I can't find anything on the last Halo Bulletin about it. Perhaps I'm just being really dense. But either way, not a huge update but a nice fix. I'm really looking forward to the weapon changes coming out in June as well.
I played exactly one game this morning and noticed the better Xs. Nice job, 343 - it seems minor but it's very helpful, even if I had gotten used to the other ones by now (actually, I had even better luck looking for my teammate's screen names frozen in place for that brief second or two post-X, pre-respawn).
They're doing more than what other developers would have done and I am glad. Remember, they have a lot of other **** to get on with too, most likely with a ridiculous time frame set by Microsoft.
The Xs came back in a previous TU, a while ago. What impresses me about this, in its small way, is that they bothered to tweak this returning feature in response to player complaints that the new Xs were less easy to see than the old ones. A lot of juggernaut-sized game companies would never bother with a second TU, even if they gave you the first one.
A lot of juggernaut-sized developers would also actually organize and manage their company properly so they don't have to cut features that have been in the previous games of the franchise. 343 has supported Halo 4 quite a bit after launch (Although the weekly updates didn't last long), but from where I see it they're mostly adding and fixing stuff that should've been done properly before the game was even launched. 343 shouldn't pat them selves on theirs backs because they brought back a simple feature that's been in every Halo game for nearly a decade, over half a year after launch, after first adding it in a broken state.
Be glad they listened at all. It's still a hellstorm over at the waypoint forums, but less so now that they're (finally) tweaking weapons and updating the X. Maybe soon they'll actually get a set of classic playlists and I'll have something to play...
Lol, it's less of a hellstorm? Half of the people on waypoint are crying for a 6sk DMR with Reach-style bloom. They're not very happy.. But, hey, it's Waypoint. Can't expect much.
This. OP: Also may I ask would Infinity Ward listen to thier fans? Hell no! Be happy to be one of the lucky Halo community members and get what you want done. 343 released thier first attempt at a full scale franchise title with so many expectations, I believe in practice makes perfect and they are now tweaking the game to better suit what te community wants. Dont be hatin.
"Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn." Oh yeah, quoted the #1 movie quote of all time from Gone with the Wind and it goes hand in hand. We tried and tried to get 343 to listen, but by the time they listened, no one cared.
Pretty much here is the status quo of every other Halo game and Halo 4 fails majorly in tons of ways to reach the status quo then any little improvement they make that gets them closer to a decent game just to get to par. I don't think that deserves any praise, Sure its good and everything but I'm not praising them till they do something progressive and something more then patching screw ups. But hey its improving there Public relations so I can't blame them for doing it.
I'm pretty damn sure CE did not have red Xs (or Xs in any form). The point is that this is a different company, and the whole thing about 343 being "full" of ex-Bungie employees is incredibly overstated. There are some, and not enough to assume that they'll be just as capable at making a game as the company that crafted it and developed it for 10 years. If you honestly thought it was likely for the transition to be that seameless, ie. without pretty major hiccups like this, then you're incredibly naive. Or just instinctively drawn to criticism. Pick one. Missteps were inevitable, especially with the likely situation of MS snapping at their heels to get the game finished. Yes, even accepting this it could have been better at release, but honestly I don't think the current situation is massively unexpected considering the upheaval of switching a longstanding, very refined franchise to a new development team. And more importantly, they could just not have listened, or kept going with "their view" of what it should be in every sense. Anyone calling this situation anything close to perfect is a fool imo, but it's still significantly better than it could be. What's wrong with noting that, exactly? Even then, they're entirely re-balancing the precision primarily lineup for god's sake. They're not patting themselves on the back, they didn't even mentiom this on waypoint. It's an under the radar patch. I'm just saying "thanks for listening." But you have to jump on the rant train because that doesn't fit in with your "everything is ****" narrative? Give me a break. If by "no one" you mean yourself and the other chronic complainers, then yeah. Sure. I'm not even against complaining. Complaining at the mistakes 343 made is how I've spent a signification portion of my time since release. Complaining is why this update, and the previous one, happened at all. Complaining is incredibly important. Complaining as a sole means of response is not. All this "no one cares" stuff being posted on a Halo forum, and about a game for which you're still producing content, is a little hard to swallow. Something progressive like a mass weapon rebalance? Oh wait. I'm not trying to defend their often stupid decisions at development stage, as I see them. Hell, there are still loads of things which utterly infuriate me. Cannot move whilst holding back to check score/enemies down. HUD colours still counter intuitive in terms of objectives (team colours as opposed to enemy/friendly). Forge maps in playlists with 2 local players, despite them basically being unplayable. Wildly inconsistent CQC weapons. And that's just off the top of my head. **** needs fixing, and badly. But 343 are going to be making Halo games now. They need to learn a lot, and if we don't make clear when they've actually done something worthwhile then they won't learn. There's a difference between ass kissing and positive reinforcement. The fact that they listen puts them above Bungie in that regard, which gives me hope for them improving. Bungie started well, but never really improved imo, and actually went downhill in many important ways. 343 have started badly, but actually look to be improving.
