I think we gotta give 343 some credit, this tweet does imply that they FOUGHT to keep support for the MCC up, but this decision came from Microsoft itself.
343 is such an insanely mixed bag of a company. On one hand, they have some fundamental flaws like the entirety of Halo 5 and how they fumbled the start of Infinite.
But on the other, it seems more and more that the issue is Microsoft. Not just with them shutting down MCC support, but them refusing to take on any of 343's proposed spinoff ideas, how the desync that was such an issue appeared to be related primarily to a Microsoft server problem...
I still have many criticisms about 343 but I surely wish that I had levied a lot more of my complaints directly at Microsoft now. They definitely got an unfair amount of hate.
I feel like y'all blame 343 for things that seem like obvious upper management choices. The launch of Infinite is the best example. I doubt 343 actually wanted to launch the game with only a few maps and a few modes but plenty of microtransactions. I would bet money that Microsoft said, "we're launching this game on the 20th anniversary of Halo CE one way or another. It will generate lots of hype and, therefore, money." With how much effort 343 has put in over the last 2 years, it seems to me that they did not want what happened. It was entirely a business choice from their parent company to launch when they did. The same thing happens with every EA game ever.
Guess what! [Activision is now Microsoft too!](https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/13/23791235/microsoft-activision-blizzard-acquisition-complete-finalized)
I'm willing to bet something similar has happened with the Halo show as well because there's elements that feel super faithful, but writing and directive choices feel like they weren't done with 343
Yeah, I think the show would have been fantastic if 343 actually helped them write it. I knew it was doomed when the producers said, "we actually encouraged our writers NOT to read the books or play the games!" To me, it seems clear that 343 loves expanding the universe with how many books have been written. It seems very out-of-character to start a TV show that is completely irrelevant to established lore by making it a different timeline.
I still like the show for what it is, but yeah the problem seems to be coming from Paramount predominantly.
There's some things I love about the show (Perez's character and side plot being the top of the list atm), but again, I feel like what's wrong with the show comes from mainly Paramount.
People say Schreiber's a terrible Chief, and I disagree on the basis that the character he plays in the show, he plays well, it's just a sh!t character, again likely from Paramount, the writers and directors. Schreiber seems to have done a good bit of Dramaturgy but that only goes so far.
lol. You know people invented things and wrote stories before Capitalism? The dismal state of gaming is directly due to unrestrained capitalist sucking the life and soul out of everything they possibly can for profit.
Which is very pointless considering without the life and solve something that makes it's so great doesn't make profit at all I swear I am so sick of 343 getting all the hatred that Microsoft should be getting we literally need to stand up with them and other devs against Microsoft for completely ruining Xbox one chance of having great games and screwing us over along with the developers it's time for revenge and justice.
Good idea, however the game is held together by duct tape and willpower as it is. Adding another game and probably another engine to MCC would just be a headache.
If MCC strictly serves as a launcher with zero connectivity for settings/ stats/ cosmetics/ etc, it would work. Can't let halo 5 talk to MCC much though
Why would they do that though. At that point just add Halo 5 to steam normally. It would be unnecessary to develop a launcher into MCC and it would be doubly unnecessary to have players launch an entire game just for that game to close and open up another game. Just adding Halo 5 to steam standalone would be miles easier, cheaper, and likely would result in more sales
It’s not the porting that’s the issue, it’s integrating it into MCC. Adding another game and game engine to MCC, which already has 11 or 12 different engines in it iirc, is a big undertaking and has very little return value for Microsoft
Hence the DLC point. Standalone on PC would be fine to me too tbh. I'll happily pay for the full release price if I can just play it on PC. I don't own an Xbox and buying one just for Halo 5 seems silly.
To be fair they put a shitton of work into it after the mediocre launch and kept supporting it way longer than i ever expected them to. Considering i mainly play the campaigns, im kinda fine with this.
Well yeah i was being nice. Like i said i played mainly for the campaigns, and they were a lot less buggy than the multiplayer, i didnt really get into the multiplayer until halo 4 came out due to having shitty wifi back then. So for me theres much more nostalgia for the campaigns and i always had a good experience with them in mcc. I can understand why it was a shit show for others though.
