Title Update 1.04.00 details

How exactly would you play matchmaking playlists with an offline account?

 

I'm assuming its going to be like League play, where for x amount of weeks( Maybe even months) You build up your stats/rank, and they will eventually reset it, giving everyone a fresh start and a reason to keep playing it.

 

I was looking forward to more misc stuff such as:

-Forced Color toggle on certain gametypes
-Scope kickout from damage
-Object terrain phasing issue tweaked
-Object spawning restrictions lifted
-Added additional gametypes (race)

But I guess with that list, you could say they got a good start.

 

I would LOVE to see descoping come back. Sniping without anyone being able to ping you out of scope makes it so goddamn easy, and it's already easy enough with the magnetism and hitboxes being the way they are. It also compounds the problem with the DMR stretching out effective encounter ranges.

 

You could probably fix half of BTB by doing that. Descoping + Reduced Magnetism = Real Halo

IMO

 

These X's are worse than a bunny boiler.

 

White rather than red, meaning they don't stand out from service tags of living team mates very much at all.
The actual X fades out in like a second, leaving only the service tag, which again they haven't made easy to discern from that of a living team mate.
Even the service tag doesn't stay until the player has respawned. What on earth is the logic in that?

I'm not calling malice like so many others, just incompetence. It's like they're genuinely listening, trying to do what the community wants, but don't actually understand the purpose of these HUD elements. How can you be designing a Halo game when you don't even understand, in depth, the role that HUD elements play enough to decide which aspects are important? It's the red and blue objective marker problem all over again. How can anyone who's played Halo with any degree of seriousness, let alone been tasked with designing a game, not understand how counter intuitive it is to have a red objective as friendly and a blue as enemy? It wouldn't even be so bad if it were totally consistent, but player names still show up as red or blue based on enemy or friendly, regardless of what team you're on. It's counter intuitive and inconsistent.

The only argument for doing these things is change for the sole sake of distinction from previous games. But how does that figure? Like how is switching red and blue on objective HUD markers going to make people stop and think "huh, this franchise is really looking refreshed, they've really turned over a new leaf by changing a tiny yet significant gameplay element"? I just don't get it. I know this is kinda a long rant over an arguably small detail, but that's kinda my point. Why mess with these things just for change's sake? And if you really need to stamp 343 on the game by changing things to illustrate a new direction, at least try to understand the purpose of these mechanics before gratuitously messing with them.

Again, I won't call malice or bad intention, they wouldn't have done this at all if they weren't keen to actually listen and react based on what we want, but you can be well intentioned but still incompetent. I think that's the case with stuff like this, and it kinda baffles me that people tasked with taking over and revitalising a franchise don't even understand the role of stuff like this enough to do it right.

 

But how does that make you feel, peg?

I just hope that because this is the second title update they still do more updates to fix other things.

 

Thing is, I don't like this argument as an actual excuse, but in personal terms I am willing to wait. Disappointing, yes. Frustrating, yes. But I'm trying to stop myself from discounting their clear intention to do right by the community, even if the actions which result are sometimes misguided and sometimes downright confusing.

I guess I just shouldn't take that kind of willingness for granted, but damn, at times it's really hard to appreciate how they can't understand the principles behind these things. Probably easy to say as someone who's lived and breathed Halo for 10 years. But idk, a big part of my is just itching to sit down with them and really talk all this stuff out. Like I said, I think the intention really is there, and I also appreciate that they do want to make their mark, I'd just feel much better knowing that they really do understand positions like mine, and the reasoning behind them, in detail. It's so difficult to stomach the culture of disallowing really candid discussion between devs and their communities, though I can totally see why it comes about.

On that note, it was actually kinda interesting listening to Bravo on the PAX panel. He doesn't display the same diplomatic approach to discussion that seems to dominate, not just in 343, but in AAA devs as a whole. When they were discussing the Gauss Hog, we got the very standard spiel of it being a tweak to make a decent difference without changing it too much. I always think that this attitude to discussing changes is so plainly aimed at not alienating anyone. They're trying to make people who like the Gauss Hog in its current form feel comfortable that their beloved vehicle isn't really going to be changed that much, but at the same time trying to convince those who want the change that enough has been done to satisfy them.

