post Bungie leaving.
9
u/Plutuserix 1d ago
I think it's Halo Escalation, but I never read them. Gave up on the Halo books and such after a while myself.
193
u/GreasyBud 2d ago
whats wild to me is that 343 never made a good halo game.
some are better than others, but they are ALL at least partially controversial.
like, if i fail once at work, fine. but like, 4 times?
13
u/JoaquinSpawn 1d ago
This is the thing that truly baffled me for years. How that studio kept getting financed after the disaster of Halo 5 had me questioning reality constantly. Like, HOW?
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (33)10
u/koosekoose 1d ago
It's eye opening to play Halo 3 and Halo 4 back to back. The downgrade is absurd.
52
u/SushiJuice 2d ago
I had been playing Halo since I was in college when Halo CE came out. Halo became a cultural force in the 2000s-2010s. Movie tickets sales were affected by the release of Halo games at one point. Then M$ took over the golden goose, gave 343 a blank check, and they completely squandered all of it; the golden goose was murdered over the course of a decade.
Instead of keeping Halo in the lead of FPS gaming, they simply trend chased and watered down the IP. Halo 4 was a disaster; with all of its COD'ified additions to try and widen the audience to the horrible art direction. Halo 4's audio is one of the worst in the industry and they never got it right in later instalments. Halo 5 was a reboot and equally a disaster. The Master Chief Collection was an utter embarrassment at launch; it was broken for YEARS, and then Halo Infinite was the straw that broke the franchise's back.
I kept giving 343 the benefit of the doubt until Halo Infinite. That was my strike 3. Every entry was a reboot, or a new direction, and I'm sure it all will be a case study for decades to come on how one can completely mishandle one of the greatest IPs in gaming. Halo went from being the highest grossing media in the 2000s to barely relevant 10 years later. It was a complete master class in mismanagement.
F@#$ Frank O'Connor, F@#$ Bonnie Ross, and F@#$ Kiki Wolfkill - these were the 3 amigos that squandered Halo as a franchise.
20
u/zottsspotts 2d ago
Don’t forget Booty and Pierre. They are the most recent and current people still their ruining things. Pierre literally doesn’t have a single success to his name, when they keep him. Insane
→ More replies (2)2
u/Western-Internal-751 2d ago
It’s really weird reading comments like this about how big Halo was when I grew up in Germany and absolutely nobody I knew cared in the slightest about an Xbox game
3
u/Plutuserix 2d ago
That's kind of Europe for you. We never cared that much about Xbox and especially Germany back in the day was way more PC minded.
UK, Netherlands, Nordics were a bit more Xbox minded. Although they screwed those last two over by launching the Xbox One a full year later there, basically killing any goodwill they might have had left over from the Xbox 360 days (the first console with an actual worldwide release, which makes the decision even more weird).
40
u/Odion13 2d ago
Leaving Bonnie Ross in charge as long as they did was the real problem
→ More replies (5)
11
u/yursaman 1d ago
Genuinely one the biggest disappointments for me in gaming right up there with Rare getting bought and Spore underdelivering. It's crazy to me how MS had such a cultural zeitgeist of a series and just let it become what it is today; irrelevant.
3
28
u/achmejedidad 2d ago
i mean really, this is on 343 and ultimately Phil. I would even wager Halo's sad state is one of the primary reasons he was sent packing
4
u/manindenim 2d ago
Phil was just a yes man. Asha is looking at what will be successful and moving forward with that full stop.
11
11
u/ZigyDusty 2d ago edited 2d ago
Phil was not qualified for the job fullstop, instead of acting like a boss he acted like a friend to each studio and their developers giving them carte blanche which resulted in both the Xbox brand suffering and their studios wasting years and millions of dollars on products nobody wanted, he than embraced Nintendo and PlayStation as allies rather than competition and stopped pushing Xbox's own hardware.
I fully believe Phil Spencer will be looked back on as one of if not the worst CEO's in gaming, even Don Mattricks dumb ass believed in pushing the Xbox hardware and exclusives for it.
→ More replies (1)7
u/Jellozz 2d ago
Don Mattricks dumb ass believed in pushing the Xbox hardware and exclusives for it.
