here’s a halo content creator i like, relatively light on the bullshit. the consensus seems to be “there’s not enough stuff in this game to hold interest.” it’s a shame because it’s sounding more and more like bungie wanted to make the eve online of FPS (as in, emergent gameplay, full-loot PVP focus, perfunctory AI enemies, humorless dystopian lore focus). but they are really going to need a heavy dose of the lore to keep people interested, given the relative paucity of stuff in the gameplay loop. and that is something that’s impossible to predict, and that modern AAA devs are well-known for being garbage at.
one thing he touches on that i think is interesting, is that halo gunplay relies on tracking aim and long time to kill, whereas destiny gunplay kind of obsoletes that with ADS, which carries over to marathon 20xx. so it’s unclear what the mechanical skill of the game is. positioning, basically. people said they liked destiny’s gunfeel but i never found it particularly compelling.
also, i’ve never played an fps/tps yet where you shoot robots that wouldn’t be improved by shooting some other type of enemy
i guess if i’m imagining a version of this game that was good, it would be more of like a STALKER vibe (what i imagine stalker to be anyway). a derelict exclusion zone type environment where things have been decaying and mutating in slightly horrific ways when they weren’t being watched. the story trailer kind of brings that vibe but the gameplay absolutely doesnt
likley the “potential players” from various industry only analytics and marketing research reports. If you spend enough time in indie game dev circles eventually you come across people with scraped steam data that you’re supposed to comb over to figure out what genres are “underserved” but have the most potential for a big audience. AAA have access to more data, I’ve never personally seen it but this is either the same scraped data or maybe they have a secret sauce - all I can think is they see the number of people playing Overwatch 2 and are like “we can do those numbers” . But also: making a single player game is a hard sell to…investors. They only see money. In fact I am pretty sure just about most people in the games buisness would make single player games were it not the money people and their metrics.
God Of War, The Last Of Us, Spiderman. They’re great for advancing the Sony brand’s “Prestige” . Much as I loathe them, I prefer their existence to the many service games that seem to come and (unfortunately) go. And even worse - the leaked documents from the ActiBlizz Microsoft merger confirmed they barely break even on them. Feeling kinda doomed on this. Going to think on it while browsing PS3 games at the local games store.
I think someone should just go bigger. microsoft suits could snort 350 million dollars of coke in a month, how about they really go all in for one last shot. put out a new xbox, pack it with a free game with a billion dollar budget. a game that got an entire new martin scorsese movie you can watch on a TV in the protagonist’s apartment. they got a hidden narnia in the closet that just a zelda game, the real thing, nintendo and all. it’s an every game, you can fly to the moon but you gotta learn how to build a rocket first, it’s fully simulated, there’s nothing on the moon at all but if you take your helmet off your head will pop in exactly the right way, the lack of an atmosphere is entirely accurate, the way your blood boils, it’s color, the feel of it pressing against your skin, everything is there, the granularity of the moon dust is immaculate, god bless the footprints of neil armstrong they’ve got them laser scanned from a drone they sent to orbit, it’s real it’s so real look at the sunlight shimmering and splitting through the ionosphere as your eyes bulge and dissolve into the sweet bliss of nothing
another big problem is investors won’t want to invest unless your budget is big enough, like bigger than $8 million for those indie game publishers that have recognizable brands. They want ROI and games smaller than that apparently don’t have it.
using The Halo Engine (slipspace) which required 6 months of learning in order to do anything with it
1a) using an engine built around BSPs to make an “Open World” game
a workforce that is mostly contractors limited to 18 months at the organization
competing visions for what Halo was, furthering churn of senior people and leads
I worked with some incredibly talented people. One of them put the grappling hook in, another built the entire camera system for God Of War, they were both contractors and were rotated out along with me. I don’t know if they didn’t playtest it enough, but had they not cut the game down it would have never come out.
But fundamentally you have a bunch of Microsoft Lifers running things and a churn of contractors coming in, learning the tools, and then leaving, which creates a lot of strife in multiple ways. What is ultra frustrating is MSFT would never open up headcount to let contractors in - with some very rare exceptions. Having worked on multiple microsoft titles I don’t think that organization is capable of addressing the fundamental cultural problems that cause their games to suck in ways that are easy to fix. You can’t build a studio culture if it’s constantly changing and you’re pushing out the new blood all the time.
Anyway yeah, they’re moving to the unreal engine, finally, and I still don’t qualify for an FTE role because I haven’t shipped a AAA game with Unreal. Good luck making the warthog with UE’s Chaos physics, I am probably one of the few people on the planet that’s actually made a vehicle work in a multiplayer shooter using unreal 5’s vehicle physics.
I watched someone stream the alpha, it moves like Destiny but with firefights that end in a game over - so kinda like…Fortnite. Or they go through buildings and click on endless boxes to find stuff. This isn’t appealing to me, i wanted to like it after everything, but I’m already exhausted
I wonder if they could make a quick solo mode: same extraction mechanics but you’re just fighting a ton of robots. It wouldn’t be…great or anything, but it would be more appealing and at least get me to maybe plunk money down on it vs what’s in there now.
OR: add dual wield shotguns. Fuck balance! Fuck “Meta”. God gave us two triggers on each controller for a reason.
I don’t know how detailed their Intended Player Power Growth Chart is (probably textbook sized), but seems to me that the easy fix for that is if you complete a contract everyone on your team gets the reward. Which, based on what I’ve heard about Destiny, means they will never do this.
I remember every design decision in destiny was driving me insane at the time I was playing it and now I can’t remember hardly a single thing about it, except that the main critical game mechanic you use to build your character you learn exists solely from little tool tip popups over things in your inventory. the main draw seemed to be experiencing a game designed by people completely disappeared up their own asses, people who haven’t seen daylight or spoken to another human being in years it, a game designed by a bunch of pissing-in-jars stage howard hugheses
yeah this is the feeling i got from destiny and also from this. and a lot of other devs/games do this too tbh. feels like studios enamored of their own -systems- and not stopping to ask whether those systems actually contribute anything positive or are just in the game because they happened to be implemented and add ‘stuff’
