That gives me absolutely 0 confidence that any passion is going to go into the development of this game. It’s just another big IP microsoft is determined to extract value from on a regular basis. I guess that’s what happens when you don’t deliver and microsoft comes knocking. But microsoft doesn’t even care if you deliver.
Jumping from 3/Reach/ODST to 4 give me culture shock. It just play so different and the story is nonsense and boring. Halo is done when Bungie said it’s done.
I see this as a good thing. 343 sucked at Halo.
The outsourced studios might actually do better than 343, to be honest. 343 has so terribly mismanaged Halo. Its ridiculous how bad of a job they did. They were given charge of Xbox’s biggest IP and the fumbled it. Halo Infinite was meant to be a glorious return to form, and it landed with a flop. Its like they did nothing but hire people that hated halo. They had the formula laid out by Bungie. All they needed to do was more of that and people would gobble it up.
Glad to see other folks have noticed this as well.
As a longtime Destiny fan, I was so excited to have Halo come in and take the spotlight and giving Bungie’s lazy ass a run for their money.
Instead halo flopped almost as hard as Anthem. Fucking sad.
…and that’s the end of Halo.
These days it’s like rpgs and first person shooters just evolved into the same genre. The boomer shooter isn’t dead, it just lives on as a game mechanic that plays a part in larger games. Remember that turn based shit in kotor? This was before putting first or third person combat in every game was normalized and it sucked. Imagine if Skyrim had turn based combat instead of direct control real-time combat, no one would still be playing it. I’d be willing to play a halo starfield like rpg maybe but they’d probably enshittify it too much so never mind.
As an engineer who has worked with and led offshore teams, I bid farewell to Halo. The time is over.
I have seen some of the worst code from offshore teams. Not saying everyone is like that, nor am I saying you have to be in these countries to make food code. But, I know how they drive the people over there, and I know what their company’s priorities are. Get the next contract, do the minimum to maintain the contract. Lowest bidder, and for the companies you get what you pay for.
I now have zero expectations for Halo. It’s too bad because the open world in Infinite was a lot of fun, but of course they wanted season passes and live services, and gamers are obviously surrounded by those. Plus with Microsoft if it isn’t extremely insanely profitable then it’s not worth continuing. Moderately profitable won’t cut it for them.
So, so long halo, it was fun, but I’ll have fun replaying the originals.
My heart goes out to the few engineers left who will now be babysitting contractors full-time.
I did that job. I lost all of my engineering time to them, a team of “senior engineers” who I had to teach git, pull requests, basic unit tests, developing along non-happy paths, deployments, and getting nothing but pushback the entire time.
Me, PR comment: “Hey this is going to throw an exception. Can you handle that?”
Them "It won’t throw an exception "
Me: yes, it literally will, look, if that’s null it will throw. Look it’s fine, just handle it gracefully, I’m. Not saying it’s bad that it will throw, just make sure the app doesn’t crash
Them: This is a waste of time, just push the code.
Just constant battles like that. Like I said it’s not their fault, it’s the culture differences of development, but man does it fuck up a software application.
From insider leaks overuse of contractors was what put infinite in the mess it was in the beginning… so they’re just doubling down on using contractors instead of listening to the actual workers. It’s a huge shame because right as 343 started to pick up steam with updates Microsoft started firing everyone.
This is why tech companies should not hire MBAs. Not even one. If you want an accountant hire an actual CPA. If you absolutely must have a CFO, pay an engineer to take some finance classes.
