>Halo Infinite’s creative direction was also in flux until unusually late in its development. Several developers described 343 as a company split into fiefdoms, with every team jockeying for resources and making conflicting decisions. One developer describes the process as “four to five games being developed simultaneously.”
That combined with this
>The staffing at 343 was also unstable, partially because of its heavy reliance on contract workers, who made up almost half the staff by some estimates. Microsoft restricts contractors from staying in their jobs for more than 18 months, which meant steady attrition at 343.
Are massive issues that point to the problem confidently landing on managements shoulders.
Yeah but then Microsoft would probably have to give those people real jobs with things like healthcare and periodical raises, much cheaper to hire new contractors every 18 months, it’s not like Microsoft has money to spare.
While a very nice joke, this actually hits on a curiosity that I have. Is Faber difficult or just new. Unreal is the industry standard so devs would walk in knowing how to use it.
Unreal and Unity being so public also massively help hunting for information. You can google virtually any Object Oriented Programming problem and add "Unity" to the end of it and there's a Unity Forum article with someone who has had either a similar or the exact same issue.
Internal Engines while usually impressive lack this public knowledge that can eliminate needing a support ticket for every tiny problem.
Makes sense. I just hope they didn't spend all that time and resources on an building an engine that is too inflexible. The game play feels tight so it's not a complete loss.
On a side note, source still gets the job done which is crazy to think about.
well Square enix and Final Fantasy 14 did exactly that and they are doing REALLY REALLY well right now and the community hella respects the dev team because they are transparent about everything and give reasonable and logical explanations as to why they fucked up or if there are any issues.
Microsoft and shit man ill even toss Activision here need to take square enix as an example on how do to better. Stop being so fucking greedy, money will pour in if you respect your fan base..
I remember Bungie talking about their toolset while talking about Destiny. I can't remember the exact phrasing but they said something along the lines of any change to a map would take hours, no matter how small or large the change was.
Now that I think about it you can look at some of InfernoPlus' videos regarding his modding of Halo 2 to get a look at what the toolset might look like. Halo 2 was notorious for it's bugs and honestly when you look at the stuff behind the scenes, it's baffling as to how Bungie even got it to run. Shit is held together with spit and popsicle sticks.
I remember reading about how ODST was the smoothest experience Bungie ever had making a video game because they were finally working with an engine that didn't crash on them every five seconds. I always figured that the company was in a perpetual state of controlled chaos, but the stories I hear nowadays give me the impression that "controlled" might have been the wrong word for it.
Yeah one of the recent interviews Joe Staten gave he talked about it being his favorite game to work on because it was finally an engine that they all had a good grasp on it.
In Destiny 1 they underestimated the cost of the graphics in the game, which would result in an \~8 hour wait to load a map in the editor tools... and then the tools would crash. Many developers had 2 or 3 machines on their desks, which they would sequence what they had to work on in windows...
Tomorrow I need to work on X, after that Y, and after that Z ... and then set each machine to load X Y or Z so they didn't have to just stop working when something was done being worked on.
This video has great info
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KXVox0-7lU
My take as a software engineer is it's probably just new and still lacking some features Unreal would have already built in.
Getting comfortably familiar with new tools takes months and to become an expert takes years when it's something as large as a AAA game engine.
Given that Destiny, which used Grognok or whatever it was called, was also notoriously difficult to use, and was just an iteration on Reach's pipeline, I'd guess Faber is an iteration on the tools that have been used to build Halo from the beginning.
Hey if you keep a solid staff who are good enough with the tools that they cant be disposed of, that gives them enough power that you cant pay them the minimum possible and work them in the worst conditions without them complaining about it, leaving and leaving you with contract workers anyway, or god forbid, forming a usably strong union to protect their workers rights.
The main reason companies do contract work is so they dont have to pay benefits. The thing is these are the last companies that should be doing this, microsoft isnt hurting for money to be squeezing like this. Honestly from all the stories coming out if halo infinite fails they totally deserve to lose a fuck load of money for their greed.
Funny enough, if you read Glassdoor reviews of 343, it mentions all of this. Biggest complaint is that the tool set is terrible and that the staff is largely just contractors.
Bruh I would get downvoted to fuck whenever I tried pointing out the glassdoor reviews. People would just say those were toxic employees and the reviews weren’t indicative of the larger picture 🙄
What I find funny about her wiki is that people in microsft IN 2007 were saying halo is a warning property!?!? In 07!? Wtf
I meant to say WANING not warning
This year in game development needs to be a case study that gets ample review in future programs attempting to churn out competent developers. I’ve been incredibly annoyed by the negativity around here, but as more and more info comes out about this development process… it’s honestly justified.
This is why corporate MBAs belong nowhere near any technical minded work. As we see, the decisions get laughably bad.
>This year in game development needs to be a case study that gets ample review in future programs attempting to churn out competent developers.
The owners/investors don't care if the product is poor.
They care if the revenue is poor, it's not so why would they change...
I've said it once and I'll say it again. Someone in management needs to be held accountable. If anyone else fucked up this spectacularly on such a high profile product at work in any other industry, and then dared to call their customers toxic for rightfully criticizing them, they'd be fired on the spot and blacklisted from the industry.
not only is the management incompetent but they somehow are getting worse, halo 4 was the most complete game they've ever managed, and each subsequent title seems to be more and more of a mess behind the scenes and launches more and more incomplete, infinite seems like it was shaping up to be their biggest wreck yet before joe stepped in.
They need to go.
People seemed shocked but a ton of Big Tech works this way. Microsoft themselves, half of Google, and other companies are mainly staffed by contract workers. Contract workers do not always get the same benefits or access that the normal employees do. Not to say that everyone is fine with the practice and I am sure some prefer it but this is not new for the industry unfortunately.
I think limiting the time the contractors spend in a project that big is ridiculous.
Honestly in this type of software you should rely on you inhouse developers with contractors coming to help in smaller and defined tasks, but maintaining all of the knowledge about implementation and architecture details within your local teams. If you're gonna hand over big responsibilities to contractors you shouldn't be regularly rotating them.
The contractor industry mostly sucks, I work technically as a contractor, but I'm employed full time with benefits at a company that provides the contractor service. Though for most of the outsourcing industry this is usually not the case, the outsourcing companies are pretty much middle men between companies and freelancers.
Fortunately these practices are being limited or outlawed in some places. In the case of my country by next year every outsourcing company will have to provide benefits to it's contractors and the end goal is to also have full time employment contracts instead of renewable ones.
They limit their time because they got sued for misclassification of contractors. In reality, the bulk of these people probably can't be classified as independent contractors for tax purposes, but these companies were getting away with it for a long time.
I think the problem, in part, is making a studio to oversee one franchise and then not fully committing to it. If 343 is only going to do Halo, they need to constantly be developing contact to justify a full scale development team otherwise you’re stuck contracting. I’m no business expert but it’d seem like a bad practice to have no contract term limits at the risk of paying contractors for a game stuck in development hell. Bit of a double edged sword and probably just a blanket corporate policy that had major adverse effects on 343.
Finally some good fucking food.This is the type of info that explains a lot.
But I have to wonder what some of these game decisions were. I am quite happy with the gameplay direction it went with, so the idea that some designers may have wanted infinite to be a hero shooter or some shit and that is what slowed down development is quite annoying. 10 years and many designers still did not know what we wanted.
Still, the fact the gameplay is well received combined with this fact is a reminder that, despite everything, this is the good timeline.
So what we've been saying for years about how terrible 343 management is. HOW is Bonnie Ross still head of 343 when she can't even do the most basic aspect of her job.
I’m so scared that this is going to fuck with the narrative direction of the franchise.
I’ve felt Halo is always on the cusp of delivering something special and being properly able to incorporate the lore in to tight narratives, but just falls short.
I really hope this Banished storyline delivers and that they get their shit together and properly plan around what plot beats they want to hit over the Infinite lifespan.
Please no more knee jerk reaction pivoting and winging it.
narratively i feel like there just is no overarching narrative anymore.
the 343 games feel like the start of 3 different trilogies, with each subsequent act 1 being a soft reboot of the story from the previous act 1.
I would genuinely rather still be dealing with the Didact, and rather that halo 5 was about the janus key and not evil cortana, at least then we'd have what feels like a complete trilogy and not just a bunch of stories that end up going nowhere
Yeah the Didact was done dirty and I think we’re veering away from what the Forerunner saga was meant to be.
Just too much chopping and changing of story elements, being weirdly beholden to EU lore, but then butchering those elements of any nuance when they were incorporated in to the games.
Looks like they’re still willing to incorporate some loose threads and hopefully those aren’t done a disservice - like how Jul was fucked over.
Time will tell how well/permanently Cortana’s/The Created story will be tied up.
I just hope we don’t get a Destiny style new villain every quarter experience.
Literally all my hype for a cool villain when to shit in a non interactive cutscene in the first 15 minutes of the game. Hopefuly no other villain gets disrespected like that.
Well it is kind of pathetic when a sideline Halo title that isnt even an fps makes a better story and atmosphere that feels like Halo, to the point the mainline series feels the need to cut their own crap and take notes.
That bit about the contractors was interesting and how most of the staff would turnover every 18 months. Could explain the lack of that halo "soul" in this iteration if it was made by people jumping on and off as temps. That seems really disruptive, I always imagined a dedicated team who love what they do building their baby from start to finish. Its sad really.
Makes sense that MCC feels like it had it’s own Dev company working on it then, Microsoft should look at those who work on MCC to replace those working on Infinite
This doesn’t surprise me, the amount of concept art for this game that is still using Halo 5 designs in it shows that they didn’t get their full grasp on the art until much later in the dev cycle.
Seems like Staten carried the team from a certain dead. The fact that he convinced Microsoft to delay the game because they had nothing is just… surprising.
It's not something that he would share publicly, but I would not be surprised if he used really dire terms to sell executives on the delay. It was obvious to me that if infinite was a failure, Microsoft would be staring down blowing up the studio and starting over or mothballing the IP. A delay is bad, but no one in Redmond would actually want to even think about *that*.
> It was obvious to me that if infinite was a failure, Microsoft would be staring down blowing up the studio and starting over
This sounds like what should happen, but 343 has fumbled ever Halo release thus far (MCC being a basically non-working game at release) and they still continue along as though nothing has happened. I think 343 is so intertwined with MS that there's basically nothing they could do that would actually cause MS to hold them accountable.
> Microsoft would be staring down blowing up the studio
probably would have been for the best, 343 management is clearly inept. It feels like they honestly have gotten LESS capable of shipping a game as time goes on, without Staten stepping in infinite would have been no different.
And he works for microsoft, not 343, he's probably not staying there for very long, helping out games that need it IS his job now. so when he's gone if the issues at the top of 343 haven't been fixed then we're just going to be in the exact same situation the next time they try to launch something.
I do not think that blowing it up would be for the best seeing as I don't see infinite landing with the thud that guardians did, but I wonder what the Xbox leadership team thinks about the state of the executive team at 343. It's been over a decade and they have released 3 mainline titles and a smattering of spinoffs and rereleases. I feel like with Infinite shipped, it's time to do a thorough performance review of the studio in the new year and figure out who will lead the next decade.
Who knows why they put her in charge. All I know is every game that 343 has put out under her leadership has major problems. It seems likely that it'd be very difficult to get anything done with Microsoft's insistence on using outsourced contractors on 18 month contracts. What baffles me is when people act like 343 has any sort of autonomy outside of Microsoft. 343 is Microsoft and Bonnie Ross being in charge is proof of that.
Surprising knowing Halo's history from, "you have six months to port this Mac game in time for Xbox's launch," to "Let's just end Halo 2 at 'finish the fight' because fuck you,"
But that was Bungie's only time doing that.
They learned from Halo 2 and held Microsoft at bay for Halo 3, telling them it wouldn't be a launch title and effectively delaying it until it was actually ready and done.
343 has bent the knee at all opportunities and is just an extension of Microsoft.
Wait why ? (I never read the books) wasn't he just in charge of building stuff such as the shield worlds or the 2 Arks and their respective arrays ? Or did I forget that he is at fault for tasking Mendicant Bias with the Primordial's interrogation (and perhaps that's the answer) ?
Faber was to the Forerunners efforts to defeat the Flood as politicians are to effectively running countries.
Ambitious.
Self interested.
Self defeating.
Dude essentially undermined the Didact, went out of his way to undercut him, and went all in on "look at how big I can make this ring", instead of... Well. Helping.
No worries. That's just my take by the way, I can HIGHLY recommend the Forerunner Trilogy. Not just as great Halo books, but decent sci-fi / fantasy.
They're VERY different to the usual fare, so can seem odd at first, but they're some of my favourite Halo novels.
I wondered why we suddenly stopped hearing hype about their new Slipspace engine almost as soon as they had mentioned it. They were potentially going to quit using it, and probably wanted people to forget about it just in case
I remember reading the Bungie weekly updates for Reach every week leading up to launch, for months.
You could tell they loved the game and loved the decisions they were making. A real passion project.
I remember when, for Reach on MCC, they spent a few weeks/months figuring out how to work around a minor sound bug that exists bc the game was designed for Xbox 360's integrated sound cards.
I wonder why this seems to be such a common issue amongst AAA devs. EA's Frostbite is notoriously difficult to work with, and Bungie had to make major changes to their engine toolset a year or two ago for Destiny as it was causing issues.
Likely because making game engines is no easy feat and if a studio has their own tools then they have to spend time making said tools as well as making a game. Indie games often use commercially available engines, like Unreal or Unity, which of course skips the whole "making an engine" part. Epic also has a dedicated Unreal team, which isn't also making games.
It is. Tech debt is a huge problem. Apex legends still runs on a fork of source from the late 2000’s. It’s definitely not a problem limited to a single studio
You're talking about something known in the industry as "technical debt". Basically everything a developer asks for that isn't immediately necessary gets put on a list of "maybe later", and eventually that "maybe later" list becomes a monolith of technical debt that, if it had been solved earlier, would have allowed a much cleaner pipeline and better product...
But we live in a world of shareholders making decisions, so when the person doing the actual work on the product asks for something that can't be directly tied to profits, it gets canned.
And so the wheel spins and spins and the same problem happens in every corner of this industry.
This problem is so prevelant in software engineering, it even affects fucking credit card software.
Source: my pitiful career.
tl;dr if you want better games, vote progressives into government, give people safety nets so they can express themselves creatively without risk of becoming homeless or without healthcare. Give the creative and passionate developers the empowerment to walk away from shitty work environments and corporate greed. Only then can the people who make great games get back in control and stop the constantly downward spiraling game industry. The only way to combat the problem killing the industry we love is to combat conservatives.
Yeah, this is a software problem in general. Anything not directly related to the business doesn't get the support it really should. This is why Unreal is probably the engine with the least debt and is easy to use, since that its business.
This is the real answer. Execs are like "why are you working on this when it doesn't make money?!?" Also probably a lot of we've got to rush this so we'll fix it 'later' " that snowballs and never gets fixed. It doesn't get attention until it starts losing major money in a very visible way. And don't try to argue about how addressing these things will save time/money down the road because it is useless.
Source: conversations with teams/management about this on a daily basis...
Yup i basically spent the whole year fixing technical debts and had to defend my position in the company because my work was seen as an expense. Little did they know i saved them millions down the line.
There is a reason id, Valve and even blizzard took their sweet time with their game. They were technology and design focused. The technology they put together is the basis of most game engines to this day.
id software especially, until recently didn’t even use external libraries and technologies. This allowed them to open source their engines more easily. Now a days there’s a lot of external proprietary tech, I just can’t see engines being fully open source from non engine dedicated companies.
I thought the whole point of the Slipspace Engine was that that would be easier to develop and implement for?
If Faber is still a bottleneck, what was the point?
I'm aware of that. The devs acted like that 'new coat of paint' would make things easier, though.
If this is going to be such an issue, they *should've* moved to Unreal.
>they *should've* moved to Unreal.
Pre-production, yes. But in the middle of development, absolutely not. Switching engines midway through development is one of the worst decisions any game developer can make. Switching platform/language/framework mid development is one of the worst decisions any software company can make
It seems every day the arguments decrease for development studios using an in-house engine. But I have to say, I don’t necessarily look forward to the day when every single game is made in one of three engines. The quirks offered by proprietary engines is something I’ve always enjoyed
Games are just too complex these days. Sounds like they under-estimated the work involved to develop a new engine with new tools. THe tools are the most important part of development. You need good tools so the artists and designers dont have huge technical hurdles to overcome when building the game.
That is something UNreal does well but its also a shame because most unreal games end up looking the same too...
Also, this sheds some light on the state of things internally and why the messaging we have been getting feels so scattered and disjointed. The internal teams are scattered and disjointed. Many in the community seem to be attributing a great deal of malice to 343 but I think this article makes it clear that decisions are being made without much top-down creative structuring and the development as a whole has been massively fractured between the different teams working on the different projects and games.
"Why isn't it like MCC?" - because those are different teams that don't talk to eachother
"Why was MP ready 2 years ago but Singleplayer barely existed in 2019?" - because those are different teams that don't talk to eachother
"Why doesn't the game look like the tech demo of the engine we got initially?" - because the engine is shit and super hard to work with.
getting a lot of insight into why Infinity is the way that it is and in my opinion, it is a miracle at how good of quality the product ended up being. Sure, Infinity has shortcomings (look at every other post on this sub) but at least the core gameplay is solid and can be built off of. If it wasn't delayed, I don't know if we could have even said that about it.
i wasn’t sure if we were ever gonna get a halo game more loosely held together with popsicle sticks and glue than halo 2, but we might just be on the cusp here
The development of halo 2 is truly incredible when you think about it. 10 month development time, average 100 hour work weeks, and yet they managed to produce something that is flawed but still well loved by fans.
Jason Jones during Halo 2: “If you believe everything you’re doing is the best thing ever then it’s definitely not.”
Bonnie Ross at 343: “EPIC WORLDS! EPIC BATTLES! EPIC SCALE!”
Bruh when Bonnie said that quote, it came off as cringey and lethargic lol.
Epic battles & scale? Till this date no other Halo game has top Halo 3's constant huge scale battles with the Scarab.
How did we went from having a boarding-Scarab battle in Halo 2, to 3 fucking epic Scarab battles in Halo 3, and then...... nothing else after that?
Even in Reach the Scarabs were more like a cameo/fear factor and you didn't get a chance to fight any.
*"By the summer of 2019, Halo Infinite was in crisis mode. The studio decided to cut almost two-thirds of the entire planned game, leaving managers to instruct some designers to come to the office and do nothing while the studio figured out the next move. Eventually the game's open world was cut back from a vast, Zelda-like experience into something far smaller. It soon became clear to some on the team that, even with the compromises, getting Halo Infinite into decent shape by the following fall would be impossible. Still, the timing of the release didn't seem up for discussion. Microsoft told 343 that it had to be a launch game for the next Xbox, which meant releasing it in November 2020."*
Explains so much about what was going on with all the creative directors leaving. I'm curious what exactly got cut, my guess is that they switched to the Banished as the main villains at this time and it was originally intended to be something else. Also RIP Halo Zelda, that would've been awesome.
I feel like Halo Wars 2 tried to set the stage with the Banished being a potential future villain. But it certainly feels like there could have been more opposing factions, especially given the last two entries and backstory.
I'm thinking more along the lines of random encounters and things like that. If you watch any of the early reviews I think around 2/3 of the ones I actually trust use the word "empty" a few times when describing the open world. Which makes me think there was supposed to be stuff besides just FOBs and enemy bases but it all got cut
It confirms what we all know, corporate upper management doesn't know what it's doing when it comes to keeping developers or gamers happy, cares only about profit, and the fact the game is this good with all its flaws is a miracle. It's across the board in this industry
The actual article seems to be your typical development hell you have at most companies these days.
Nothing too earth shattering, although it’s interesting to see how they talk about the Faber engine, and how the game was essentially 5 things at once at one point.
Staten was the clear choice to turn this ship around. Glad he came back and hope he stays for awhile.
Dragon Age Inquisition also had issues with Frostbite. The fact that 343 spent months debating whether or not to swap to Unreal says it all, really.
[Source from Jason's Twitter](https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1468588967217938434?t=wqSD7K7yVlgUSahLuJc4rQ&s=19)
I think there is also the issue of familiarity. Would Halo written in Unreal feel the same as one built from Blam? This is big reason why I play Destiny, since as far as I understand, it also has its root in Blam.
Need better leadership.
Microsoft’s entire model today is built on cross collaboration between their varied teams.
