Xbox Developer_Direct on the 25th of January

[LaveDisco]

1 hour ago, MidWalian said:

We've reached the point where 343 needs to announce that they will continue making Halo games.

 

As continues to undermine my ever weakening faith in MS’s ability to manage devs, this tweet perfectly incapsulates  why Twitter is so much worse.  People started uploading pictures of text to get around the size limit  issues with it, for “official” statements and the like. And now official statements are still JPEG’s even if they clearly can fit in a tweet.  Bonkers. 

[LaveDisco]

Also I totally read that as at least one (probably newly bought) dev is being put onto halo to alternate developments like activision do with CoD. 
 

Probably pulling the wolfenstein team away from stuff - I can imagine it’s not quite so appealing for MS to be chatting about nazis overthrowing America.

[Sarlaccfood]

5 hours ago, Strafe said:

The person in charge of gamepass should stay in charge of gamepass.

 

MS want to get someone with proven experience of successfully managing multiple game studios into shipping games, not use a guy who sets up licensing deals. 

 

 

I might be wrong, but I would have thought the individual studio heads are the ones that have a direct impact on if a game ships or not. The person in charge of them will be greenlighting projects and hopefully have their ear to the ground on gaming trends, making sure collectively across the studios they have a good varied line-up of regular releases catering to a broad range of different interests and markets, all while maintaining good working relationships with third parties to fill any gaps their own studios have left in the release schedule. 

 

I would expect them to put the right people in charge of those studios to make sure they ship the games though for sure. 

[PyramidFace]

3 hours ago, MidWalian said:

We've reached the point where 343 needs to announce that they will continue making Halo games.

 

 

Football's dreaded vote of confidence now in video game form.

[merrychan]

6 hours ago, MidWalian said:

We've reached the point where 343 needs to announce that they will continue making Halo games.

 

Maybe they were announcing that they haven't all been laid off?

[Stanley]

One thing for certain we won’t see another Halo game for a long, long time. I enjoyed Infinite but the lack of any further single player content despite the game begging it for, kind of sealed its fate. 
 

Feels like a big full stop. Twenty years on and the original is still the best. 

[Mr. Gerbik]

7 hours ago, MidWalian said:

We've reached the point where 343 needs to announce that they will continue making Halo games.

 

Given their terrible track record, I'd rather have seen a completely different studio have a go at it.

[Mr. Gerbik]

Shit, Microsoft owns MachineGames now aka Starbreeze aka dem guys who done Riddick and Syndicate: The Shootah. Let them do something for example. Just step away from 343 already, they had 3 goes at it for over a decade. It's clearly not working, it's done, try something else.

[Strafe]

6 hours ago, Sarlaccfood said:

I might be wrong, but I would have thought the individual studio heads are the ones that have a direct impact on if a game ships or not. The person in charge of them will be greenlighting projects and hopefully have their ear to the ground on gaming trends, making sure collectively across the studios they have a good varied line-up of regular releases catering to a broad range of different interests and markets, all while maintaining good working relationships with third parties to fill any gaps their own studios have left in the release schedule. 

 

I would expect them to put the right people in charge of those studios to make sure they ship the games though for sure. 

I‘m sure that is the case too but MS has a long history of buying companies and changing the working practices/culture to Microsoft’s and messing things up. That’s not to say Microsoft themselves have a bad way of doing things but it doesn’t work everywhere.

[monkeydog]

5 hours ago, Strafe said:

I‘m sure that is the case too but MS has a long history of buying companies and changing the working practices/culture to Microsoft’s and messing things up. That’s not to say Microsoft themselves have a bad way of doing things but it doesn’t work everywhere.

 

They've talked openly about that being a mistake, and their keenness to retain culture of studies they've bought over the last four years.

 

Doesn't help 343i or The Initiative though, being MS assembled. Kind of wonder how The Coalition and Turn 10 manage to deliver consistently.

[Strafe]

1 minute ago, monkeydog said:

 

They've talked openly about that being a mistake, and their keenness to retain culture of studies they've bought over the last four years.

I guess we’ll see how much of that holds when some games from all these acquisitions start coming out.

[Stanley]

1 hour ago, Strafe said:

I guess we’ll see how much of that holds when some games from all these acquisitions start coming out.

Certainly doesn’t seem to have affected Arkane, who at least have a game out soon, and Bethesda themselves of course who never seem in a hurry anyway, but they do have a game out this year 😬

 

I feel for 343i as taking over from Bungie was never going to be easy, but Halo 4 is a good game, and their multiplayer components for 5 and Infinite are arguably the best in the series. Master Chief Collection came good eventually too, and Infinite campaign is a really nice game, but it clearly wasn’t complete despite being so long in development - and who knows how much control they really had over that. 
 