^ What that guy said. Lots is wrong with Halo 4, but at least they're also fixing and tweaking a lot. It could be worse - much worse. Also, I feel like there's a serious lack of hindsight in some of these comments, which seem to implicitly compare 343 unfavorably to Bungie and Halo 4 unfavorably to all the Bungie-made Halo titles. Please, know your history. There were problems with all the games after CE. Patches were released for some (but not all) of those problems for every game after CE; and in every case it was months after the game shipped. To wit: - Halo 2 came out in early November 2004. It took until April 2005 before you could use the brute shot effectively, no longer fly with swords, no longer grab weapons through walls, etc. (Source.) Super-jumping was never fixed. Insanely OP sword was never nerfed. - Halo 3 was out in September 2007. Didn't get a TU until February 2008, one which finally fixed the BXB button glitch among other things. (Source.) They never found a satisfactory solution for Halo 3's melee problem.* * Spoiler At launch in Halo 3, if two players with no shields meleed each other at roughly the same time, the player who got the kill was essentially random due to latency. Later they patched it (believe this was in the April TU) so that this scenario almost always resulted in both players dying instead. Both were incredibly annoying; the patched version was just the lesser evil. - Reach - probably not a good point of reference since the game changed hands after launch, but again the TU was way late in coming; Bungie certainly didn't deal with their armor lock or bloom problems at any point prior to handing the keys to 343, who finally released a TU over a year after the game shipped. Bottom line, I don't think their time frame on getting these updates out is at all unusual, and I don't think the types of problems inherent in Halo 4 are much worse than the ones in Halo 2, 3 and Reach. I do think the game overall is not up to the level of 2 or 3, but that's largely due to underlying design decisions, not the lack of red Xs. And as someone who still plays it regularly, yes, I do appreciate when they patch things; and I remember horrific experiences with games I otherwise liked where really annoying problems were never addressed, so yes, I give 343 a bit of credit for that. I'm not down at Frankie's office giving him reacharounds for it or anything, but if I saw him I might fire off some finger-guns and give him an attaboy.
There's this thing called a figure of speech. Not literally "no one." I don't complain, it's not my job to pretty much do 343's job by letting them know what needs fixed. If they can't figure that out on their own, their products are always going to be a few steps behind. And back to "No One," I'm speaking for the Halo population as a whole. After the commercial success of the launch which was fueled by a massive marketing budget, the online population of the game plummeted to record lows for the once great game series. Halo 4 currently draws in around 30,000 unique users a day down from the 500,000 that Halo Reach held during the same time after it's launch. "Frankly my dear, no one gives a damn" about your red x update. And I still produce content for this game? You made me laugh a little. It's been awhile since I have and the stuff I did do involved very little effort or time. I'm focused right now on developing my own FPS for school (writing the script for it right now along with modeling environments). I may return for Halo 5, but I doubt **** will change with 343. They just don't have the same 'stuff' many other great game developers have. They seem more money hungry.
