A reader is furious at the current state of Halo Infinite, and it's recently announced delays, and berates Microsoft for not reining in developer 343.
Back when the original Xbox came out Halo was the reason I got into games. I'd played them before that, but never put much consideration into them; I was a casual gamer at that point, you could say. But after taking a chance on buying an Xbox (everyone else I knew had a PlayStation 2) I fell in love with the game and together with Halo 2 it felt like I was playing something that was well ahead of its time.
Naturally, I got an Xbox 360 and all the Halo games, but I was dismayed when Bungie announced they were going independent and would no longer be working on the series. I was hopeful that it would be okay though, as Microsoft was setting up a new developer, with some of the old Bungie vets, and they were going to work on nothing but Halo.
That was 343 Industries and as far as I'm concerned they've been a disaster. Not only that but they're actually getting worse.
Halo 4 was an okay first game. It clearly wasn't as good as Bungie's stuff, but it at least had some new ideas. The story lost me very early on but overall, I thought it was a decent start that could be hinting at better things to come. How wrong I was.
Next was Halo: The Master Chief Collection which didn't work for, I want to say three years? I tried to check on Wikipedia and it says the game came out in 2014 and they were still making major changes in August 2018. All I know is that matchmaking never worked at any time I played it before giving up on it.
That should've been the end of it right there, as far as I'm concerned. How you can mess up a remaster collection that badly, for a game your company was specifically set up to oversee. I don't know how it's even possible.
So then next comes Halo 5, which was terrible. The multiplayer was some weird mix of Call Of Duty and Quake, while the campaign was super short and barely had Master Chief in it. Everyone hated it, it wasn't a big hit, and suddenly the series' name was so bad, as far as ordinary gamers go, that it no longer made sense to make a game called Halo 6.
But Halo Infinite, that would be the big comeback. That was going to be Halo's Zelda: Breath Of The Wild moment. A big new open world game with amazing graphics on the new Xbox Series X and basically a soft reboot for the whole series. Then they showed it in public and it was literally a laughing stock. The memes went on forever and the game was delayed for a year.
At this point the whole situation is so stupid I don't even entirely blame 343. How anyone at Microsoft thought what they showed was going to impress anyone I have no idea. If not before, this was definitely the point to say that 343 were not up to the job and to get someone in to finish the game and then shut down 343 and rethink the future. But no, they went on.
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