This approach to discussing change always puts me off a little. At best it's non committal, and at worst it's oxymoronic. You've made a change, and you obviously feel that a change needed to be made, so the mechanic was bad enough that you actually felt compelled to change it. Just pick your stance and stand by it, show some conviction, ya know? Bravo didn't just say "yeah, it's useless now, Gauss haters rejoice!" but he was clear on the fact that a meaningful change had been made, even if it isn't gamechanging. He also specifically addressed the metrics of that change as a basic part of his point, which isn't very common. Instead of saying things like "tweak" or "rebalance," he was like "yeah, we've reduced magnetism and damage." It's frank, and from my perspective as a keen player, I appreciate that. Perhaps that's normally avoided for fear of alienating people with confusing terminology, perhaps it's for fear of coming down too strongly on one side of the nerf vs. buff debate, idk, but I find his instinctive approach to Halo discussion quite refreshing personally. He's very much a student of the game, and I think that's good. He's no superman, and I know damn well that I disagree with him on certain things, but I'm very glad he's there. I'm sure there are other such characters ate 343, but I just don't know about them, and I hope they get a little more airtime too.

 

Bottom line is that most people that work for 343 are hired for specific skill sets - art design, coding, marketing savvy, whatever it may be. Deep familiarity with Halos past and a good grasp of how the game is played at the more competitive levels are, I'm sure, secondary requirements at best for most positions. So the result is that a lot of decisions get made by people that (from our point of view) shouldn't be making them, though they certainly have the skills to execute them. This happens in my line of work as well - we make software for manufacturing companies, but none of us actively work in manufacturing; we rely on customer feedback to know what needs to be done, and if we make a bad choice on the fly or get bad advice from one specific customer that isn't representative of the others, then we pay for it later.

This isn't to say that 343 needs to hire only people who moonlight at 2.0 K/D Halo obsessives. But it does mean that they'd benefit from having a few community liasons who vet all these proposed tweaks THOROUGHLY before implementing them. Somebody like you, Pegasi, would catch something like bad "X" decisions right away, and save them some trouble.

 

They supposedly did that nutduster. Before halo 4 released they touted the fact that they hired numerous "community" people to act as play testers and multiplayer developers

 

And they also must have had an internal beta. 343 surely can't be anything close to devoid of experienced players, whatever their role, and I wonder what the responses were like to decisions like this during wider testing.

 

I'm sure they did, but some of the decisions that have been made demonstrate that they either didn't hire the right people, or they listened to the wrong ones out of the ones they hired. And it's questionable how many of the TU changes were tested by community people, I think. If Peg is right in his description of the X (and I'm sure he is), that seems like something any serious competitive player would catch in their very first test game.

 

It's easy to judge from the sidelines but in this kind of case the more people you have looking at a potential problem the harder it is to come to a sensible conclusion, as counter-intuitive as that sounds. 343i is a large development studio and lots of redundancy. Maybe 3 QA people or developers brought up the X issue and wanted it a certain way while 4 other developers QA people wanted it a different way while their bosses and their bosses wanted it yet a different way. Some where along the production chain a decision gets made and deadlines must be reached because the same 1 thing can't be worked on for days on end.

I don't say this to excuse poor performance or bad decision making, I only say it to give better insight into the development process and why what may seem like simple decisions to us gets a lot more complicated in actual production.

 

Incompetence with the temptation of money.

Omg can't be serious, Reach had a bug where people Dc'd bunch of times sometimes it would reverse the colors of flags HUD markers pissed me off so much when it happened, I thought that was just a more common glitch in Halo 4(don't play enough to notice it was every game) , Honestly I don't enjoy 343i screwing up every thing I bought Halo 2 day one release for $120 I've been playing Halo long time and like the IP, But seriously I long for the day when 343i mistakes/errors/bugs/glitchs/bad choices don't exist or at least I stop finding out about more... I don't think there is one aspect of Halo 4 that isn't screwed up in some aspect.

There is no viable argument for doing these things there big company hired by one of the most richest company's which I'm assuming huge salary's and the game itself had a huge budget (biggest of all halo's) and sold and made most money of any Halo, This isn't Halo CE that Bungie made out of there college dorm(Couldn't find info how much cost to make CE because anniversary info clogs up the search's) AAA game,biggest Microsoft budget on a game,343i Wanted to make this game, Deserves any scrutiny it gets.

 

Fair point. I guess in that light I'm a little disappointed with the people who are in positions that happen to define the course of development, but that's a more banal complaint. I just find the mismatch between intention and manifestation a little frustrating.

 

If that was true, how did something so obvious as fine tuning options slip by them?