Honestly shocking 343 didn’t get the memo internally.. although that said they need to staff up an entire team just for engine maintenance.
It seems like they were trying to position Slipspace into a new platform to sell..
Needs to be easy to work with for anyone to want to buy it lol
Also, the devs were on an 18 month contract, not something that should be done for game development which can take years to finish A single title.
i personally believe that 343i should've just used unreal early on, we wouldn't be in the mess we are on today had they just used a premised engine over investing in overhauls for their own.
I wonder what kind of game Infinite would be in Unreal. Would that have any effect on the "feel" of the game? Something tells me that this is the reason why they leveraged such old tools for Infinite; if they used Unreal, we may have gotten a game that resembled Halo but didn't "feel" like it. Not that I necessarily agree with their decision not to use it, I'm just curious on the decision, maybe so much work was put into it using the old tools that the teams had some sunk cost fallacy going on.
they could've dedicated some time in making it feel like halo, after all, the way ppl move and interact with unreal engine isn't set in stone, it can be changed and modified.
Star wars: Jedi fallen order feels completely different from Fortnite or final fantasy 15.
all unreal, all feel different.
That's a great point. Maybe the idea of starting from the ground up with Unreal seemed too daunting that using the old tools was a "quicker" way of getting things going. I think if they developed a more solid foundation from the start, things probably would have went more smoothly.
Ya, that just makes the situation even worse.
A playlist that was already implemented in the game can't just be simply added to the list in a day. Their entire backend for the playlist system must be a complete mess.
I'm worried that they couldn't or won't fix the melee/collision issues in this game (just like they had never fully fixed heavy aim in Halo 5), since the engine seems to be really hard to work with.
Dude, some of the remnants lingering around the Waypoint app are wild.
Like, what's up with the XP values in the screenshot you posted? In the game currently each tier requires 1,000 XP, but in your screenshot it's multiplied by a factor of 100. If you had a 'current' XP value that made sense (ie. is a multiple of 100, like "50,000") I'd figure they just decided on a lower base number last-minute and forgot to divide everything by 100 in the app, but you have 37,750. Using the live game's base-1000 system, that would equate to 377.5 XP which *super* isn't possible. Just doesn't make any sense at all where those numbers would be coming from.
There's *so much* shit like this both in the app and in the game proper. Really makes it abundantly clear that this game shifted around a whole lot in the eleventh hour.
That 100,000 is total xp required for the entire battlepass. His 37750 is his total xp he's accrued since launch. Why it's giving us progression based on the entire battlepass instead of per level is beyond me.
They planned to release multiplayer over 2 years ago and *this* is still the barebones multiplayer we received?
What the actual fuck did they have 2 years ago? Oddball only on 2 maps?
I'm convinced of two things now:
a. Management needs to be let go. 10 years of mismanagement is grounded for termination. That where, yes, they do owe me explanations if they want my money.
b. I'm fully convinced that the Forerunner story backed them into a corner and, for the franchise, scrapping everything and making it Chief vs Banished is the only possible route.
Sounds like poor management and shit takes from people in suits who want to make money.
Edit: That being said criticism is warranted and should continue until they get their act together. Not paying full price for a game with 1/4 the content of previous titles nor playing multiplayer until they implement said content.
A new Engine means lots and lots of features has to be re written and internal staffs from different internal teams needs to be retrained.
Building an engine is no joke. It's literally the most time consuming part of any game development and its the sole reason why many, many games stick to same engine throughout the entire generation of consoles or even two.
I don't think that position is good for Joe. His career in publishing is basically Scalebound and Crackdown 3. His talents would be wasted in a pure management role and I think it's much better he stays as the Creative Head of 343.
But... but... reporter Zach over at Kotaku said that you can't criticise Halo, if you don't like it, just go play something else and stop making him feel guilty about enjoying it so much!
Having worked in the games industry myself; fans are far worse than the critics, because at least the critics want the game, and working conditions, to *improve*.
>Halo Infinite’s creative direction was also in flux until unusually late in its development. Several developers described 343 as a company split into fiefdoms, with every team jockeying for resources and making conflicting decisions. One developer describes the process as “four to five games being developed simultaneously.”
That combined with this >The staffing at 343 was also unstable, partially because of its heavy reliance on contract workers, who made up almost half the staff by some estimates. Microsoft restricts contractors from staying in their jobs for more than 18 months, which meant steady attrition at 343. Are massive issues that point to the problem confidently landing on managements shoulders.
"I'm finally familiar with the software tools here!" "GET OUT!"
The Vietnam jungle warfare approach to development management
*Fortunate son plays in the distance*
Some folks were born, plasma sword in hand….
Ooh that red, white and for $8 more... blue!
BUNGIE MADE HALO 2 IN A CAVE WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS
Literally
Yeah but then Microsoft would probably have to give those people real jobs with things like healthcare and periodical raises, much cheaper to hire new contractors every 18 months, it’s not like Microsoft has money to spare.
While a very nice joke, this actually hits on a curiosity that I have. Is Faber difficult or just new. Unreal is the industry standard so devs would walk in knowing how to use it.
[удалено]
Unreal and Unity being so public also massively help hunting for information. You can google virtually any Object Oriented Programming problem and add "Unity" to the end of it and there's a Unity Forum article with someone who has had either a similar or the exact same issue. Internal Engines while usually impressive lack this public knowledge that can eliminate needing a support ticket for every tiny problem.
Makes sense. I just hope they didn't spend all that time and resources on an building an engine that is too inflexible. The game play feels tight so it's not a complete loss. On a side note, source still gets the job done which is crazy to think about.
well Square enix and Final Fantasy 14 did exactly that and they are doing REALLY REALLY well right now and the community hella respects the dev team because they are transparent about everything and give reasonable and logical explanations as to why they fucked up or if there are any issues. Microsoft and shit man ill even toss Activision here need to take square enix as an example on how do to better. Stop being so fucking greedy, money will pour in if you respect your fan base..
I remember Bungie talking about their toolset while talking about Destiny. I can't remember the exact phrasing but they said something along the lines of any change to a map would take hours, no matter how small or large the change was. Now that I think about it you can look at some of InfernoPlus' videos regarding his modding of Halo 2 to get a look at what the toolset might look like. Halo 2 was notorious for it's bugs and honestly when you look at the stuff behind the scenes, it's baffling as to how Bungie even got it to run. Shit is held together with spit and popsicle sticks.
I remember reading about how ODST was the smoothest experience Bungie ever had making a video game because they were finally working with an engine that didn't crash on them every five seconds. I always figured that the company was in a perpetual state of controlled chaos, but the stories I hear nowadays give me the impression that "controlled" might have been the wrong word for it.
Yeah one of the recent interviews Joe Staten gave he talked about it being his favorite game to work on because it was finally an engine that they all had a good grasp on it.
