#343i

[hellson06]

Halo 2 Master Chief Drawing with Prismacolors

[aloofraven]

I stopped following Halo Infinite updates like a year ago, but every few months I’ll search for it on youtube and it’s so funny how the big talkers flip-flop their opinion on it on a weekly basis.

Yesterday: 343 has SAVED halo!

2 weeks ago: Halo Infinite is DEAD

3 weeks ago: Gameplay has been FIXED?

4 weeks ago: 343 KILLED the Halo Franchise

1 month ago: Can Halo Infinite be SAVED?

[bloodgulchblog]

[bloodgulchblog]

343 Industries will then take on a parental role for Halo, overseeing new games and content while working on maintaining the game's engine. This isn't entirely new territory for 343 Industries as it has relied on outside help to develop Halo Infinite's multiplayer content (Season 2 is a prime example of this), but Bathrobe Spartan claims that the planned story-based DLC has been scrapped due to it being considered not cost-effective under 343's stewardship.

343 Industries Will No Longer Make Halo Games, But Will Oversee Outside Development - Report

It's claimed that 343 Industries will be taking a backseat to the development of future Halo games.

I knew it already in my heart but I'm still devastated.

(If you come on this post to tell me how bad you hated Infinite's campaign, kindly fuck off and get your own post)

[bfoxanimation]

Man...

[bloodgulchblog]

My feelings of "Infinite felt like an apology to me personally for 5 and I accepted it" and "it's extremely sad to me how Halo has swerved its story on every installment of the last decade" coexist because having feelings is complicated.

[bloodgulchblog]

I feel kind of bad about my bitching about 343, given the circumstances. But it's hard because there's a line between the entity and the individuals. A company can never truly love anything etc etc.

I've always felt like there have been people who love this IP and were trying to say something, but got held back by executive meddling and the hostility of the job.

Like, reading that book about the development of Bungie days Halo showed how they were pretty much always under ridiculous pressure handed down by Microsoft even then, but the 2000s were a very different time. Gamers didn't have such free access to attacking creators directly and while they were influenced by feedback and sales numbers, I don't think it was as constant as the fucking hellfire of running a live service game with the expectation of constant updates in 2022.

It makes me really sad how easily beloved old IPs can be crushed to death by the weight of the soulless corporations that are so keen on devouring them.

The entity with the wallet is so terrified of taking any risk or committing to any direction that nothing can happen that matters.

[quentin719]

With how often people complain about how 343 handles Halo, I never hear my own biggest issue:

343 pushes the fantasy elements HARD and forgets to approach it as a war story at all.

The original Halo games' narratives were war movies in a sci-fi fantasy setting, not sci-fi in a military setting. That is, it was a war story first with fantasy set dressing. The earlier books and Halo: Reach took this approach the strongest, but that was the priority for Halo's story for Bungie's entire run.

Basically all of the grounded but glorified approach to war that you'd expect from an American propaganda film, but set in a sci-fi universe with sci-fi bad guys.(another example of this style of story is the movie Battle: Los Angeles)

Even in the more fantasy leaning parts of the original trilogy, the UNSC and the Covenant had the appearance and feel of a functioning military, especially in terms of how characters interacted with each other outside of combat.

The sci-fi elements on the humans' side were also much more grounded than 343's interpretation. Outside of spaceships, the games, books, and other media always mostly showed humans using technology that, to some degree, already existed in the real world at the time, only inserting sci-fi on the humans' side where it was necessary for gameplay or to facilitate events in the story.

343's portrayal of how military personnel (Spartans moreso than normal soldiers) interact may as well be ripped from an MCU film, and most of their sci-fi leans WAY harder into fantasy than Bungie ever would have.

Beyond the contents of the narrative itself, I grew up in a city with a population that was 2/3 active military and veterans, and I went to a public high school that was on an active military base. Tons of people everywhere from ROTC to the actual military preferred Halo over other games because its story portrayed military personnel more accurately and respectfully than more "realistic" shooters like Battlefield and CoD. I've heard from other people that this sentiment didn't end at my hometown.

Halo Infinite managed to correct or compensate for a lot of the problems with earlier 343 titles, and Halo Wars 2 brought back the best of the old visual elements, but I'm worried that what made Bungie's Halo stories stand out might be gone for good.