Touche. Not really central to my argument, though. Behind what, exactly? And it'd be a valid figure of speech if you also offered any indication that it formed even a majority sentiment. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that Halo 4 graph appears to be peak users per day (ie. most concurrent users), rather than unique users within a 24 hour period, making it a meaningless comparison. Most users online at any given point =/= total users online in 24 hours. Your last posted threads list indicates that you've been posting map previews (plural) as recently as 3 weeks ago. That's what I'm going on. That's actually my point here. They didn't need to include X's in the first TU. They certainly didn't need to then fix them (after, yes, doing them badly). What about these two consecutive updates, and the upcoming weapon rebalance (which outdoes any rebalance done in Halo before), tells you that they're more money hungry than, say, Bungie? Call them bad developers if you like, but money hungry? They've supported the game well and look to continue that. Oh, and I thought I was on your ignore list? Funny that...
The graphs show both and you really want to argue that the population isn't down compared to last Halo's? Really? I just showed you the facts. I'll just let that die and ignore that comment. 343 used Reach to go off of, Bungie's worst Halo (their first big mistake). Enough said there as well. 3 weeks ago and is only a map preview of a map a put a whole couple of hours into and never released. My one and only released map was Curb Stomp. Enough said about that. P.S. You are on my ignore list. --------------------------------------------- It doesn't matter how much of this they fix. They released as it was and the fan bases weren't happy. Go ahead and praise them for the Red X but they have a lot bigger problems in front of them than the little **** they fixed. They're ignoring the big picture. --> Broken Mechanics - not traditional Halo settings - Low speed, low jump - no bleedthrough --> No Rank - Absolutely alienated a massive population, most of which quit Halo - Bungie further insults competitive players with Arena --> Armor Abilites - Somehow this new mechanic became the highlight of matchmaking. Why so much emphasis was put into a broken mechanic I will never know. AAs should stick in campaign, Firefight and BTB. --> Few Maps (poor concepts) - Introducing some of the worst maps in the Halo franchise, it felt like most of them we're designed for BTB and almost made this game feel like BF where you walk around for 10 minutes searching for a battle... and then get sniped. --> Bloom - added nothing to gameplay, but took away from skill by adding randomness - fail attempt, made a single burst weapon have more inaccuracy than an Assault Rifle. Halo Reach failed for obvious reasons and yet you guys ignore those reasons, make some of them worst and add even more game breaking features. --> join session in-progress --> keeping armor abilities, and increasing the in-game amount to 2 (sprint + 2nd) --> instant respawn, and your placing it into the best playlist as confirmation --> wrecking the way weapons spawn, a classic and integral part of Halo Every Halo fan I know of in real-life doesn't care for Halo anymore. They have no drive to even play it anymore. Why, because it's just not Halo. Sure it's the same title but they have changed it so much it's just not the same game anymore. When you release the game, it better be a finished product. Bungie made sure of that. 343 said '**** it' and we'll fix it as we go. If Halo was my baby and I was ultimately in charge, **** would be a whole lot different. Quit asking what your employees want to change and start listening to the people that pay you, your fans. Plus you should never stray to far away from what makes your game great, which they did.
Umm, no they don't. The Reach one shows unique users in a 24 hour period. The Halo 4 one shows most users online at one time. Those are completely different statistics. Each graph only shows one figure, and they are different, incomparable figures. You might want to check these "facts" before you try to use them to back up your argument. So you're still forging as recently as 3 weeks ago? Doesn't seem like someone who doesn't give a damn... Oh, and as I said, plural. I see 2 previews posted 3 weeks ago. Nice to know you can't resist clicking that link to view my posts. I'm flattered. Nice straw man argument there. I specifically stated that they have bigger problems to fix. I also pointed out that they're not expecting any praise for this, and didn't even mention it on waypoint. It's a minor fix. Why are you trying to make out that I've defended their entire development attitude when I specifically haven't, but have actually criticised it? I'm simply trying to point out that they're listening. Way to completely fail at backing up your money grabbing point, which is actually the argument I was making in the first place. Seeing as you seem intent on responding to arguments that I never even made, rather than actually reading my posts, I'll restate something for you: