"Loyalty is a weird word"
If you were an avid reader of video game journalism in the 90s and early 2000s, you probably came across some articles written by Frank O'Connor (@franklez). The former Official Xbox Magazine editor was one of the more prolific writers about games during an era that was largely defined by the "hardcore gamer."
He left the world of game journalism and joined Bungie in 2003. He lives and breathes Halo; he doesn't appear as a man obsessed, but his actions say he might be, just a bit. When the franchise went to 343, his loyalty was not with the talented creators of Halo at Bungie, but with Halo itself. Now he's franchise development director of the entire franchise. Speaking to O'Connor, there's a sincerity in his voice about his commitment to this fictional universe.
"I came into Bungie during the beginning of Halo 2, during a time when they were really resetting what Halo 2 was going to be. So I got to see the dark days and the good days, and the culture that they built up over the years.
"But let me be clear -- I came to Bungie because I loved Halo," he says. "So when we spun out, I knew the next thing was going to be incredible. My passion has been for the characters and the scenarios that we'd been creating all those years. That was ultimately where my loyalty lied -- and I think 'loyalty' is a weird word to use in your career. It's a strong aspect of how you should behave, but I don't become emotionally attached to a corporation, for example.
"I just felt like we were on the verge of turning it into something really special; mostly through the work that other people at Bungie had done, but that was the path I wanted to follow."
O'Connor was present during the entirety of the Bungie-343 handover. During the transition, he knew that Halo would soon have another home. He was already talking to people like Kiki Wolfkill, who would be executive producer on Halo 4 at 343, and Bonnie Ross, 343's general manager about the franchise's life beyond Bungie.
Ross, Wolfkill, and the small 343 team at Microsoft were already asking O'Connor, the Halo guru, questions about how they should take care of the franchise. "It wasn't the same as farming out your property to a stranger," says O'Connor. "[Bungie] knew where it was going, and they knew we wanted to do our own thing. Whether or not [343] would do the right thing or not, Bungie didn't know. But knew that was our intention. We cared about it."
 "There were a lot of mistakes"
"Look around you," says Kiki Wolfkill (@k_wolfkill), explaining the challenge the core team was taking on. "You don't have a team, at all. You don't have a triple-A studio. You have 12 people. You have 13 computers, and no office space."
By now, Wolfkill can probably be considered a Microsoft video game stalwart. She joined Microsoft Game Studios in 1998, serving as art director. After about 10 years, and shipping a couple dozen games, she embarked on the 343 venture.
"On top of having no studio, we had to solve that problem in tandem with dealing with the other challenge," she adds. "It just didn't look possible on paper."
That "other challenge" is the most salient one: making another entry in the Halo franchise that would live up to expectations that first took root more than a decade ago.
The way Halo 4 was made was unnatural, says Wolfkill. 343 started at around a dozen people, ballooning to about 200. With contractors, the number of people who put their hands on the game amounted to 350. That growth, and all of the problems that came with it, took place while developing the game.
 "There were a lot of mistakes we made along the way in which we knew weren't necessarily the right way to do things," says Wolfkill of the steep learning curve. "But given what we had to deliver and our timeframe, we accepted that these are necessary mistakes, and we acknowledged and cataloged them.
"We started off with a number of people who had a ton of industry experience, and thought, 'We're going to do everything right! We've seen all these mistakes in the past, we'll avoid those, because we're smarter and we have the experience!' The reality is, circumstance forces you down a path, and your ambitions collide, and there will always be catch-up that you're doing. That's where most mistakes are made.
"There were production realities that made us build things inefficiently," she continues. "I think there was also the learning curve of understanding how to work together."
There was inefficient prototyping -- the team didn't clearly define and communicate the parameters of successful prototypes early enough in development, which slowed the process. The team also started to realize that Halo 4's narrative, rooted in volumes of sci-fi lore, was at times too inside baseball, and wasn't self-contained enough. It was an accessibility issue that needed to be addressed.
Sub-teams would get too close to a singular component of a game, such as a new enemy design, and not think of the design in the larger context of the game’s mechanics, lore and narrative, leading to inefficiencies in the overall development process.
343 also struggled with balancing familiarity with reinvention, as the studio wanted to please a large fanbase, but at the same time bring something new to the series. While the game received high scores, some critics pointed out a feeling of sameness.