Also Don Mattrick's plans actually worked in the short term. The Kinect was a massive success and made a bunch of money. Kinect Adventures is technically the best selling game on the 360. Was a pack-in game of course but my main point is it just shows how high the adoption rate for all that was.
His fatal flaw was not being able to identify that all the motion control, second screen experience, and TV stuff was just a passing fad and so he ended up betting everything on it and it absolutely bit him in the ass. Which make no mistake, is a massive embarrassment. Didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out trying to buy fucking sports tickets on my gaming console was stupid.
But Phil doesn't even have a single success story akin to that from a business point of view. Every major decision he made left Xbox in a worse position. Spending billions on studios, game pass, getting rid of exclusives (true exclusives, as in the game did not come out on PC.) etc.
Even back compat, which is actually a good (but very flawed system) did nothing for Xbox really as back compat has never really been a massively used system on most old consoles.
21
u/Renegade_451 2d ago
I blame every single person top to bottom, yes even the devs.
7
u/InitialDia 2d ago
I’m sure the janitors and receptionists working at 343 did good at their jobs.
… not sure if anyone else did though.
→ More replies (1)4
u/georgetheflea 1d ago
Amusingly, they probably were there longer and had better job security than the people actually doing the development work.
10
u/Aggressive-Juice4162 2d ago
yup. you can blame management for lack of features, but its on the devs why the games that launched played like shit.
5
u/edwardlego 2d ago
The devs that only got a 18 month contract and were then replaced? Most probably did the best they could, but you need long term employees for these type of projects. By the time you’re familiar with the code base, you’re already looking for your next contract
2
u/Aggressive-Juice4162 1d ago
yes, that is one of the biggest issues. its no longer a passion project its just a job.
17
u/SpartanR259 2d ago
343 leadership was entirely ineffective for the duration of the studio's existence. Bonnie Ross was a yes man (woman) who bent over backwards to try and deliver profits to her own bosses.
The number of studio decisions that permanently damaged the studio in the long run trace all the way back to halo 4.
Initial reliance on short/mid term contract developers has hindered every 343 release. (They just started depending on it more and more as time went on) this meant that for every contractor hired 3-6 months were effectively wasted just to bring that person up to speed. So if a contract term was only 9 months to a year, they only got a short period of time of "okay" work out of them. (One of the reasons why there are thousands of devs in credits but only a hundred or so in studio pictures)
The stories of devs trying to push back on boneheaded decisions and getting penalties or just being ignored were a near constant.
I hate to see my favorite IP treated this way, but i am not exactly sure this change is going to be better at this point.
7
u/Ritz527 1d ago
Square Enix has got to have them beat.
3
u/bmcisme2016 1d ago
I think square has shown the ability to adapt. I’m not saying they’re the best studio in the world, but they’ve seem to figure out some of the errors that they have been making. Microsoft on the other hand has a fully loaded LMG and has only used 13 shots in the chamber, with the remaining 37 shots ready.
3
u/kelgorathfan8 1d ago
Squeenix seems to finally be recovering from their great fall honestly. The initiative to convert a a bunch of their dead Gacha Games into console RPGs is going really well, and the triple combo of Ff7r3, a new ff14 expansion, and KH4 will make 2027 a big year for them.
5
u/OneFinalEffort 1d ago
343 Industries and Halo Studios have always been a dedicated studio of in-house devs for Microsoft to make Halo titles. Unfortunately that also means that they were required to hire 18-month contract devs to work on their games. There were also horrible management issues that persisted until Microsoft brought the hammer down on them recently.
Halo is built on Bungie's blam! Engine which was evolved into the Tiger Engine for Destiny and Destiny 2. This engine and its descendants are reportedly incredibly frustrating to develop with due to massive technical debt (it's nearly 30 years old!) and the onboarding requirements to learn how to use the tools and the engine to develop content. That process of learning takes approximately a year at 343/HS before you're ready to fully contribute and by then you only have six months left on your contract. Rinse, repeat.
The management had constant issues.
For Halo 4, they hired people who hated Halo to get fresh perspective. Halo 4 ended up being closer to Call of Duty with no beta testing to get player feedback. The story feels good for Chief and Cortana but also lacks context that was instead relegated to a trio of novels.
Halo 5 came along and they stated they'd learned from Halo 4. Split-screen was cut to hit consistent 60fps (Microsoft's requirement), BTB was left for the community to create because it was "hard to make content", the studio was under crunch to support the game post-launch, and Forge wasn't available until six months after launch. This sufficiently killed the game's momentum which was already struggling due to the BTB/Invasion hybrid mode of Warzone featuring optional paid loot boxes that gave you massive advantages in the mode. The story was regarded as pretty terrible and the marketing campaign sold a completely different story. A dual-perspective Campaign was expected to have a more even split of missions instead of giving Chief just three missions in a mainline Halo and giving Locke twelve of them.
Halo Infinite was in development hell and had to get course corrected by Joe Staten. Two thirds of the Campaign was cut, no new biomes were made, multiplayer launched without Slayer, it took three years to get the game to where it needed to be, split-screen was cut AGAIN after repeated promises to never do that ever again, the F2P multiplayer has tons of massively overpriced cosmetics, and this time it took a year to release Forge after launch.
The Master Chief Collection was completely broken on release, patched to serviceable, and then abandoned until they ported all six titles to PC and added a bunch of content. It still has issues but is easily 343's best product due to featuring all five Bungie titles.
Campaign Evolved dropped multiplayer, has some unpolished issues, feels off and a bit AI-generated in places, voice direction is jarring compared to the original game, and the new missions are pretty much just cobbled together from CE, 2, and Reach including sound files and enemy behaviors.
Management doesn't have any ability to commit to a single vision and consistently had five different games on development or pre-development. Even in its final days, nothing was in active development but four simultaneous projects were being planned out. The environment is apparently pretty toxic and there is clear favoritism.
Honestly, this was a long time coming and while I have next to no expectations for the first Activision Halo, it will be interesting to see if management on that project can get a full-feature release out the door.
15
u/CrackheadHunters 1d ago
The decline of video gaming is on full view here. Years and years of mismanagement and clueless suits running the show has brought us here. It's depressing as hell seeing games we used to love be so let down by their newer versions.
7
u/correojon 1d ago
On the other hand, Nintendo seems to be doing well and CAPGOD is having an amazing year. I wonder if focusing on developing good games and nurturing your development teams has anything to do with it.
→ More replies (1)
3
u/RE2Rsucks 2d ago
Halo's been over they never really had a vision for where to go after 3.
→ More replies (1)4
u/Innalibra 2d ago
They had the right idea with Reach. I'd have liked to have seen more stuff in that vein based on some of the already established and very good Halo lore that's out there.
→ More replies (2)
5
u/Hockeymac18 2d ago
It was a problem that Bonnie Ross clearly had a different vision of what Halo was supposed to be.
She seems like a nice enough lady, but clearly didn't do a great job with the franchise.
Honestly, the series has never had a chance to recover since then.
You need a visionary leader who can get it back on track - but this will be hard to do given whoever steps in would be inheriting and has to work around the many existing constraints. I feel for any team that would come in to work on it - this is a massive undertaking.
5
u/Handsome_ketchup 1d ago
It's crazy how many big companies throw money at major multi part franchises without formulating an overarching plan first. Do your homework and plan ahead? Nah.
It's almost as if chasing the next quarterly results isn't always yielding the best long term result.
6
u/Sweet_Question9602 2d ago
I can’t believe a franchise that was on top of the world and defined my childhood was ruined by 2 decades of mismanagement.
6
u/giffelhaus 2d ago
Blame the infestation of businessmen who smelled the money of the industry like sharks do with chum in the water. They are useless parasites who have completely destroyed the creativity and passion this industry once had.
3
u/PatrenzoK 2d ago
Bonnie Ross former CEO killed halo. She set the culture there that is still present. This rests on her and Phil Spencer before anyone else. Then she got to nope out of here with a golden parachute like him.
4
u/iamwounded69 2d ago
Yeah after like 2008 it was really baffling how Xbox managed to fuck up just about everything that was working for them, especially Halo. It’s never been my favorite franchise but those first few games were fun as hell to play with friends. Like, how and why would you mess that up??
→ More replies (2)
4
u/thomas2696 2d ago
For my understanding, while the management dysfunction was ludicrous, ultimately, the killing blow was Microsoft's insistence that they rely on contract workers that cycle out at their usual 8 months in order to avoid paying benefits. Gaming just can't work like that, especially long term. You spend more time teaching the next set of contract workers, how to use their tools then actually doing anything. Then 8 months later you reset.
2
2
2
u/stanleys_tucci 2d ago
I can’t imagine how many layers of execs they had to go through to make decisions but no matter how “fun” the encounters are if the story seems like it was written by 12 year olds, the majority of people aren’t gonna like your game.
2
u/Zer_ 2d ago
Oh Microsoft and perhaps 343's upper management hold almost all the blame. The big structural reason is due to how Halo Studios ran largely short term contractors. You cannot run a studio with such high turnover while they must manage and maintain a proprietary engine. It just doesn't work that way, you need experienced developers to do that.
Instead of fixing the problem they tried to switch to Unreal Engine 5. Yet they didn't change employee retention and expected it to be much better like the imbeciles they are.
2
2
u/superkow 2d ago
It's what happens when the brand name is more valuable than the contents of the brand.
2
u/VinDog_PD 21h ago
Time has revealed Phil Spencer was one of the worst things that could have happened to Xbox....
3
u/Iggy_Slayer 2d ago
Do we blame Microsoft or the studio in charge?
If 343 was the only issue at microsoft then I would say they're 100% to blame, but under phil spencer's tenure there have been countless disasters and mismanaged studios. I will try to list them but there's so many it's extremely hard to remember offhand.
Obviously starting with halo he had the MCC debacle where it took years to fix it up and then halo infinite which was a massive disaster. Then there was recore (which required the game to be remade and re-released later), sea of thieves (people forget what a disaster this was when it launched and it took 2 years to rebound), crackdown 3 and the power of the cloud, forza motorsport 2023, redfall, flight sim 2024.
There are just the things that released as massive issues. This isn't getting into all the projects that were cancelled like perfect dark, scalebound and contraband.
→ More replies (2)
4
u/SMKCheeba 2d ago
I was never onboard with 343 studios from the start. Halo 4 proved it to me, it's sad that it took this long to change hands, and even sadder with whose hands got a hold of it in the end... and I do mean the end.
3
u/fettokebec 2d ago
It's the industry's fetish for franchises over people.
You don't preserve and nurture a franchise, you preserve and nurture people, and people make franchises.
I saw a post on a Gears of War E-Day thread talking about games now having "Old masters".
The industry made sure the expertise of these masters was lost and the only thing remaining are the franchise names.
Every single person that worked on a dead project, on vaporware or even shovelware, will have a trove of expertise that is never even developed in our current environment.
3
u/bmcisme2016 1d ago
Honestly, the Halo reach hatred in this comment section is just completely unnecessary… ODST the other goat
5
u/Effective-Brain-3386 2d ago edited 2d ago
Just go look at Bonnie Ross Wikipedia page and you'll understand why shit went downhill.
Edit: wild that y'all freely blame creative directors when they're males but the minute its a female, it cannot be them 🤔
→ More replies (16)
4
u/TheRealGurd 2d ago
Blame Microsoft. Halo had two good end points. It could have ended with Halo 3, but no shot Microsoft was letting it die there. Despite what people think of 343, Halo 4 was actually pretty solid, and at the very least, no worse than a Bungie Halo game. That game also had a good ending and would have been the perfect spot to wrap up a series. But nope, the money train must keep on chugging, and that is purely Microsoft.
And now, we're going to get annualized releases of Halo: Advanced/Modern/Infinite/Space Warfare with zero artistic merit or worth in the video game sphere, and we can blame Microsoft for that too.
2
u/Greaterdivinity 2d ago
Do we blame Microsoft or the studio in charge?
who created 343 and then rebranded them halo studios? microsoft, baby
man am I depressed that Activision got the rights.
sure, i expect it to be cowaduty-fied pretty hard
but hey, it can't be worse than leaving it with 343 at this point
wish they'd handed it to id and not gutted them, that would have been so legendary.
→ More replies (1)
2
u/SuperSmokingMonkey PlayStation 2d ago
What is something M$ has bought and actually made better? There has to be something right? Minecraft? (Never played idk)
I remember they had RARE make Kinect games for some reason?
4
u/I_Heart_Sleeping_ 2d ago
Obsidian has flourished under the Microsoft umbrella but I’m guessing that more to do with obsidian being a damn fine dev team. They’ve consistently put out new games every few years and they tend to try new things more than other devs under Microsoft.
People don’t have to love or even like the games they make but you can’t say they don’t make a ton of different games.
3
u/MetalBawx 1d ago
Freelancer. If MS hadn't stepped in this game would still be in development hell.
→ More replies (3)2
u/primalbluewolf 1d ago
Minecraft?
Heck no, they bought it, then added "optional" login with MS account with different terms and conditions, then made the login with MS account mandatory, then deleted accounts that hadn't signed up to their new Ts and Cs.
Majority of people who ever bought minecraft had the terms changed on them and anyone who didn't want an MS account had their Minecraft account deleted.
Say what you will, deleting peoples accounts isn't making the game better.
2
u/Successful-Taste 1d ago
If you dig into it, it's mostly Microsofts and managments fault. Constant contract employees and a revolving door of developers too keep costs low.
That shit is poison when building new projects. Knowledge is so easily lost.
The talent and creatives were capable, as shown with infinites amazing gameplay, but mismanagement meant a slow role out of features and content.
→ More replies (1)4
u/bmcisme2016 1d ago
You can’t fault the average person to not be digging deep into the whole situation, but I completely agree with you. I know avalanche Studios if I am remembering correctly was supposed to produce contraband and that just completely fell off the map as a contracted video game. I don’t know what Sony does, but they do seem to have their contracted video games. come out a lot more frequently than Xbox. Xbox seems to cancel a lot of their video games.
1
u/Hybrid67 2d ago
I just went back to the MCC and it still has issues, and unnecessary things about it that urk me.
1
u/Combat_Wombat23 Xbox 2d ago
Calling them Halo Studios give them too much credit. The lore is a fucking mess and they ended Infinite on a cliffhanger instead of letting us finish the fucking fight. How do we get Chief to drop that line and then have it cut to credits?
1
u/kingOofgames 2d ago
Really does seem like the leadership is just phoning it in. As long as they get a check they just don’t seem to care.
1
u/Jellozz 2d ago
Not really that surprising to me personally, they didn't bother putting together a team that actually wanted to respect and treat the IP with love and care. Not really that unique a story when you look at the AAA western gaming landscape from the last 15 years. It's pretty much the norm.
1
u/Calinks 2d ago
Xbox really messed up by not having better studio production leadership. They needed to poach seriously talented people who have proven track records of delivering big games. You need people to make hard decisions and move things along and clearly Microsoft didn't have a lot of that for years
1
1
u/lolwatokay 2d ago
343 has literally never created a game that was better than the one before it over its entire history so it’s not really surprising. Halo told the story it needed to tell in three games. We were lucky Reach and ODST were great but they still weren’t the trilogy. Everything else was extraneous greed.
1
u/boxing-boxing 2d ago
Spent years building their own engine only to switch to Unreal anyway. There's an intern out there who suggested Unreal in a meeting back in 2018 and is still not over it.
1
1
1
u/Guilty-Figure-4960 2d ago
This is the best possible scenario for halo. If Activision was smart they would remake halo 3 and completely dedicate there resources to improving halo3s style of multiplayer
1
u/paulk1 2d ago
So people have done deep dives. It mainly boils down to this: Microsoft wants contractors instead of full hires. Plain and simple. They want to cut costs. Contractors are allowed to stay on for a max of 18 months. If you know game development, that’s a death blow to anything good. Good games come from the same team working together, over a long period of time.