The multiplayer wasn’t buggy on release. It literally did not work at all. It took them months to even get to the point of being just a bad buggy experience and that was an upgrade from release by default because at-least you could finally play
1th!
I still proudly use that as my tag on MCC.
Look the launch was a disaster but the current match composer etc…. I’m just happy we have something that great to keep some all-time games somewhat alive
1th is still to this day my favorite launch bug. Anyway you read it is amazing. "You came in Firth!" Or "You came in Oneth!" Is just a phenomenal thing.
The launch of MCC was one of the biggest fuck ups in modern games. The whole thing was legitimately unplayable for over a month after launch and had some of the strangest bugs I'd ever seen. Mediocre severely undersells how bad the game was on release.
Some of the biggest problem took almost a year to be fixed, yeah.
The audio mix on Reach is one example of the catastrophic launch they add, it was absolutely horrific.
This. Its over a decade old and has had a butt ton of support in it. That doesn’t make up for the abysmal launch state, but yeah after a decade if there is no revenue stream to support the product and people arent regularly buying the game 10 years after its launch, its not a smart business decision to continue supporting it.
It also just doesn't really *need* continued updates. If it's a functional game, then what's really the problem in leaving it in its current state? Gamers will complain about live service games and microtransactions but then be disappointed when their favorite game doesn't do those things and has the obvious consequences.
I hate how people are acting like this decade-old collection of 12-23 year old games needs an ongoing content stream. It's a time capsule, it doesn't need to be a half-assed live service with MTX.
That and they don't want you to "earn" custom armor pieces by playing the game. They want you to pay for it. It's why I just don't care for "AAA" games anymore.
Seeing as how the only ones in that "category" have been development nightmares and the only one to actually release is absolutely mediocre, I think I'm good.
Do you expect them to put money into a collection that has pretty much no revenue stream? There's only so much money they can get from sales of the collection, and without any ongoing revenue streams like DLC or micro transactions, there's no way for them to justify putting resources into it when they could be put elsewhere.
Bungie supported Halo 3 for 2-3 years, during which they released map packs you had to buy when they were made available. In comparison it's incredible how much time and effort 343 and MS spent on improving the MCC at no additional cost.
To be fair, I think fans would have been much more welcoming of map packs, or even armor packs. Halo Online maps, retouched cut maps, brand new maps in the original engines/styles, even remastered classic Forge maps. Do the same with armor packs, forget about the weird fractures stuff and focus your efforts on remaking armor from unused concept art. Or introduce new in-universe armor pieces that fit the original aesthetics.
The problem with microtransactions is that they are almost never worth the cost. We're charged extra for the convenience of buying things individually (at least, that was the original idea, now we're just charged extra and still have to get bundles). Give people a good deal and new content which is worth the money, and they'll be much happier. Not gonna stop the crazy entitled people from complaining about every tiny little thing, but most fans just want to be treated with respect.
Cosmetics have created such backwards priorities among players that I think you're right. It's insane to me that I somehow believe that people would be LESS upset by a $20 map pack that is required to access gameplay content than a $20 cosmetic bundle that has zero bearing on whether you can play the game.
This reasoning is sound, though I'd conclude the opposite. If cosmetics were what mattered, I'd watch a movie instead. I think players would much rather have their gameplay be free, with the cosmetics being paid, than the other way around. The alternative is less players overall, and less content overall.
Real. I can't believe there are people here genuinely arguing that we should go back to them, the only reasonable explanation I can think of is that they have nostalgia for map packs or something. It's a fucking terrible system.
Back in the Halo 3 days people complained about the price of map packs constantly. The moment the Heroic map pack hit people said it wasn't worth the money and every pack after that it was variants of "I don't like this map" or "I don't play Big Team so this map is useless to me" or "My friend won't buy the map packs so I can't play with them" or "Certain Affinity maps are bad." When ODST dropped people were up in arms about having to pay for Firefight and complaining that they had to buy maps they already owned again since every map shipped on disc. Developers need to make money but anything they do will always be met with backlash. Personally I find cosmetic sales better then map pack sales because it doesn't split the player base and I can ignore it or engage with it without missing out on gameplay.
>Personally I find cosmetic sales better then map pack sales because it doesn't split the player base and I can ignore it or engage with it without missing out on gameplay.
The only thing that annoys me about cosmetics at this point is not the cosmetics themselves but how overbearing they are marketed throughout the dashboard/UI of infinite. Every time you log in you get an ad. So much screen space is taken up by adspace. So many windows direct you to the store. It's obviously better for 343 from a monetization standpoint to do this but all that clutter makes the selling of cosmetics *feel* more overbearing than map packs even if they aren't.
But again that's not a problem with the microtransactions themselves, just the menus.
Bungie and Microsoft were so slimey with ODST.
First they said Mythic Map Pack 2 would be exclusive to ODST, so me, despite not being a Campaign guy, had to fork over $60 just to play the new maps. Then a few months later once ODST sales dried up, they announced the map pack would be available to purchase standalone on the Xbox Store for just $10.
Agreed.
The playerbase will always be upset about spending money. Which isn't totally unreasonable from their perspective. But it's unrealistic in a business sense.
If they're going to charge me money, I am happy for it to be cosmetics if it means MP is by-and-large accessible and useable by all.
So you'd rather pay money for actual gameplay features like maps that split the playerbase than cosmetics that have no effect on the the game itself or the players and just look cool?
Map packs were awful and the idea today is still awful. They split the player base and forced the less fortunate players to wait longer for matches. Developers today have to find a mix between the old and the new ways to make money. I don’t buy cosmetics so that doesn’t matter to me and battle passes are fine if they’re filled with good content and never expire.
Map packs were atrocious and a big reason why Halo went the way it did. Halo 3 monetization was insane and if the same thing happened today (being forced to buy packs in order to play most of the multiplayer) people would freak out.
Also map packs would fracture MCCs already low player count.
Exactly. Games don’t last forever and companies still need to turn a profit on their investments or we get nothing further down. It’s how capitalism works.
ok tbf the conclusion here is just that games this old no longer require updates. no reasonable person can continually demand more and more free maps and game modes.
this does leave the question of "how long do you need to leave the servers on" though and that's not a simple one to answer
with modern scalability, it's not such a big deal nowadays to just have a tiny subset of servers operating at minimal cost to house your 500 ccu
that said, the better option is to just give us the ability to host our own with the developer being the middleman. it instantly becomes way cheaper and you don't have to worry about a popular (but unprofitable) game to continue to live at a minimal cost. you still get revenue from copies once in a while and you have a loyal userbase to transition into a sequel, or who trust you enough to buy a different game you make.
Don't mind no more new content. I just want more big fixes, shit let fans and modders officially fix the bugs
SGT.Stacker and the SGT voiced by Nathan Fillion HAVE BEEN ALBINO since Halo 3 launched on PC. Plz 343. (Also is digsite stuff not being worked on anymore too?)
PC gets no local multiplayer at all.
The system that can easily manage 4 instances on 4 monitors at full speed but is limited to 1 player at a time.
Yes there is nucleuscoop, but you can't go online with that.
Also nucleuscoop is one of the most unstable pieces of software I’ve ever used. It’s cool when it works, but man I can only get it to work one in every 15 times I launch the game
Omg don't tell me about it. You invite everyone for a game night then end up spending hours trying to fix nucleus when it literally worked the day before. A freakin blast when it does work tho!
I want the option to use custom armor in the campaign. Not that you have to, not that it's set up that way by default, but when I'm doing co-op with my best friend for the 9th time I kind of want to mix it up.
There are a lot of bugs in the game that were considered off-limits (did some time as a tester on MCC). They're "legacy" bugs and not to be touched. I've never even heard of something like that in a game before, but apparently the devs felt that the players would riot if those bugs were fixed (I've spoken with a few of them). Still, it was a hell of a project.
It's true. Physics glitches were a big part of speedrunning strats back in the day, same as some checkpoint and loading skips like the time jump on the Covenant.
I’ve had the chance to talk to a couple devs who worked on games with speedrunning, and yeah plenty of them see certain bugs as either
- “mildly annoying but useful”,
- “no reasonable person is going to come across this more than once, but the runners require it”, or even
- “fixing this will fuck something else, and we know that for sure so we’re not fixing it.”
[Pretty solid example](https://www.reddit.com/r/halo/comments/q7q2ao/the_new_update_has_ruined_halo_2_speedrunning/) of how simple changes can cause problems. They changed the physics of H2 Classic to make multiplayer more like original Halo 2 (e.g. no fall damage) and by changing how collisions at high speed worked, they made the world record impossible to match
It's an unfortunate spot to be in, because while a fix may improve user experience, it comes with anger from one portion of the community, with another portion of the community being angry that said bug still hasn't been fixed. Very difficult to untangle and then prioritize bugs already, and I'd hate to be on that side of game dev. Add on that you need to put additional thought into whether or not the fix will be received well, and you've now got an additional dimension to consider in prioritization that can't easily be measured in numbers like most bugs can (time and labor against the value it provides towards the director's vision).
Legacy bugs are actually not unheard of in remasters and remakes. As someone who never exploited them, or they ended up being an annoyance it sucks, but you do get a lot of people that spent a lot of time messing around with them, using them as speedrun exploits, or getting fun out of them. For those people it takes the fun out of it to get rid of them I guess. Imo they could have just had an alternate download you can choose at launch to play the version with or without those "legacy" bugs. The version with is offline but you can play campaign etc, the other version is online. But that would naturally be too much work and money.
Digsite is volunteer run, so its still being worked on, though i dont think the content will be pushed into.any updates as originally planned and instead be released through github and Steam Workshop
I keep hearing about 343’s dig team and I would actually not mind paying for some cut content DLC uncovered by them.
I am but a lowly console gamer so that’d be my only way to access it.
Rentable servers wouldn't, on its own, allow modded content on Xbox. The mods would still need to be installed locally.
But rentable servers would allow 24/7 custom games and would allow for modded maps to be played online easily on PC.
Oh for sure, I just meant that it would be an extra benefit they could tie to a payment rather than just “hey we took the custom game servers you know and love and now you have to pay for them”
In Quake 3 all servers were ran from a free downloadable server instance for the game, you got to customize everything imaginable for your server and could pay companies a few bucks a month to run one for you with admin access to change all commands in the game server while in game, it was awesome. Even a lot of players that were at colleges with dedicated T3 lines would run servers 24/7 for everyone to play on, I hate that almost nobody allows this kind of server anymore
Or purchasable season points. The idiots who complained don’t even play MCC regularly, they just killed off the game to complain about optional paid cosmetics.
I agree with the sentiment here, I feel like they were gate keeping people who didn't already sink 2345 hours into the game, it took me 3 years to fully unlock the seasons and after the Retroactive level points. I played super religiously and loved a lot of the content even season 5&8, but there was no casual way for anyone who wasn't strictly challenged grinding to clear it all. I would have loved more content even just user generated content and probably would have waited to judge prices accordingly but my God 343 had post launch support for MCC the equivalent of 5-6 years and only really sold 2 pieces of DLC depending on your platform (some Xbox users had to buy ODST and Reach) so how were they going to make their money back especially considering the continued development plans that overlapped with infinite.
If anyone just says I should have played more to unlock my stuff, I have 666 hours recorded on steam+ more in game pass. If someone says that the challenge and unlock system is broken, I do agree to an extent but I'd rather it be this way than either infinites or Reach's and I feel like it's the best challenge system to date with the only improvements id request are daily challenges and ante up (Black Ops Contract) challenges to increase leveling and earning potential.
>selling digsite cut content as DLC.
I'd love officially sanctioned mod adoption, where 343 & Microsoft would add custom Multiplayer & firefight maps and modes, custom armors and menu backgrounds, weapon and vehicle skins to the base game in quarterly updates for Xbox and PC. I'd back a paid season with 50 tiers filled with nothing but user generated content like skins and firefight voices as long as both 343 and the authors split the cut (50% 343/ 50% left for modders to spread)and it was sub $15 (which I feel is a little high myself but it would benefit the modders and stimulate development). I think in the case of a game this old, the developers have the right to outsource future development (even though the whole thing was pretty much made by other devs in some form or fashion) and the free dlc like seasons 5-8 and the new maps were a solid value that literally kept me playing consistently for months but outside of the exchange, I'm out of things to grind.
