Idiot directors and VPs don’t realize that the independence is what leads to the games being different enough to justify separate existences. Put the same teams on Halo and CoD and they’ll converge and cannibalize each other.
Or maybe they do realize this and are willing to sacrifice the IP at the altar of Moloch.
TBH it seems like the Halo teams have been trying to copy COD for a while (going as far as adding COD mechanics to the Halo:CE remake).
If they're under the same roof, my optimistic hope is that they'll try to focus on how to differentiate the IPs. But realistically we'll probably just end up with even more micro transactions
Eh, a lot of these studios have not performed well at all over the last 10-15 years. It seems like Phil Spencer was the type of boss that let these teams run wild and be creative, and all he got back was a bunch of late, over budget, underwhelming games.
Halo Infinite from 343/Halo Studios stands out in particular. They thought that game was ready to ship in late 2020 and showed it off on their summer showcase, where it triggered such an intense backlash they delayed the game for a year and it still came out with minimal content.
Halo and Rare going under Activision could be a good thing. But if you want to be cynical, they are moving all of these studios out of "Microsoft Gaming Studios" and into Activision, Bethesda, King, etc. to make it easier to sell each of those individually or spin off the whole thing altogether.
Even talented teams given lots of independence and a large budget can coast and meander during development, and more importantly not release the interesting stuff in a timely manner (see GTA6).
At least with the Netflix model they fund every director available, including independent and C-list directors, and release everything quickly, using quantity to mask quality issues. Bigco Gaming is addicted to the 5yrs+ in-development blockbuster model and it's not producing many hits and the public notices that sort of thing.
“For Halo, our goal is clear: make the greatest Halo game ever, worthy of its universe and legacy, while staying true to what made players love it in the first place,”
Are those opposing goals? Why say "while" as if they are in competition with each other?
Guys, there’s now a non-zero chance that we will see a proper official Halo game running on top of a Quake 3 Arena derived game engine within our life-time. Childhood fantasy might become real. “:D”
I honestly didn't think that the story of 4 was bad (outside of the QTE fight at the very end), and I enjoyed the character growth in Infinite. If you jump from 3 to Infinite then you'll probably hate Chief, but the way he's gradually been forced to accept his humanity has actually made him more interesting to me. He's definitely not the original character he was intended to be (he kept his helmet on so that anybody could imagine themself inside the suit) and I think a lot of original fans are mad at that.
I remember people hated on Reach because it didn't follow Chief and they added all the gadgets, then people hated 4 because of the weird undersuit Chief wore and a bunch of other nitpicks. Infinite has been hated for a slew of other reasons, but now Reach is considered good and 4 has a rising reputation. It seems to me that PvP players and story players have two extremely different outlooks on where the games went wrong, but at least we agree on one thing - keeping 5/Guardians on Xbox only was stupid (I still haven't played it).
The astonishing thing with the Halo franchise is that 343 kept being given chances to go again, and again, when it clearly just wasn't working. By the time they get round to releasing a great new Halo people that loved the original will be taking out their pensions.
It cannot be understated the extent to which the console industry, including third party publishers and devs, needs Sony and Microsoft to both stay competitive. In that light the drastic moves being done at MS are long overdue, but maybe not sufficient. It's also an open question if consoles (outside of the Nintendo universe, which is a very different audience) have a future at all.
Halo used to be what everyone wanted (both to play and dethrone), but now it's sitting in the corner eating glue. Moving it under Activision is certainly an extreme measure, but if it means everyone who touched on it in the past 15 years can't anymore, I'm listening.
I'd argue the entertainment industry is reaching a ceiling on the quality that inflated budgets guarantee. Microsoft could throw a billion dollars at Halo 6 and then get an unfavorable response because Master Chief doesn't get the shotgun early enough in the campaign.
Somehow I doubt merging once-competing-now-heavily-downsized studios will be a recipe for success (see also the merging of Bethesda and Obsidian Software). Not that managing an army of game developers among one of the world's largest armies of developers is an easy task... but it does seem like the key is smaller teams with more creative liberty (hopefully working without the burden of an existing IP with such lofty expectations)
The Fallout TV show probably had to be the final straw for how much independence Bethesda gets to have. Boy, to have been a fly on the wall in that conference room.
"The TV show is doing gangbusters and you're telling me you don't have any F*CKING RELEASES IN THE CAN?!?! Stick Starfield, Todd, you're done with your 'art'."