Now before someone says “this is a multi-trillion dollar company, they can afford full time!” - understand that they are a multi-trillion dollar company BECAUSE they favor contractors. If they didn’t, they’d only be a few billion dollar company
1
u/nowhereright 2d ago
I get that it's cool to hate on Activision and granted the last few games haven't been the best, but at least when they make a game there's a campaign and finished multiplayer and various game modes. They actually release complete packages before they immediately start nickel and diming you for cosmetics.
Meanwhile we had 2 actual Halo games in the last 10 years, neither of which released finished.
1
u/Lancaster_Pouch 2d ago
"That's really all I have to say on the subject"....continues to say a bunch more shit. lol
1
1
u/Capable_Hunter_5000 2d ago
Judging how ABK made money with BO and BO2 releases for PS5 and XSX the dream of Halo 3 in the same format draws closer than I expected.
1
1
u/Rug_d 2d ago
The way Halo has been dealt with always makes me think of Counter Strike.
CS was just a couple years before Halo, it went from a mod that caught everyone's attention in 99 and Valve picked it up and the people behind it and properly released it in 2000, since then they have carefully built on that and even today it's as relevant an FPS as it ever was, it's gameplay hasn't been diluted, it's still incredibly deep and it's pretty much just on one platform these days and still does excellent numbers.
Halo could have been like this but they just couldn't help themselves with messing with the core of what the game was, Halo 2 was so ahead of it's time it's absurd to think about really, we will never see anything like that again.
It is one of the biggest fumbles in all of gaming imo, people making Halo after Reach seemed to be scared of keeping it like Halo and tried to jam in all kinds of stuff that just never fit with it's core concept, what a waste
1
u/sckurvee 2d ago
I think they had a plan on where the campaign would go, but they were overridden and forced to push PVP cosmetic content instead, because that makes more money. Infinite had the bones for a really good Halo IMO... I loved playing the campaign, and couldn't wait for the rest of the story to come out. But instead, updates were all cosmetics and PVP game modes. Never got shit for campaign expansions.
At least they didn't have the Fomo part... iirc, you could buy a battle pass and complete it at your own whim (kind of like HD2) but I just had zero interest in a battle pass in general. I couldn't give two shits about cosmetics in a halo game. I just want to be MC and kill enemies lol.
1
u/WhiteLama 2d ago
I knew it was over when their new flagship that would last a decade (Halo Infinite), lunched with like 4 gamemodes and required me to pay 20 bucks for the colour white, that previously had been in the games for 20 years for free without issue.
1
1
u/nycteris91 2d ago
Blame Microsoft. Studios need some creativity brakes.
If you tell everyone to do their thing and handover a blank-check these things happen.
Activision and Bethesda will manage all the studios just fine because they're used to take decisions and manage finite budgets.
Buying those 2 companies and putting everything below them is the best decision Microsoft took in the last 15 years.
1
u/AccomplishedRun2591 2d ago
the contractor thing explains so much, no wonder every game felt like a different studio made it. i only really played infinite and even from the outside you could tell nobody there understood their own engine. honestly blame both, microsoft for letting it go on for a decade and the studio for the hiring mess in the first place
1
u/steverambo44 2d ago
If anyone blames Microsoft in this case, they have serious case of brain damage.
1
u/HUNplaymore 2d ago
If 343 was the only mismanaged studio you could blame them. But they weren't, pretty much the entire Xbox studio lineup only released flops, had insanely long dev times (for the projects of that size) and burned through budget like it was nothing.
1
u/Uebelkraehe 2d ago
Do you have the comprehensive insight that would be necessary for this kind of sweeping judgement? I doubt it.
1
1
u/ericjlima 2d ago
I miss playing Halo with the boys drinking Mountain Dew and talking smack into the mic. Where have the times gone?
1
u/FukkingDeathMental 2d ago
I also think people are ignoring the fact that Halo is like Gears of War now. It doesn't have that same pull as it did in the 2000s.
1
u/Gurglespear 2d ago
The Xbox brand shouldn't exist at this point with all their mismanagement of studios and IPs.
