"It's all very personal"
November 6, 2012 was the release date for Halo 4. Holmes and the crew at 343 were glued to their computers, awaiting the trickle, then eventual flood of feedback from the press and from players. He escaped into the bubble of the world wide web, absorbed.
"My wife has learned that I'm just not in a state of communication with the rest of the universe at that point," laughs Holmes. "I'm just obsessively reading stuff to see what the reactions are from fans and critics alike."
What Holmes and the rest of 343 saw from the press was generally high praise, which earned the game a Metacritic score of 87. Scores ranged most from perfect ("Trust me, you want this." - Joystiq) to excellent ("It holds the series' standard high." - GameSpot), with a few middling ("I can't escape the feeling that Halo needs to try a bit harder." - EGM) and one quite bad ("A shiny old dog without any new tricks." - Tom Chick). That's on top of all of the varied fan chatter that was happening in comment sections and forums.
"It's all very personal, whether you're getting great feedback and seeing how people are loving the game, or seeing the criticisms about the game," Holmes says. "It's something in which you really pour your heart and your soul into. So you care very deeply about what that feedback is. ... As a general rule, we try not to overreact to the loud, vocal minority."
An obsessed 343 watched everything unravel. The game generated $220 million in global sales on day one (higher than Halo Reach's $200 million launch day), and by all accounts, that provided a pretty healthy amount of validation for the team.
"I wouldn't want to do it again"
Now months have passed. The game is still a work in process, with its heavy concentration on online components and new digitally-distributed content. 343 has started work on a new project with one important luxury: having an actual studio.
"We did some clever things, we made some mistakes, and we learned really rapidly from those mistakes, and tried not to repeat them," says Wolfkill. "And we sort of pulled it off. We pulled off both things. We created a studio with a natural, organic culture, which is a worthy source of pride to us, and the studio created a worthy source of pride with the game itself.
"We did it -- I wouldn't want to do it again, that's the honest truth, but now we have that team in place, so we don't have to."
|
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.
-__-