I mean, I'm not even asking for a new installment, but the TV show is in New Vegas now, and not even a remaster of Fallout: New Vegas? In a world gone mad with advertising, I'm truly shocked that the single tie-in was a remaster of Fallout 4.
Nintendo has the worst hardware, but consistently delivers a small number of really great games you can't play anywhere else. Any game you can play on a Xbox you could also play on a real PC and have a vastly better experience and far more utility. Xbox is just a shitty, ad infested, crippled gaming PC. Playstation is heading in that direction as they lose more exclusives, but at least their hardware is better than Microsoft's so the games look/play better.
Microsoft might as well give up and just sell a bunch of low-mid range gaming PCs in console shaped cases, running windows, ship them with controllers and just brand them as Xboxes. At least for now. Eventually Microsoft wants games as a service, where you buy a dumb terminal/cheap thin client and they stream games you pay excessively high prices for but never actually own to your screen.
What you described with the "might as well give up" is literally the idea behind Project Helix. It's a PC branded as Xbox with some compatibility layers glued in.
Xbox now is a game studio, not a console manufacturer. Look at them through that lens. Doom, Halo, Overwatch, Fallout, whatever else, whether you are into them or not, they own a lot of franchises and those are their core now.
Depending on the hardware, if they let you get to a desktop, and you can run regular windows programs (especially steam and emulators) it might actually be worth it for some people. Especially for households where nobody owns a desktop/laptop, just phones and tablets.
Microsoft might as well give up and just sell a bunch of low-mid range gaming PCs in console shaped cases, running windows, ship them with controllers and just brand them as Xboxes.
But, that's exactly what they're doing right now, and you're still not satisfied? What would be different compared to today? It very much is exactly what they're doing.
I haven't seen it yet. Maybe I'll be satisfied when I do, but as of today it still makes no sense to buy an xbox and hasn't made sense for many many years.
The series S at launch, probably until year 3 or so, was arguably the greatest deal in gaming. Especially with how easy it was to get cheap (even free) gamepass.
Xbox is designed for kids, who's parents don't want them to have full access to a desktop computer and don't know how powerful of a gaming computer they need (people like to claim its cheaper but it really isn't, and it's easier to spend more on fast hardware you don't really need).
Because of this eco-system for kids, xbox has great multiplayer support (including locally for friends), and the software was a clearer focus with less bloat. I don't see xbox market going away any time soon unless people stop having kids
I find modern Windows very frustrating. The Xbox lets you play games that might be available on PC/Windows but you don't have to deal with Windows. That's why my sister has an Xbox. She ditched Windows for a Mac years ago because Windows kept getting more annoying, but the Xbox was easily usable in 2013 and it still is today.
Microsoft runs monopolies. Business software Monopoly specifically.
They cannot make user and customer focused software. They cannot make user and customer focused hardware. They do not care about customers.
Although I guess they have proven to be okay at data centers.
What should the Xbox be if Microsoft was a competent organization, like half of what apple is? And I'm not an Apple fan by the way
- since they have a monopoly of PC gaming, much to the pain of PC gaming users, that should afford them the ability to effortlessly Port x86 base games to an x86 gaming console platform
- because of their extensive relationships with PC hardware manufacturers, it should afford them the ability to produce a very powerful but cost-effective gaming platform
- Maybe even since steam runs primarily on x86, Microsoft could have partnered with steam to get their games onto that platform relatively seamlessly
- The PC gaming has several decades of dos and windows games that could have been updated, remade, or the like, so there should have been a wealth of ip available to them
- and with good coordination, should have been able to bootstrap dozens of software gaming studios to make actual good games exclusive to their platform
Well Microsoft succeeded at some of this. They did not succeed to the necessary degree, especially with treating their own custom games
every platform is also a community. a network of players, like a neighborhood, or a bar. Your friends & acquaintances are there. The whole is more than the sum of it's parts. It's more than just hardware, or exclusives.
I switched from PS to Xbox a few years ago, because my family and friends were playing there.
There's also some nice technical benefits, but compared to my friends, who cares?
For Halo, our goal is clear: make the greatest Halo game ever, worthy of its universe and legacy, while staying true to what made players love it in the first place.