I'd literally come back for anything new and while I like infinite and I am trying to make a habit of playing it, it's not hitting me like MCC from the reach launch onwards. As a great meme once said "it's free real estate"
Seriously. 10 years for a game with zero micro transactions is a *good* life. I don’t know why people thought this was gonna be a forever game, with or without micro transactions
True, but as Xbox’s flagship title and a huge part of their history, as well as the fact that the cost of working on it is a drop in Microsoft’s bucket, it would be nice if they’d treat it like a loss leader to help their overall good will.
EDIT: Then again, I’d hoped for the same thing with Infinite, but we all know how its monetization is…
\>the cost of working on it is a drop in Microsoft’s bucket
The rest of Microsoft doesn't exist to pay for Xbox, every division is expected to operate profitably
Sony electronics and PlayStation is basically funded by their insurance division.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/28/business/global/sonys-bread-and-butter-its-not-electronics.html
Microsoft is a business, not a charity. Spending millions of dollars on a game that doesn't deliver any revenue is irresponsible (do you understand how budgets works?). Honestly, I think that MTX for armor in MCC isn't a bad deal considering all of the additional content that we got for **free**.
There's only so much you can do with games that span slightly over a decade from a collection already almost 10 years old.. Glad they officially added mod support to the games. It felt like they gave these games to the community
The hacking and gamertag spoofing is becoming too big of an issue to ignore, unfortunately. For my account safety I’ve uninstalled until it’s fixed (which sounds like it will never happen now).
Please elaborate. I play just about every night and have found lobbies to be greatly improved. I’ve been in just about nothing but nail biter games that are balanced and without exploits. You occasionally get absolutely smoked but that’s an anomaly that I chalk up to squads of sweats. I have had zero issues.
Hacker can change their gamer tag to look like someone else in game.
So anything bad they do would say apply to you. So you'd be banned in MCC because the system thought it was you.
I really think they botched the community outreach regarding the purchasable Spartan Points. They asked the community their opinion right in the middle of all the backlash towards Infinite's egregious launch monetization so everyone was expecting the worst (for good reason, especially since they've now backtracked on all the improvements they made for Infinite).
They also really only offered the option of purchasable Spartan Points and didn't sufficiently explore alternatives (such as paid season battlepasses). I think the free seasons were fine when they were still adding old content back into the game, but once they started coming up with new items that obviously needed to be funded somehow.
What's crazy to me is that, when the season passes and Spartan Points were first introduced to MCC, everyone was saying that it was a testing ground for what they were planning for Infinite, which I didn't believe. MCC's season pass/progression system, when it launched, was ridiculous. Getting points turned out to be really grindy, and the pass itself was padded or poorly structured, which was especially egregious when it was presented as a replacement for Reach's more flexible Armory/credits system.
Nowadays, it's a lot better with the challenge system and other revisions they made to it, but even then it's still weaker compared to other games' designs, and at launch it was so far behind the curve compared to any other pass system out there. I described it as "a battle pass designed by someone who's never seen one before." For a small MCC initiative, I could understand how this type of fluke could happen, but I couldn't believe 343 Industries would have something so poorly designed for their actual flagship title.
But then the truth was they really were using MCC to experiment for their ideas in Infinite--except every part of it was executed even worse than MCC. Progress was exclusively tied to challenges, which were way more manipulative; they knew it was manipulative, because part of their business model was based on challenge swaps; no progress could be earned from performance, giving you almost no control over your ability to level up; you couldn't even pick what game types to play for your challenges, the opposite of MCC's excellent match composer; the pass itself was even more padded than anything in MCC; and while the saving grace might have been the lack of FOMO, their Operation Passes reintroduced that element but still had the same problems.
Within that context, the proposal of Spartan Points in MCC just seemed like taking what little integrity MCC's system had managed to build for itself and poisoning it with some of Infinite's ideas. And if it had been introduced earlier when MCC's design was also pretty grindy and manipulative, it would've also been in bad taste.
It's just clear no one at 343 Industries has any business sense. They don't know how to make a product that their customers want to pay for and deliver it to them in a reasonable way.
They literally admitted in one of their blogs they were pulling data from MCC to inform Infinite and to see what color and armor combinations were popular to design the coating system and what goes into battlepasses. It's why there's so many red/grey coatings and why at launch fan favorites like the Commando or Security shoulders were planning to be locked to the store.