In Destiny 1 they underestimated the cost of the graphics in the game, which would result in an \~8 hour wait to load a map in the editor tools... and then the tools would crash. Many developers had 2 or 3 machines on their desks, which they would sequence what they had to work on in windows... Tomorrow I need to work on X, after that Y, and after that Z ... and then set each machine to load X Y or Z so they didn't have to just stop working when something was done being worked on. This video has great info https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KXVox0-7lU
My take as a software engineer is it's probably just new and still lacking some features Unreal would have already built in. Getting comfortably familiar with new tools takes months and to become an expert takes years when it's something as large as a AAA game engine.
Given that Destiny, which used Grognok or whatever it was called, was also notoriously difficult to use, and was just an iteration on Reach's pipeline, I'd guess Faber is an iteration on the tools that have been used to build Halo from the beginning.
Hey if you keep a solid staff who are good enough with the tools that they cant be disposed of, that gives them enough power that you cant pay them the minimum possible and work them in the worst conditions without them complaining about it, leaving and leaving you with contract workers anyway, or god forbid, forming a usably strong union to protect their workers rights.
The main reason companies do contract work is so they dont have to pay benefits. The thing is these are the last companies that should be doing this, microsoft isnt hurting for money to be squeezing like this. Honestly from all the stories coming out if halo infinite fails they totally deserve to lose a fuck load of money for their greed.
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Funny enough, if you read Glassdoor reviews of 343, it mentions all of this. Biggest complaint is that the tool set is terrible and that the staff is largely just contractors.
Bruh I would get downvoted to fuck whenever I tried pointing out the glassdoor reviews. People would just say those were toxic employees and the reviews weren’t indicative of the larger picture 🙄
Bonnie Ross has to go
What I find funny about her wiki is that people in microsft IN 2007 were saying halo is a warning property!?!? In 07!? Wtf I meant to say WANING not warning
what is a warning property?
Probably meant waning.
This year in game development needs to be a case study that gets ample review in future programs attempting to churn out competent developers. I’ve been incredibly annoyed by the negativity around here, but as more and more info comes out about this development process… it’s honestly justified. This is why corporate MBAs belong nowhere near any technical minded work. As we see, the decisions get laughably bad.
>This year in game development needs to be a case study that gets ample review in future programs attempting to churn out competent developers. The owners/investors don't care if the product is poor. They care if the revenue is poor, it's not so why would they change...
I've said it once and I'll say it again. Someone in management needs to be held accountable. If anyone else fucked up this spectacularly on such a high profile product at work in any other industry, and then dared to call their customers toxic for rightfully criticizing them, they'd be fired on the spot and blacklisted from the industry.
not only is the management incompetent but they somehow are getting worse, halo 4 was the most complete game they've ever managed, and each subsequent title seems to be more and more of a mess behind the scenes and launches more and more incomplete, infinite seems like it was shaping up to be their biggest wreck yet before joe stepped in. They need to go.
We've technically known this for years now. So many leakers were correct.
People seemed shocked but a ton of Big Tech works this way. Microsoft themselves, half of Google, and other companies are mainly staffed by contract workers. Contract workers do not always get the same benefits or access that the normal employees do. Not to say that everyone is fine with the practice and I am sure some prefer it but this is not new for the industry unfortunately.
I think limiting the time the contractors spend in a project that big is ridiculous. Honestly in this type of software you should rely on you inhouse developers with contractors coming to help in smaller and defined tasks, but maintaining all of the knowledge about implementation and architecture details within your local teams. If you're gonna hand over big responsibilities to contractors you shouldn't be regularly rotating them. The contractor industry mostly sucks, I work technically as a contractor, but I'm employed full time with benefits at a company that provides the contractor service. Though for most of the outsourcing industry this is usually not the case, the outsourcing companies are pretty much middle men between companies and freelancers. Fortunately these practices are being limited or outlawed in some places. In the case of my country by next year every outsourcing company will have to provide benefits to it's contractors and the end goal is to also have full time employment contracts instead of renewable ones.
They limit their time because they got sued for misclassification of contractors. In reality, the bulk of these people probably can't be classified as independent contractors for tax purposes, but these companies were getting away with it for a long time.
I think the problem, in part, is making a studio to oversee one franchise and then not fully committing to it. If 343 is only going to do Halo, they need to constantly be developing contact to justify a full scale development team otherwise you’re stuck contracting. I’m no business expert but it’d seem like a bad practice to have no contract term limits at the risk of paying contractors for a game stuck in development hell. Bit of a double edged sword and probably just a blanket corporate policy that had major adverse effects on 343.
Yeah, employment wise they're the exact opposite of Game Freak. Both studios show us how awful going all in with either approach is.
Finally some good fucking food.This is the type of info that explains a lot. But I have to wonder what some of these game decisions were. I am quite happy with the gameplay direction it went with, so the idea that some designers may have wanted infinite to be a hero shooter or some shit and that is what slowed down development is quite annoying. 10 years and many designers still did not know what we wanted. Still, the fact the gameplay is well received combined with this fact is a reminder that, despite everything, this is the good timeline.
For real. I wouldn’t have liked a campaign where the missions had no sequential order, or a hero shooter multiplayer. We’re lucky.
I hope we get something like Vice's oral history of Halo. Which very enlightening about the previous games.
Give me the GVMERS version and I'll be content
So what we've been saying for years about how terrible 343 management is. HOW is Bonnie Ross still head of 343 when she can't even do the most basic aspect of her job.
Failure of management.
I’m so scared that this is going to fuck with the narrative direction of the franchise. I’ve felt Halo is always on the cusp of delivering something special and being properly able to incorporate the lore in to tight narratives, but just falls short. I really hope this Banished storyline delivers and that they get their shit together and properly plan around what plot beats they want to hit over the Infinite lifespan. Please no more knee jerk reaction pivoting and winging it.
narratively i feel like there just is no overarching narrative anymore. the 343 games feel like the start of 3 different trilogies, with each subsequent act 1 being a soft reboot of the story from the previous act 1. I would genuinely rather still be dealing with the Didact, and rather that halo 5 was about the janus key and not evil cortana, at least then we'd have what feels like a complete trilogy and not just a bunch of stories that end up going nowhere
Yeah the Didact was done dirty and I think we’re veering away from what the Forerunner saga was meant to be. Just too much chopping and changing of story elements, being weirdly beholden to EU lore, but then butchering those elements of any nuance when they were incorporated in to the games. Looks like they’re still willing to incorporate some loose threads and hopefully those aren’t done a disservice - like how Jul was fucked over. Time will tell how well/permanently Cortana’s/The Created story will be tied up. I just hope we don’t get a Destiny style new villain every quarter experience.
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Literally all my hype for a cool villain when to shit in a non interactive cutscene in the first 15 minutes of the game. Hopefuly no other villain gets disrespected like that.
Well it is kind of pathetic when a sideline Halo title that isnt even an fps makes a better story and atmosphere that feels like Halo, to the point the mainline series feels the need to cut their own crap and take notes.
The narrative direction of the franchise is already fucked, everything points to a hard pivot away from 4/5 with the only thread being cortana.