I seriously doubt that is going to happen. 343 Industries, now Halo Studios, has the dubious distinction of being the only AAA game studio that has somehow never made a universally acclaimed game over almost 20 years. Sure, there are some good parts of Haloes 4 and 5 and Infinite and MCC, but all of these games have a giant asterisk next to their quality.
You would think Campaign Evolved would have been a lay-up, but despite multiple studios working on the at a drastically smaller scope than even the original Halo, it still currently has a "Mixed" review on Steam.
"Make the greatest Halo game ever" is too high of a bar to cross, I think a slightly more realistic goal for would be "make a decent Halo game that majority of players like", which at this point, I'm not sure if it is achievable.
Remember when we had a robust Western AAA video game industry? Man that was awesome. Too bad it had to die a slow death over the past decade and a half for various completely unnecessary reasons.
AAA games got too big to fail, so they had to be made to appeal to everyone, even if that meant they no longer appealed to fans of previous franchise titles. You Just Can't Make A Game About Things Like Space Marines With Dudes As The Primary Target Audience Anymore, apparently!
Crunch had to die because even though every game everyone's ever loved was made under crunch, crunch is stressful, it's bad to work hard on making something good, so that had to go, so millions could be wasted on making unsuccessful games.
Then, all the studios had to get bought up and consolidated and then laid off—who could've seen that coming a mile away?
It's been such a bummer to watch an industry I once cherished for its incredible output in terms of both technology and entertainment die a slow decade-and-a-half-long death, but, here we are.
Idiot directors and VPs don’t realize that the independence is what leads to the games being different enough to justify separate existences. Put the same teams on Halo and CoD and they’ll converge and cannibalize each other.
Or maybe they do realize this and are willing to sacrifice the IP at the altar of Moloch.
TBH it seems like the Halo teams have been trying to copy COD for a while (going as far as adding COD mechanics to the Halo:CE remake).
If they're under the same roof, my optimistic hope is that they'll try to focus on how to differentiate the IPs. But realistically we'll probably just end up with even more micro transactions
Eh, a lot of these studios have not performed well at all over the last 10-15 years. It seems like Phil Spencer was the type of boss that let these teams run wild and be creative, and all he got back was a bunch of late, over budget, underwhelming games.
Halo Infinite from 343/Halo Studios stands out in particular. They thought that game was ready to ship in late 2020 and showed it off on their summer showcase, where it triggered such an intense backlash they delayed the game for a year and it still came out with minimal content.
Halo and Rare going under Activision could be a good thing. But if you want to be cynical, they are moving all of these studios out of "Microsoft Gaming Studios" and into Activision, Bethesda, King, etc. to make it easier to sell each of those individually or spin off the whole thing altogether.
What is there to sacrifice? There hasn’t been a new Halo game since 2010. Just fan fiction, remakes & anthologies.
They're essentially closing 343/Halo studios because they had independence for a decade and did nothing but flop.
Even talented teams given lots of independence and a large budget can coast and meander during development, and more importantly not release the interesting stuff in a timely manner (see GTA6).
At least with the Netflix model they fund every director available, including independent and C-list directors, and release everything quickly, using quantity to mask quality issues. Bigco Gaming is addicted to the 5yrs+ in-development blockbuster model and it's not producing many hits and the public notices that sort of thing.
Are those opposing goals? Why say "while" as if they are in competition with each other?
Because 343 studios, quite obviously, doesn't think very highly of the original Halo trilogy. Paraphrased, their pitch is:
Guys, there’s now a non-zero chance that we will see a proper official Halo game running on top of a Quake 3 Arena derived game engine within our life-time. Childhood fantasy might become real. “:D”
There hasn't been a proper official Halo game since Reach though.
I thought Infinite was quite fun but you could tell they cut a lot of content.
It was so aggressively mid. I enjoyed hunting HVT’s with my buddy but that was about it.
I honestly didn't think that the story of 4 was bad (outside of the QTE fight at the very end), and I enjoyed the character growth in Infinite. If you jump from 3 to Infinite then you'll probably hate Chief, but the way he's gradually been forced to accept his humanity has actually made him more interesting to me. He's definitely not the original character he was intended to be (he kept his helmet on so that anybody could imagine themself inside the suit) and I think a lot of original fans are mad at that.
I remember people hated on Reach because it didn't follow Chief and they added all the gadgets, then people hated 4 because of the weird undersuit Chief wore and a bunch of other nitpicks. Infinite has been hated for a slew of other reasons, but now Reach is considered good and 4 has a rising reputation. It seems to me that PvP players and story players have two extremely different outlooks on where the games went wrong, but at least we agree on one thing - keeping 5/Guardians on Xbox only was stupid (I still haven't played it).
