Halo Studios: New Name, New Engine, New Games, New Philosophy
Halo Studios: New Name, New Engine, New Games, New Philosophy
But same studio
And same bullshit too.
We have a studio full of the exact same people who don't get what made their predecessors great. They will continue to miss the mark with new branding and new tech.
Betting on another bland and soulless corpo cash grab that wears the skin of another nostalgic childhood memory.
What I am really unsure about is if there's even a market for Halo anymore.
I'd like to think that a plot-heavy, dialogue-heavy game has a place in the modern era, at least after God of War and Ragnarök, but I don't know if that's what the kids want, and I really don't think the industry wants it because it's expensive and the ROI is low compared to PvP extraction shooters, which are cheaper to make an easier to monetize.
I want to play a story through, and I want to care about the story and the characters and the dialogue. I cut my FPS teeth playing Marathon (Bungie's predecessaor to Halo) and never got into the shallow-plotted shooters that id Software was pushing at the time, but I think the market has largely passed me by.
This focus on the engine and the focus on company structure does not give me hope.
I walked past a Gamestop once and heard one tween girl ask another what Halo 5 was. "It's some old game my dad used to play."
That was ten years ago.
Considering how successful Red Dead 2 was, I think the market exists. Although smaller for Halo
This article, or corpo propaganda depending on your cynicism, asserts as fact that "gamers" are clamoring at the gates, screaming about the length of time between installments in franchises. That rings hollow to me. If anything, it seems like franchise fatigue is a much more common ailment. However, Lemmy is the entirety of my social media presence, so I am sure I'm not tuned in to the wider landscape.
I definitely remember a lot of people whining about how long Infinite took to release, especially when it got delayed a full year, and then finally releasing after 6 years, it wasn't even that good. The old 3 year cadence was pretty perfect imo, plenty of time for each game to have a good run before the next one, and not close enough together to cause fatigue.
I suppose I cling to the old adage that a bad game is bad forever, while a delayed game may some day be good. It's less true today than when Miyamoto said it (No Man's Sky being the commonly cited example of a game which was able to turn its radioactive launch into a fairly positive experience), but I still believe it's more accurate than not. I'm picking on a straw man here, but I wonder how many of those "gamers" bemoaning Halo's long absence also look down their noses at the yearly release mill of sports games. Far as I'm concerned, new games in a franchise should come when the creators feel they have something new to showcase. A new mechanic, new engine, a new plot, whatever. Obviously, the games industry at large is perfectly happy to ok boomer me, and I'm perfectly happy to keep mining through my backlog of games which manage to be fun without live updates.
Only feels like they became 343 a couple of years ago
They were always 343 from their founding in 2007. It didn't form out of Bungie if that's what you're thinking.
So when can I play Halo on my PlayStation?
The day after Nintendo sues Sony for "D-pad patent infringement"
Quotas are rising in the Halo mines.