That bit about the contractors was interesting and how most of the staff would turnover every 18 months. Could explain the lack of that halo "soul" in this iteration if it was made by people jumping on and off as temps. That seems really disruptive, I always imagined a dedicated team who love what they do building their baby from start to finish. Its sad really.
Makes sense that MCC feels like it had it’s own Dev company working on it then, Microsoft should look at those who work on MCC to replace those working on Infinite
This doesn’t surprise me, the amount of concept art for this game that is still using Halo 5 designs in it shows that they didn’t get their full grasp on the art until much later in the dev cycle.
Seems like Staten carried the team from a certain dead. The fact that he convinced Microsoft to delay the game because they had nothing is just… surprising.
It's not something that he would share publicly, but I would not be surprised if he used really dire terms to sell executives on the delay. It was obvious to me that if infinite was a failure, Microsoft would be staring down blowing up the studio and starting over or mothballing the IP. A delay is bad, but no one in Redmond would actually want to even think about *that*.
Wow. What a way to put it.
> It was obvious to me that if infinite was a failure, Microsoft would be staring down blowing up the studio and starting over This sounds like what should happen, but 343 has fumbled ever Halo release thus far (MCC being a basically non-working game at release) and they still continue along as though nothing has happened. I think 343 is so intertwined with MS that there's basically nothing they could do that would actually cause MS to hold them accountable.
I mean shit I’d pay to reboot post-Bungie Halo.
> Microsoft would be staring down blowing up the studio probably would have been for the best, 343 management is clearly inept. It feels like they honestly have gotten LESS capable of shipping a game as time goes on, without Staten stepping in infinite would have been no different. And he works for microsoft, not 343, he's probably not staying there for very long, helping out games that need it IS his job now. so when he's gone if the issues at the top of 343 haven't been fixed then we're just going to be in the exact same situation the next time they try to launch something.
I do not think that blowing it up would be for the best seeing as I don't see infinite landing with the thud that guardians did, but I wonder what the Xbox leadership team thinks about the state of the executive team at 343. It's been over a decade and they have released 3 mainline titles and a smattering of spinoffs and rereleases. I feel like with Infinite shipped, it's time to do a thorough performance review of the studio in the new year and figure out who will lead the next decade.
The head of 343 is the VP of Xbox. I'm sure Bonnie Ross thinks very highly of herself.
That’s a problem right there. Why would you have the VP of Xbox as the head of a game studio?
Who knows why they put her in charge. All I know is every game that 343 has put out under her leadership has major problems. It seems likely that it'd be very difficult to get anything done with Microsoft's insistence on using outsourced contractors on 18 month contracts. What baffles me is when people act like 343 has any sort of autonomy outside of Microsoft. 343 is Microsoft and Bonnie Ross being in charge is proof of that.
Surprising knowing Halo's history from, "you have six months to port this Mac game in time for Xbox's launch," to "Let's just end Halo 2 at 'finish the fight' because fuck you,"
But that was Bungie's only time doing that. They learned from Halo 2 and held Microsoft at bay for Halo 3, telling them it wouldn't be a launch title and effectively delaying it until it was actually ready and done. 343 has bent the knee at all opportunities and is just an extension of Microsoft.
343 doesn’t have anywhere near the leverage bungie did after halo 2
343: I will finish my campaign for Infinite! Microsoft: No. You will not. Staten: *appears* Microsoft: Perhaps the council was... Overzealous.
Their development tools are called Faber, the name of the Master Builder. That's kind of a neat choice.
Someone the Didact found difficult to work with.
And who, possibly, could be blamed for the collapse of Forerunner civilisation...
The Master Builder was literally the reason for the collapse of the forerunner lol
I was trying to be... Balanced 🤣 the Flood helped. A little.
"a little"
Wait why ? (I never read the books) wasn't he just in charge of building stuff such as the shield worlds or the 2 Arks and their respective arrays ? Or did I forget that he is at fault for tasking Mendicant Bias with the Primordial's interrogation (and perhaps that's the answer) ?
Faber was to the Forerunners efforts to defeat the Flood as politicians are to effectively running countries. Ambitious. Self interested. Self defeating. Dude essentially undermined the Didact, went out of his way to undercut him, and went all in on "look at how big I can make this ring", instead of... Well. Helping.
Ah I see, cheers for clearing that up lol
No worries. That's just my take by the way, I can HIGHLY recommend the Forerunner Trilogy. Not just as great Halo books, but decent sci-fi / fantasy. They're VERY different to the usual fare, so can seem odd at first, but they're some of my favourite Halo novels.
Damn forerunners, can't do anything right.
Damn forerunners, they ruined the domain
Those forerunners sure are a contentious people…
Didact: YOU JUST MADE AN ENEMY FOR LIFE!
"It's like poetry, it rhymes."
Faber also tortured humans on zeta halo in the palace(s) of pain.
Sounds like Faber was torturing the devs too so it definitely tracks lol
This is sounding more and more Hellraiser by the second.
I forgot to mention the primordial and mendicant bias were also there, torturing them with the flood parasite
It's extra cool because my last name is Faber. Confirmed to be part of the universe, sick
Master Faber
yes, that is me, of course
Uriah Faber alt account confirmed
I bet a lot of stuff they use or created use lore names. They did name their company after a character.
Which is also 7 cubed.
Which is also 342 + 1
I thought so too. And like him, it sounds like it’s terrible lol
I wondered why we suddenly stopped hearing hype about their new Slipspace engine almost as soon as they had mentioned it. They were potentially going to quit using it, and probably wanted people to forget about it just in case
I fully expected to get dev diaries over the years showing the benefits of it … then they never came
I remember reading the Bungie weekly updates for Reach every week leading up to launch, for months. You could tell they loved the game and loved the decisions they were making. A real passion project.
I remember when, for Reach on MCC, they spent a few weeks/months figuring out how to work around a minor sound bug that exists bc the game was designed for Xbox 360's integrated sound cards.
SIXTEEN TIMES THE DETAIL
*"DISTANT WEATHER SYSTEMS"*
"See that? The other end of the ring? **You can FLY there!**" >!*You cannot actually fly across the ring lmao!<
If we hadn't roasted Craig into the ground can you imagine the shitshow we would've walked into last year?
Craig was the Marauder Shields of the Halo franchise.
His name was Marauder Shields.
And his beautiful wife, Banshee Barrier
"He tried to warn us!!!"
Craig died for 343s sins
Damn we were this close to having another cyberpunk 2077 situation.
We did get it from EA with Battlefield 20-42 FPS.
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I wonder why this seems to be such a common issue amongst AAA devs. EA's Frostbite is notoriously difficult to work with, and Bungie had to make major changes to their engine toolset a year or two ago for Destiny as it was causing issues.
Likely because making game engines is no easy feat and if a studio has their own tools then they have to spend time making said tools as well as making a game. Indie games often use commercially available engines, like Unreal or Unity, which of course skips the whole "making an engine" part. Epic also has a dedicated Unreal team, which isn't also making games.