Speaking to Holmes, O'Connor, and Wolfkill, there's a common theme, or tone in their voices, that recurred over and over again. For all the opportunity and potential they saw in this project, there was some mind-numbing dread of screwing up. Not just screwing up the game, but screwing up your team, your studio, your career, the franchise itself.
Wolfkill laughed, correcting me, saying it wasn't exactly "mind-numbing dread," but merely "mind-numbing fear." Luckily for 343, the studio happened to be working on one of the most recognizable brands in video games, and was backed by the substantial resources of Microsoft.
|
Printer-Friendly Version
Halo 4 even messed with the control scheme sufficiently for me to hate it.
Even if Halo might stand for a lot the Indie-scene despises, I must admit the people behind this Leviathan have my utmost respect. The passion to perfect the Formula and to do their universe justice is more than I can say about the current montearization sell-out of a lot of small and middlesized mobile studios.
From the formentioned "Studio switches" (DMC, Gear of war, COD) is imo Halo 4 the one which delivered the best overall experience (Gears delivered the worst) and I seriously hope that next Years Arkham "switch" (from rocksteady to WB Games) will be at least on par with 343i version of the Halo-universe
Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the passion that the core team brought to the game, and I respect the fact that they finished it, but this design-by-committee stuff just doesn't work. Someone needed to take ownership here.
The sad thing is though, is that these people are patting themselves on the back when they've made literally the worst Halo game ever (admittedly the bar is high...but still). Not that I didn't enjoy the game somewhat (I did)...but I think everyone was expecting a lot more.
Check out http://halocharts.com/2012/chart/dailypeakpopulation/all to see the rapid decline.
Randomness is what creates frustration and not having in-game ranks takes away a reward that COD players and old Halo players have always enjoyed. 343i grossly exaggerates the negative effects of ranks in terms of boosting but everyone knows the MM experience was infinitely better in Halo 3 than Halo 4. Randomness is creates by AA's, ordinances, sprint, no weapons on map, terrible maps, and instant respawn. None of these things belong in Halo, they ruin the experience. You CANNOT have sprint and then have slow kill times. It means stupid plays like running into the middle of the map are not punished because you can just run away.
In the end, 343i is out of touch. Look at the current population, it's a joke. The game will be a graveyard in a few months. A halo game has never had even remotely close to the sharp MP drop off that Halo 4 has had. We just want to play an actual Halo game, please, please don't put sprint, AA's, and ordinances back in.
Good article devs are devs AAA or indie, Coexist <-- Somebody do this with a mix of indie and AAA game characters please...
As another person already mentioned if you look at the games MP population you notice the sharp decline of players. Some decline is expected but you now have the game peaking at 30K. Many times if you are on at night its very very low. Last night while I was playing it hit 6K. This effects my experience through playlist search times and quality of the matchup I receive. As a knowledgeable semi-skilled Halo player the chance of me and my friends getting a quality game is very very low. We usually are just trying to see at that point how much we can beat the enemy team by, not IF we can. This leads to some very non-challenging games without a true ranking system. Alright stealth brag over. The reason is because this game has introduced elements of CoD, and this cannot be denied. Instant Respawn, More one-shot overpowered weapons to reduce the importance of Halo's Shield/Health player dynamic, Personal and Global Ordnance to introduce more randomness and take the focus off map control as traditional Halos have always rewarded map control. These things are inherent beauty spots of the game that have been removed to pander to the masses to get CoD sales. That may have worked looking at the sales figures and I will never mention Halo 4 was a failure as a product, not even as a game. It was a good game, just not a good Halo!
Now lets talk about change. Change is inevitable, in life there are factors that you cannot control. Death, the rising taxes, your gut getting larger with every night gaming session you know should be spent on the elliptical. However the gaming world is different, its a magical world where programmers can control every little knob and lever of the world we play in. You technically could release Halo 2 and just cross out the title and put Halo 3 and re-release it. While Madden adds new features, the core game is still football a game that hasn't changed in forever besides a small number of rule changes. So every year a new one releases and every year players buy the game for the new player changes, the graphical enhancements, and possibly a new feature or two. Or you have CoD, a game that's stayed sort of true to its core gameplay besides the CoD4 to MW shift, and even Blops tries to alleviate that gap. Halo has done nothing to alleviate the changes it makes, they try and shoehorn a classic mode in Reach and Halo 4 and always fall sort of flat. Mainly because the core is so warped and changed you cant set options to make it feel like the past Halo's.