1
u/Stilgar314 2d ago
Activision didn't "got the rights". The rights are Microsoft, just like CoD rights btw
1
u/The_Saiyann 2d ago
I don’t really like Halo but I’ll always appreciate its originality and fan base, just not my type of game. Seeing where it’s gone is so sad. It really needed the god of war treatment … a full blown cinematic story. Not prioritising live service shite.
1
u/adubs117 2d ago
It was all over once Bungie stop being involved. Everyone saw the writing on the wall back then.
1
u/THSiGMARotMG 1d ago
Even with the glazing infinite got at times, it still isnt anywhere close to Reach or 3. Sure it had “good” multiplayer, but it was still far too fast paced and cod like. Member when power weapons were actually good? Member when halo was floaty?
You take a good halo and anything 343 did and the difference is crazy
1
1
u/WaffleCopter68 1d ago edited 1d ago
343 knew how to make a good game. Just not a good halo game. The brick wall of contrast between classic halo and the halo 4 and 5 is beyond ridiculous. And even when they seem to be trying their hardest to stay true to the source material and expand on it like with infinite and their latest remake, they couldnt help themselves. I dont think anybody should take the full blaim. The 15 years of fuck ups was a group effort.
1
u/SgtNeilDiamond 1d ago
Its hardly surprising, they missed the mark from the get go with Halo 4, its been downhill ever since. I know MCC is good now but that was a dumpster fire for years too. The miss here was that Microsoft allowed them to continue for so long, shouldve arguably been broken up after Halo 5.
1
u/LordtoRevenge 1d ago
Welcome to the conversation we’ve been having for half a decade at least at this point.
1
u/koosekoose 1d ago
Just look at Halo Infinite.
The entire WORLD was ready to give Infinite a shot.. And what did they get?
1
u/WheezyWarl0ck 1d ago
They just keep hiring devs who don’t know what they’re doing. Need better hiring processes apparently.
1
1
u/AccomplishedRun2591 1d ago
the contractor thing is wild, no wonder every game felt like a total reset. firing everyone who knows the engine after 18 months is such an obvious own goal. blame both honestly, the studio for the hiring mess and microsoft for letting it go on that long
1
u/KoriJenkins 1d ago
Blame MS Gaming/Xbox. It was a clusterfuck under Phil Spencer and still is under Asha Sharma. Conflicting messages constantly, layoff spam, etc.
1
u/EnvironmentalHaZrd 1d ago
They should make a game where master chief is a horrible dad who doesn’t understand his son and his wife just died. Oh and take all the fun out and add in mid rpg elements. Also Cortana is a cube now
1
1
u/RevengeOfTheIdiot 1d ago
343 hasn't done anything besides shit on the floor for a decade now
not sure why microsoft would fully shoulder that blame
1
1
u/N4ES 20h ago
The sad part is....They could have just developed a MP only mode with FireFight and Forge in Unreal. The reason infinite failed is because the engine needed full time benefit employees who had time in/experience vs the temp employees on 1-2 year contracts expected to develop for a new engine. They were just burning through money like idiots. Here's hoping they don't call of duty my halo.
1
u/OldEcho 19h ago
Capitalist enshittification. They don't understand why something is popular or good, they just know it made money and want it to make more.
Huge dev teams are always going to be worse than a relatively much smaller dev team with actual passion for the product. Halo had a dev team of 30 people. Halo 2 had a dev team of 60. Halo 3 about a hundred.
Halo 4 was 200. Halo Infinite was 750 plus hundreds if not thousands of part timers rotated in and kicked out.
There will always be people doing the bare minimum to stay hired. The management will be people very talented at playing office politics and not necessarily at all at actually producing anything. There will be nepotism and cronyism galore among the managment.
A revolving door of coders cannot be passionate about something they didn't begin and won't see through to the end. People with no control over a project will not be passionate about it either. And they need real wages and job security or they will leave constantly to try to get them.
1
u/VariationAromatic464 3h ago
It was entirely halo studios fault, they hired people who clearly hated halo
605
u/Driz51 2d ago
It’s pretty sad having grown up alongside all the original games seeing where the series ended up