Given they just laid off most of the id team I wouldn't hold any hope.
The next game is officially Unreal Engine based, so not quite the same swapping out Quake with Unreal.
I really would have liked Halo games based on idTech though. I can't see why idTech can't be a complete package for Halo, especially 7 and 8.
Firing a bunch of id staff probably crushes that idea more than it was previously though.
The astonishing thing with the Halo franchise is that 343 kept being given chances to go again, and again, when it clearly just wasn't working. By the time they get round to releasing a great new Halo people that loved the original will be taking out their pensions.
It cannot be understated the extent to which the console industry, including third party publishers and devs, needs Sony and Microsoft to both stay competitive. In that light the drastic moves being done at MS are long overdue, but maybe not sufficient. It's also an open question if consoles (outside of the Nintendo universe, which is a very different audience) have a future at all.
Halo used to be what everyone wanted (both to play and dethrone), but now it's sitting in the corner eating glue. Moving it under Activision is certainly an extreme measure, but if it means everyone who touched on it in the past 15 years can't anymore, I'm listening.
Well now activision gets to make Call of Halo so we’ll see how that goes!
MS as a company remains perpetually in reset mode.
Fixing blue screens must be hard.
I think they have an impossible task. Make a good product that is a pleasure to use for players and devs while being more profitable.
Their only goal is to be more profitable.
it is easy: give up on hardware and focus on games
I'd argue the entertainment industry is reaching a ceiling on the quality that inflated budgets guarantee. Microsoft could throw a billion dollars at Halo 6 and then get an unfavorable response because Master Chief doesn't get the shotgun early enough in the campaign.
Somehow I doubt merging once-competing-now-heavily-downsized studios will be a recipe for success (see also the merging of Bethesda and Obsidian Software). Not that managing an army of game developers among one of the world's largest armies of developers is an easy task... but it does seem like the key is smaller teams with more creative liberty (hopefully working without the burden of an existing IP with such lofty expectations)
Obsidian became a part of Bethesda, huh?
The Fallout TV show probably had to be the final straw for how much independence Bethesda gets to have. Boy, to have been a fly on the wall in that conference room.
"The TV show is doing gangbusters and you're telling me you don't have any F*CKING RELEASES IN THE CAN?!?! Stick Starfield, Todd, you're done with your 'art'."
I mean, I'm not even asking for a new installment, but the TV show is in New Vegas now, and not even a remaster of Fallout: New Vegas? In a world gone mad with advertising, I'm truly shocked that the single tie-in was a remaster of Fallout 4.
Maybe Todd's more a champion of the people than I originally realized. Not retreading ground with remasters is admirable in my book.
Are we gonna ignore Bethesda reselling Skyrim in different coats for 15 years?
I really don't understand the point of Xbox.
Nintendo has the worst hardware, but consistently delivers a small number of really great games you can't play anywhere else. Any game you can play on a Xbox you could also play on a real PC and have a vastly better experience and far more utility. Xbox is just a shitty, ad infested, crippled gaming PC. Playstation is heading in that direction as they lose more exclusives, but at least their hardware is better than Microsoft's so the games look/play better.
Microsoft might as well give up and just sell a bunch of low-mid range gaming PCs in console shaped cases, running windows, ship them with controllers and just brand them as Xboxes. At least for now. Eventually Microsoft wants games as a service, where you buy a dumb terminal/cheap thin client and they stream games you pay excessively high prices for but never actually own to your screen.
What you described with the "might as well give up" is literally the idea behind Project Helix. It's a PC branded as Xbox with some compatibility layers glued in.
Xbox now is a game studio, not a console manufacturer. Look at them through that lens. Doom, Halo, Overwatch, Fallout, whatever else, whether you are into them or not, they own a lot of franchises and those are their core now.
Depending on the hardware, if they let you get to a desktop, and you can run regular windows programs (especially steam and emulators) it might actually be worth it for some people. Especially for households where nobody owns a desktop/laptop, just phones and tablets.
But, that's exactly what they're doing right now, and you're still not satisfied? What would be different compared to today? It very much is exactly what they're doing.
I haven't seen it yet. Maybe I'll be satisfied when I do, but as of today it still makes no sense to buy an xbox and hasn't made sense for many many years.