They constantly talk about how to make Halo more accessible to players and new players. This ends up catering to the masses of casual players who will play Halo for awhile. They will play through the campaign maybe once or twice, play through it with friends maybe once or twice, and maybe play through it a year or two later before the next game comes out so they can remember more about the game. They will step into MP for an average of 24.5 games* (*this number is completely made up) and then they will stop after winning 20% of their games and never care to notice the intricacies of everything they've just played. Then they will say oh yea "that game was fun". Meanwhile you have hardcore players playing a game that wasnt designed with their needs in mind, and these players now probably make up a much higher percentage of the people who are still on your game night after night. The CoD players left the week after Halo 4 was released when Blops II came out, you can even see the sharp decline of players right after Blops release on the Halo population charts. You can see the Christmas spike that lasted a week and you can see other small bumps that are mostly weekend and DLC bumps, but besides these bumps its been a game of pure decline.
Another note now that players can choose loadouts with perks, AA's, and everything that is locked behind unlocks. You actually have to grind to level up and unlock gameplay altering abilities. This means a kid at SR-130 the highest experience ranking has every ability unlocked in multiple loadouts. You can switch loadouts throughout a game. So this person essentially has more things available to him in game than a player who just started does. Gameplay altering abilities should never be in Halo. The only thing keeping a player from beating another player is his knowledge and skill. If a kid comes home and gets to play eight hours of Halo 4 all week and I have to be at work come home make dinner and put the kids in bed and then I finally get two hours to sit down at night and play I shouldn't be penalized before I even pick up that controller. Unlocking of items needs to be purely aesthetic.
Also maps, because of the fact players can have two mobile AA's at once. Sprint is now default and then you can have say jetpack, you now have much more mobility and abilities all at once. This is too much. It makes larger maps feel smaller so Halo now has to have all these large maps, and what small maps are there Haven and Abandon? Then they released the first DLC which was once again all large maps!? Really!? Give us some arena maps like Halo has always had! Halo has always been about sort of knowing what your enemy can do and predicting and analysing what hes going to do based on that essential assumption. You no longer can do that though because there are so many abilities and variables players can have and you never know if they just got some random ordnance drop that gave them a sniper that can one shot even if they hit your body? Really!?, you are more playing rock paper scissors guessing what he has against what you chose at spawn. Nobody wants their gameplay that close to a gamble.
So lets stop catering to the casuals who leave because you've removed all depth and skill gap so they could play, let people learn the game figure out what works what doesnt let them evolve their skill and feel great about it, let them rank up to 50 and let them say "I am now good at Halo!" and feel proud of their accomplishment. Lets create a game with competitive players in mind. Lets release a game with a ton of smaller maps and maybe 2-3 large maps. Then your first DLC can be 2 small and 1 more large and continue in that fashion. Lets focus less on having the players fix your map problem by using Forge World and subsequently getting less than par maps into MM that effects everyone's experience when they play. Lets bring back campaign theater and scoring for communities like High Speed Halo. Lets get this game back into MLG so people can watch tournaments and play Halo professionally again. Lets have a HaloTV feature where when we dont want to play we can stop in and watch preloaded files of good games recently played, lets be able to chat about it too, lets be able to stream to JTV or Youtube from within the game. Let us remember that you can keep a game true to its roots and have great sales like Madden. Halo 2014, The next great Halo, HALO game, not CoD. Halo.
Also Hiring that Juices would be a great idea.
The site is starting to gain popularity.
Other sites like penny arcade have a pretty substantial following and many articles get linked.
The bad:
And then you have the internet fuckwad theory:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19
Articles like this are great for the community, these people don't even have to do this but they did it anyways, and you get people come here just to bash the game and not even address the article itself. They should at least abstain from posting, we have enough places on the internet where you can go and criticize games you don't like. Oh well.
I'm not sure whether this is a good or bad thing. On the one hand, it's great that Gamasutra is getting more popular and the articles are being more widely-seen. On the other, the comments on this site were, and probably still are, the best on the whole web - keeping the quality comments visible with this increase in low-quality comments will take some effort.
-__-