What now for Halo and that type of game generally? There’s only really id left now making these world class single player FPS games. 

[PaB]

7 hours ago, Strafe said:

I‘m sure that is the case too but MS has a long history of buying companies and changing the working practices/culture to Microsoft’s and messing things up. That’s not to say Microsoft themselves have a bad way of doing things but it doesn’t work everywhere.

It’s very American thing to buy successful companies and turn them round. They  are great at it 

[Strafe]

I reckon the delay to Starfield was Microsoft’s intervention. Todd Howard isn’t the type to worry about shipping unfinished games.

[MidWalian]

3 days to go! 

Please don't be shit.

[Benny]

To be honest, after MS laying off 10000 people, their glorified Game Pass hype advert can get in the sea.

[Haribokart]

4 hours ago, Benny said:

To be honest, after MS laying off 10000 people, their glorified Game Pass hype advert can get in the sea.

 

When the sort of soulless drone to chirpily spout "I do feel for the people being laid off as it’s never a nice thing, but it doesn’t hugely bother me" with no shame is their target audience I don't think it matters to them.

[Broker]

15 hours ago, Stanley said:

Certainly doesn’t seem to have affected Arkane, who at least have a game out soon, and Bethesda themselves of course who never seem in a hurry anyway, but they do have a game out this year 😬

 

I feel for 343i as taking over from Bungie was never going to be easy, but Halo 4 is a good game, and their multiplayer components for 5 and Infinite are arguably the best in the series. Master Chief Collection came good eventually too, and Infinite campaign is a really nice game, but it clearly wasn’t complete despite being so long in development - and who knows how much control they really had over that. 
 

What now for Halo and that type of game generally? There’s only really id left now making these world class single player FPS games. 

Regardless of the relative merits of the games, 343’s Halo titles just haven’t drawn the kind of audiences of had the type of impact that you’d expect from what used to be one of the biggest franchises in the world. 4 and 5 are incredible looking games for the hardware, but seem to lack the innovation you’d expect from the series, whereas infinite was clearly trying to shake things up but made a bad impression graphically. I’d honestly prefer to see what 343 did with a new franchise, and give Halo to someone else or shelve in until you’ve got a great new entry. 
 

Early 2000’s Microsoft was so laser focused on finding the next big franchise. 

[JPL]

2 hours ago, Haribokart said:

 

When the sort of soulless drone to chirpily spout "I do feel for the people being laid off as it’s never a nice thing, but it doesn’t hugely bother me" with no shame is their target audience I don't think it matters to them.

Why do you keep doing this man? It’s really odd.

 

I hope you’re feeling well enough to make it to the anniversary meet, as I’d love to meet you face to face, so you could see these perceptions you have of me are totally wrong. I bet we’d get on well in reality. This version of me that you’ve built up in your head is really tiring and you’ve been relentlessly hounding me for years now. Please can you just stop being like this, for both of us?

 

Apologies to everyone else for bringing this up in here, but his constant needling of me needs addressing.

[Stanley]

11 minutes ago, Broker said:

Regardless of the relative merits of the games, 343’s Halo titles just haven’t drawn the kind of audiences of had the type of impact that you’d expect from what used to be one of the biggest franchises in the world. 4 and 5 are incredible looking games for the hardware, but seem to lack the innovation you’d expect from the series, whereas infinite was clearly trying to shake things up but made a bad impression graphically. I’d honestly prefer to see what 343 did with a new franchise, and give Halo to someone else or shelve in until you’ve got a great new entry. 
 

Early 2000’s Microsoft was so laser focused on finding the next big franchise. 

Yeah, sadly I don’t think Halo will ever be that game again. The first game was very much a case of right time, right hardware, right developer, the stars aligned. The FPS just isn’t as popular as it once was, not the story driven ones following in the wake of Half Life anyway, nowadays they are all free to play affairs and even COD single player is just sidelined or remakes. 
 

Even Bungie struggled. Their sequels were fine, great in some cases, but everyone still admires the first the most. After twenty years I think we’ve just got to accept that it won’t be bettered.

 

I agree with you that 343 should do something entirely new, free from expectations and the shackles of Halo. 

[Mr. Gerbik]

1 hour ago, Stanley said:

Even Bungie struggled. Their sequels were fine, great in some cases, but everyone still admires the first the most. After twenty years I think we’ve just got to accept that it won’t be bettered.