The series S at launch, probably until year 3 or so, was arguably the greatest deal in gaming. Especially with how easy it was to get cheap (even free) gamepass.
Xbox is designed for kids, who's parents don't want them to have full access to a desktop computer and don't know how powerful of a gaming computer they need (people like to claim its cheaper but it really isn't, and it's easier to spend more on fast hardware you don't really need).
Because of this eco-system for kids, xbox has great multiplayer support (including locally for friends), and the software was a clearer focus with less bloat. I don't see xbox market going away any time soon unless people stop having kids
hmmm, that does not make sense. for one, xbox competes with playstation and playstation is definitely not designed for kids.
second, nintendo exists for "family friendly" market.
Nintendo's offering is absolutely the "for kids" console.
I find modern Windows very frustrating. The Xbox lets you play games that might be available on PC/Windows but you don't have to deal with Windows. That's why my sister has an Xbox. She ditched Windows for a Mac years ago because Windows kept getting more annoying, but the Xbox was easily usable in 2013 and it still is today.
Microsoft runs monopolies. Business software Monopoly specifically.
They cannot make user and customer focused software. They cannot make user and customer focused hardware. They do not care about customers.
Although I guess they have proven to be okay at data centers.
What should the Xbox be if Microsoft was a competent organization, like half of what apple is? And I'm not an Apple fan by the way
- since they have a monopoly of PC gaming, much to the pain of PC gaming users, that should afford them the ability to effortlessly Port x86 base games to an x86 gaming console platform
- because of their extensive relationships with PC hardware manufacturers, it should afford them the ability to produce a very powerful but cost-effective gaming platform
- Maybe even since steam runs primarily on x86, Microsoft could have partnered with steam to get their games onto that platform relatively seamlessly
- The PC gaming has several decades of dos and windows games that could have been updated, remade, or the like, so there should have been a wealth of ip available to them
- and with good coordination, should have been able to bootstrap dozens of software gaming studios to make actual good games exclusive to their platform
Well Microsoft succeeded at some of this. They did not succeed to the necessary degree, especially with treating their own custom games
every platform is also a community. a network of players, like a neighborhood, or a bar. Your friends & acquaintances are there. The whole is more than the sum of it's parts. It's more than just hardware, or exclusives.
I switched from PS to Xbox a few years ago, because my family and friends were playing there.
There's also some nice technical benefits, but compared to my friends, who cares?
Xbox360 was so good. Kinnect Halo 3 halo 4 were good (more halo3) And had many coo op games.
Xbox360 was the second best system behind PS2 in my mind. PS4, Switch, and Super Nintendo get honorable mentions.
I seriously doubt that is going to happen. 343 Industries, now Halo Studios, has the dubious distinction of being the only AAA game studio that has somehow never made a universally acclaimed game over almost 20 years. Sure, there are some good parts of Haloes 4 and 5 and Infinite and MCC, but all of these games have a giant asterisk next to their quality.
You would think Campaign Evolved would have been a lay-up, but despite multiple studios working on the at a drastically smaller scope than even the original Halo, it still currently has a "Mixed" review on Steam.
"Make the greatest Halo game ever" is too high of a bar to cross, I think a slightly more realistic goal for would be "make a decent Halo game that majority of players like", which at this point, I'm not sure if it is achievable.
Part of Halo CE failing is boycott, I was interested until MSFT did all their shenanigans and cost people their livelihoods.
Remember when we had a robust Western AAA video game industry? Man that was awesome. Too bad it had to die a slow death over the past decade and a half for various completely unnecessary reasons.
AAA games got too big to fail, so they had to be made to appeal to everyone, even if that meant they no longer appealed to fans of previous franchise titles. You Just Can't Make A Game About Things Like Space Marines With Dudes As The Primary Target Audience Anymore, apparently!
Crunch had to die because even though every game everyone's ever loved was made under crunch, crunch is stressful, it's bad to work hard on making something good, so that had to go, so millions could be wasted on making unsuccessful games.
Then, all the studios had to get bought up and consolidated and then laid off—who could've seen that coming a mile away?
It's been such a bummer to watch an industry I once cherished for its incredible output in terms of both technology and entertainment die a slow decade-and-a-half-long death, but, here we are.
Laura Fryer, ex Xbox executive, her channel on YouTube has some really great insights into all of this.