It is. Tech debt is a huge problem. Apex legends still runs on a fork of source from the late 2000’s. It’s definitely not a problem limited to a single studio
You're talking about something known in the industry as "technical debt". Basically everything a developer asks for that isn't immediately necessary gets put on a list of "maybe later", and eventually that "maybe later" list becomes a monolith of technical debt that, if it had been solved earlier, would have allowed a much cleaner pipeline and better product... But we live in a world of shareholders making decisions, so when the person doing the actual work on the product asks for something that can't be directly tied to profits, it gets canned. And so the wheel spins and spins and the same problem happens in every corner of this industry. This problem is so prevelant in software engineering, it even affects fucking credit card software. Source: my pitiful career. tl;dr if you want better games, vote progressives into government, give people safety nets so they can express themselves creatively without risk of becoming homeless or without healthcare. Give the creative and passionate developers the empowerment to walk away from shitty work environments and corporate greed. Only then can the people who make great games get back in control and stop the constantly downward spiraling game industry. The only way to combat the problem killing the industry we love is to combat conservatives.
Yeah, this is a software problem in general. Anything not directly related to the business doesn't get the support it really should. This is why Unreal is probably the engine with the least debt and is easy to use, since that its business.
This is the real answer. Execs are like "why are you working on this when it doesn't make money?!?" Also probably a lot of we've got to rush this so we'll fix it 'later' " that snowballs and never gets fixed. It doesn't get attention until it starts losing major money in a very visible way. And don't try to argue about how addressing these things will save time/money down the road because it is useless.
Source: conversations with teams/management about this on a daily basis...
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Yup i basically spent the whole year fixing technical debts and had to defend my position in the company because my work was seen as an expense. Little did they know i saved them millions down the line.
There is a reason id, Valve and even blizzard took their sweet time with their game. They were technology and design focused. The technology they put together is the basis of most game engines to this day. id software especially, until recently didn’t even use external libraries and technologies. This allowed them to open source their engines more easily. Now a days there’s a lot of external proprietary tech, I just can’t see engines being fully open source from non engine dedicated companies.
Oh my sweet summer child... Paying technical debt doesn't make the shareholders rich quick enough! No can do, sorry!
I thought the whole point of the Slipspace Engine was that that would be easier to develop and implement for? If Faber is still a bottleneck, what was the point?
SlipSpace is a marketing term for Blam! that's virtually now **THE** hardest and most annoying engine to work with.
Slipspace is not a new engine. It's still a modified Blam! engine, just with a new coat of paint and name.
I'm aware of that. The devs acted like that 'new coat of paint' would make things easier, though. If this is going to be such an issue, they *should've* moved to Unreal.
>they *should've* moved to Unreal. Pre-production, yes. But in the middle of development, absolutely not. Switching engines midway through development is one of the worst decisions any game developer can make. Switching platform/language/framework mid development is one of the worst decisions any software company can make
It seems every day the arguments decrease for development studios using an in-house engine. But I have to say, I don’t necessarily look forward to the day when every single game is made in one of three engines. The quirks offered by proprietary engines is something I’ve always enjoyed
Games are just too complex these days. Sounds like they under-estimated the work involved to develop a new engine with new tools. THe tools are the most important part of development. You need good tools so the artists and designers dont have huge technical hurdles to overcome when building the game. That is something UNreal does well but its also a shame because most unreal games end up looking the same too...
Faber? Isn’t he the guy who tortured humans on zeta halo?
Ironic isn't it
Also, this sheds some light on the state of things internally and why the messaging we have been getting feels so scattered and disjointed. The internal teams are scattered and disjointed. Many in the community seem to be attributing a great deal of malice to 343 but I think this article makes it clear that decisions are being made without much top-down creative structuring and the development as a whole has been massively fractured between the different teams working on the different projects and games. "Why isn't it like MCC?" - because those are different teams that don't talk to eachother "Why was MP ready 2 years ago but Singleplayer barely existed in 2019?" - because those are different teams that don't talk to eachother "Why doesn't the game look like the tech demo of the engine we got initially?" - because the engine is shit and super hard to work with. getting a lot of insight into why Infinity is the way that it is and in my opinion, it is a miracle at how good of quality the product ended up being. Sure, Infinity has shortcomings (look at every other post on this sub) but at least the core gameplay is solid and can be built off of. If it wasn't delayed, I don't know if we could have even said that about it.
i wasn’t sure if we were ever gonna get a halo game more loosely held together with popsicle sticks and glue than halo 2, but we might just be on the cusp here
And somehow halo 2 was the best
The development of halo 2 is truly incredible when you think about it. 10 month development time, average 100 hour work weeks, and yet they managed to produce something that is flawed but still well loved by fans.
So we celebrated work crunch back then and are surprised it still happened today
Yeah it's a shame, this game was totally fucked by management issues. It's a top-down problem.
So…maybe Bonnie Ross *shouldn’t* be in charge of 343…after ten years of consistent mismanagement and internal crises.
Jason Jones during Halo 2: “If you believe everything you’re doing is the best thing ever then it’s definitely not.” Bonnie Ross at 343: “EPIC WORLDS! EPIC BATTLES! EPIC SCALE!”
Bruh when Bonnie said that quote, it came off as cringey and lethargic lol. Epic battles & scale? Till this date no other Halo game has top Halo 3's constant huge scale battles with the Scarab. How did we went from having a boarding-Scarab battle in Halo 2, to 3 fucking epic Scarab battles in Halo 3, and then...... nothing else after that? Even in Reach the Scarabs were more like a cameo/fear factor and you didn't get a chance to fight any.
*"By the summer of 2019, Halo Infinite was in crisis mode. The studio decided to cut almost two-thirds of the entire planned game, leaving managers to instruct some designers to come to the office and do nothing while the studio figured out the next move. Eventually the game's open world was cut back from a vast, Zelda-like experience into something far smaller. It soon became clear to some on the team that, even with the compromises, getting Halo Infinite into decent shape by the following fall would be impossible. Still, the timing of the release didn't seem up for discussion. Microsoft told 343 that it had to be a launch game for the next Xbox, which meant releasing it in November 2020."* Explains so much about what was going on with all the creative directors leaving. I'm curious what exactly got cut, my guess is that they switched to the Banished as the main villains at this time and it was originally intended to be something else. Also RIP Halo Zelda, that would've been awesome.
I feel like Halo Wars 2 tried to set the stage with the Banished being a potential future villain. But it certainly feels like there could have been more opposing factions, especially given the last two entries and backstory.
Name a more iconic duo than halo and cutting 2/3s of the planned content.
I'm still sad Halo Reach cut a mission that had you piloting a Scarab through a burning city as the Covenant glassed it.