On this forum, yes definitely. Anecdotally, I get the impression that for a wider audience Halo 3 is THE Halo game.

[Mr. Gerbik]

Thinking about it, I don't know why Sony is so worried about Xbox owning Call of Duty. Surely under Microsoft management it will only mean that we won't see another Callof Duty game for 10+ years?

[Stanley]

14 minutes ago, Mr. Gerbik said:

On this forum, yes definitely. Anecdotally, I get the impression that for a wider audience Halo 3 is THE Halo game.

Not just this forum, it was the game that launched and sold the Xbox and at the time that AI and combat loop felt revolutionary. Halo 3 was definitely the game that received the most hype “finish the fight” but I don’t think any Halo will be able to reinvent itself and deliver that same feeling Halo CE did.

 

I think sometimes having a strict deadline and other limitations can really help too. No doubt if they had longer they would have added more stuff but in the process taken away from the purity of what they delivered.
 

That’s how I view the sequels; more guns, abilities etc. but the core combat loop is what makes it, all present and correct in the  very first game, everything else was just fluff or worse, bloat. 

[bear]

On 22/01/2023 at 06:23, Mr. Gerbik said:

Shit, Microsoft owns MachineGames now aka Starbreeze aka dem guys who done Riddick and Syndicate: The Shootah. Let them do something for example. Just step away from 343 already, they had 3 goes at it for over a decade. It's clearly not working, it's done, try something else.

At its core Infinite is a good game that's occasionally exceptional. The slow pace of updates has basically killed it which is frustrating as people seem to be be doing great things now with Forge but it's arrived too late. 

The most frustrating thing when you read Schreiers reporting on what went wrong with Infinite is that the issues you might expect to hear about when it comes to a troubled development, namely money and resources, don't seem to apply here. It all seems to come down to managerial incompetence. The contractor stuff is prime "know the price of everything but the value of nothing" horseshit. Spend eighteen months getting someone up to speed and making them part of your team only to dump them because spreadsheet says no, fucking stupidity.

 

Moving on, I think putting Machine Games on Halo would be a waste. If they are working on Wolfenstein and Indiana Jones now then I'd be much happier to see them finish off their Wolfenstein story and then go make something new and fresh. 

[Broker]

5 hours ago, Stanley said:

Yeah, sadly I don’t think Halo will ever be that game again. The first game was very much a case of right time, right hardware, right developer, the stars aligned. The FPS just isn’t as popular as it once was, not the story driven ones following in the wake of Half Life anyway, nowadays they are all free to play affairs and even COD single player is just sidelined or remakes. 
 

Even Bungie struggled. Their sequels were fine, great in some cases, but everyone still admires the first the most. After twenty years I think we’ve just got to accept that it won’t be bettered.

 

I agree with you that 343 should do something entirely new, free from expectations and the shackles of Halo. 

Shackles is the right word. The name Halo just comes with so many expectations, you’re always going to piss off fans if you try to innovate but if you deliver the same thing you’re not attracting anyone new. I get the feeling that’s why Bungie were willing to abandon it, though they’ve ironically ended up in a very similar situation with Destiny.

 

I also think that the other aspect of right place/right time is the multiplayer. When something becomes a multiplayer phenomenon they always struggle to recapture that going forwards. Fundamentally, the world generally has one big general thing that huge quantities of people are playing, and once you’re not that anymore getting back there is borderline impossible. It happened to Doom, Quake, UT, counter strike and all the others. And then you’re constantly chasing the glory days of when you were the big thing, but most games get there by being brand new and capturing a lot of peoples imaginations. 

[Pob]

8 minutes ago, Broker said:

Shackles is the right word. The name Halo just comes with so many expectations, you’re always going to piss off fans if you try to innovate but if you deliver the same thing you’re not attracting anyone new. I get the feeling that’s why Bungie were willing to abandon it, though they’ve ironically ended up in a very similar situation with Destiny.

The frustrating thing is that 343i had, in my opinion, exactly the right idea with Halo Infinite, in both single and multiplayer. It's just a shame they couldn't fill out the single player with interesting missions and environments, nor support the multi with the expected updates and progression systems. The direction was exactly right, they just couldn't execute it.

 

Oh, apart from the story, which was worse than ever.

[MidWalian]

Hurrah! Games! Hurrah!

 

[Stanley]

So Minecraft, Redfall, Forza, what do Zenimax make? 

[ScoobyDoom]

4 minutes ago, Stanley said:

So Minecraft, Redfall, Forza, what do Zenimax make? 

Elder scrolls online? A shiny new expansion on the cards perhaps

[Strafe]

Isn’t Zenimax just the holding company?