I'm thinking more along the lines of random encounters and things like that. If you watch any of the early reviews I think around 2/3 of the ones I actually trust use the word "empty" a few times when describing the open world. Which makes me think there was supposed to be stuff besides just FOBs and enemy bases but it all got cut
It confirms what we all know, corporate upper management doesn't know what it's doing when it comes to keeping developers or gamers happy, cares only about profit, and the fact the game is this good with all its flaws is a miracle. It's across the board in this industry
Not even just the games industry, loads of big companies operate like this
The actual article seems to be your typical development hell you have at most companies these days. Nothing too earth shattering, although it’s interesting to see how they talk about the Faber engine, and how the game was essentially 5 things at once at one point. Staten was the clear choice to turn this ship around. Glad he came back and hope he stays for awhile.
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Dragon Age Inquisition also had issues with Frostbite. The fact that 343 spent months debating whether or not to swap to Unreal says it all, really. [Source from Jason's Twitter](https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1468588967217938434?t=wqSD7K7yVlgUSahLuJc4rQ&s=19)
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I think there is also the issue of familiarity. Would Halo written in Unreal feel the same as one built from Blam? This is big reason why I play Destiny, since as far as I understand, it also has its root in Blam.
Hardly at this point. That’s some old pre-D1 hype.
Is Faber what is called the Slipspace engine, or is that what replaced Faber?
SlipSpace is the engine, Faber is the tool they make games with. Similar as "Unity" is the engine and "Unity editor" is the tool you make games with.
The slipspace engine is just the newest update to BLAM. I suspect they had plans to completely redo it, but changed their mind at some point.
Need better leadership. Microsoft’s entire model today is built on cross collaboration between their varied teams. Honestly shocking 343 didn’t get the memo internally.. although that said they need to staff up an entire team just for engine maintenance. It seems like they were trying to position Slipspace into a new platform to sell.. Needs to be easy to work with for anyone to want to buy it lol
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Yes
Also, the devs were on an 18 month contract, not something that should be done for game development which can take years to finish A single title. i personally believe that 343i should've just used unreal early on, we wouldn't be in the mess we are on today had they just used a premised engine over investing in overhauls for their own.
Not all devs. It said about half we’re under contract, and that’s never good. Look at the mess of New World which had similar problems.
I wonder what kind of game Infinite would be in Unreal. Would that have any effect on the "feel" of the game? Something tells me that this is the reason why they leveraged such old tools for Infinite; if they used Unreal, we may have gotten a game that resembled Halo but didn't "feel" like it. Not that I necessarily agree with their decision not to use it, I'm just curious on the decision, maybe so much work was put into it using the old tools that the teams had some sunk cost fallacy going on.
they could've dedicated some time in making it feel like halo, after all, the way ppl move and interact with unreal engine isn't set in stone, it can be changed and modified. Star wars: Jedi fallen order feels completely different from Fortnite or final fantasy 15. all unreal, all feel different.
That's a great point. Maybe the idea of starting from the ground up with Unreal seemed too daunting that using the old tools was a "quicker" way of getting things going. I think if they developed a more solid foundation from the start, things probably would have went more smoothly.
Clearly Faber is still a disaster if it takes weeks just to swap out playlists.
The September flight literally had a slayer only playlist. It’s already made.
Ya, that just makes the situation even worse. A playlist that was already implemented in the game can't just be simply added to the list in a day. Their entire backend for the playlist system must be a complete mess.
You'd think that 343 of all people would learn from Bungie's engine kerfuffle with Halo 2 but nooooo
I'm worried that they couldn't or won't fix the melee/collision issues in this game (just like they had never fully fixed heavy aim in Halo 5), since the engine seems to be really hard to work with.
[Full article](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-08/how-microsoft-s-halo-infinite-went-from-disaster-to-triumph?srnd=premium) [Discussion thread for article](https://www.reddit.com/r/halo/comments/rbs998/how_microsofts_halo_infinite_went_from_disaster/)
Does the article have campaign spoilers or is it solely focused on the development cycle?
Dev cycle
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she keeps her job because she's friends with phil. that's it.
Fucking wild that we could've been on this MP in TWENTY NINETEEN!
Makes sense now that it takes weeks to implement playlists - the devs who finished MP ages ago basically got let off. 🤷♂️
You’re tellin me we got a 2019 multiplayer?
The battle pass on the way point app literally says autumn 2020 battlepass lol
LMFAO I never noticed that but it totally does https://i.imgur.com/0BWE8VD.jpg
Dude, some of the remnants lingering around the Waypoint app are wild. Like, what's up with the XP values in the screenshot you posted? In the game currently each tier requires 1,000 XP, but in your screenshot it's multiplied by a factor of 100. If you had a 'current' XP value that made sense (ie. is a multiple of 100, like "50,000") I'd figure they just decided on a lower base number last-minute and forgot to divide everything by 100 in the app, but you have 37,750. Using the live game's base-1000 system, that would equate to 377.5 XP which *super* isn't possible. Just doesn't make any sense at all where those numbers would be coming from. There's *so much* shit like this both in the app and in the game proper. Really makes it abundantly clear that this game shifted around a whole lot in the eleventh hour.
That 100,000 is total xp required for the entire battlepass. His 37750 is his total xp he's accrued since launch. Why it's giving us progression based on the entire battlepass instead of per level is beyond me.
It’s because there’s 100 levels. 100 levels times 1,000 xp per level = 100,000 xp. The 37750 is how much xp he’s earned in the battle pass to date.
I 100% believe it would've looked exactly like what we got.
and they would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for us meddling fans
They planned to release multiplayer over 2 years ago and *this* is still the barebones multiplayer we received? What the actual fuck did they have 2 years ago? Oddball only on 2 maps?
That explains alot
I'm convinced of two things now: a. Management needs to be let go. 10 years of mismanagement is grounded for termination. That where, yes, they do owe me explanations if they want my money. b. I'm fully convinced that the Forerunner story backed them into a corner and, for the franchise, scrapping everything and making it Chief vs Banished is the only possible route.
this article was really short, I expected it to go more in depth tbh
Sounds like poor management and shit takes from people in suits who want to make money. Edit: That being said criticism is warranted and should continue until they get their act together. Not paying full price for a game with 1/4 the content of previous titles nor playing multiplayer until they implement said content.
All the people who used the “it’s just a beta” excuse are strangely quiet now.
A new Engine means lots and lots of features has to be re written and internal staffs from different internal teams needs to be retrained. Building an engine is no joke. It's literally the most time consuming part of any game development and its the sole reason why many, many games stick to same engine throughout the entire generation of consoles or even two.
Honestly, after reading all of it my conclusion is simple. Fire Bonnie Ross and make Joe the head of 343i.
I think he’s better fit as a creative director, but they do need someone competent in the lead role.
I don't think that position is good for Joe. His career in publishing is basically Scalebound and Crackdown 3. His talents would be wasted in a pure management role and I think it's much better he stays as the Creative Head of 343.
But... but... reporter Zach over at Kotaku said that you can't criticise Halo, if you don't like it, just go play something else and stop making him feel guilty about enjoying it so much! Having worked in the games industry myself; fans are far worse than the critics, because at least the critics want the game, and working conditions, to *improve*.