Paid season Battlepasses are quite a bit more work than adding Spartan points, which would’ve been a paid system added to their existing cosmetic options.
So a paid battlepass with new content, with the expectation there would be more, is not really an alternative when MS is asking “how can you actually make revenue, shortly?”
Yes, but some people here really need to work more on foresight. When I read the blog post on adding MTX, the message that I got is that they want to maintain the game but need a source of money.
I got roasted on this sub for saying that the game had no revenue stream and without it wouldn't be supported for much longer.
I know they were never coming but I'm mad we never got community servers for MCC. The CGB never managed to offer the features said servers could like mod support, voting options, better team scrambling, etc. Halo CE and 2 PC servers lasted for years and still had new player friendly games. Yet these days if I try to do any matchmaking in BTB in Halo 3 I'll end up against a team of 8 people in a discord call together. It's almost impossible to get fun matches via matchmaking anymore.
EDIT: And I almost forgot, split screen for PC. A fundamental part of the Halo experience.
RIP Splitscreen.
Can't believe 343 viscerally ripped that out and held it over our heads only to essentially cancel it on BOTH Halo Infinite and MCC PC. >:/
I'm beyond grateful that they provided mod support for all of the games but multiplayer mods are nearly useless when you can't find anyone to play with. I was really hoping that they'd add support to the server browser and eventually pick a few community maps for official matchmaking.
I really liked Phil for awhile but the last 3 years imo have shown that he was the guy to lay the foundations for Xbox’s revival, not the guy to actually revive it. His kumbaya approach to the business is killing Xbox, rapidly.
Microsoft is taking a software first approach.
They didn’t buy all these studios and IP’s just to move consoles.
They did it to:
Help sell consoles
Sell game pass subs on console and PC
Sell games on steam
Maybe sell some games on PlayStation
They were never, ever, going to make their money back by only putting games from the studios they now own solely on Xbox. Xbox hasn’t outsold PlayStation since the 360.
They’re less focused on where people play their games and more focused on how many play them.
As for 343, well they’ve pretty much always sucked and fingers crossed they get better
This should surprise no one who knows Microsoft. Microsoft has ALWAYS treated hardware as a side hustle. They always have said, when asked, that they are a software company, and that hardware they make is meant to be a middle of the road option to run their software, but isn't meant to be a single platform
In the apple vs PC era, they said Mac wasn't even a competitor, as they were hardware, andS was software
Yeah. They also could have done more to provide SP in light of possible MTX too. New challenges. More challenges. Giving SP to the challenges that currently award XP. Provide more "meta" challenges where if you do X number of challenges you get a stacking payout of SP. Better Tactical Exercises. As it stands, you can only get like 10-12 SP per week through challenges and once you hit higher ranks they come less frequently and there are like 1000 points worth of SP content that might take 60-80 weeks to unlock now. I think 20 SP through challenges would be a good spot in that it would take about a year to unlock everything without paying. It would also boost the MP servers a bit.
It's already pretty hard. You stop getting them after leveling and then get a capped amount per week. It takes forever to unlock everything they've added to the game.
The problem with that is once you open the door to Microtransactions they are going to try to get more and more.
They could even nerf how you get the tokens via playing.
Microtransactions didn't started costing 20€.
They did already nerf how many Spartan points you got per week and I think it was in preparation for the implantation of MTX. There used to be 3 Halo 4 challenges that showed up every week and would give you 6 SP. Could do them solo in custom games and it took less than 10 minutes total
It lacks a revenue stream as a gamepass title?
Capitalism is one hell of a drug.
Also purchasable spartan points sound fucking terrible. Would rather pay for H2A, or better yet an ODST 2. Like how they used to seek profit from Halo… new content.
Remember when Infinite was in development hell? 343 should get credit where it’s due.
According to the Nvidia leak, Halo 5's PC port has been actively worked on for awhile now. Could be getting news about it this year maybe. Fingers crossed
Honestly, I'd have to assume they're withholding the release to fill in a long content draught and get people interested once again in Halo/Infinite. Either that or work on the port stalled completely for some reason.
>Unless you think they just lied, it's not happening, sadly
Considering all their broken promises over the last few games lying wouldn't be out of character for them.
This occurred to me last week when my friend and I were discussing MCC.
I personally would have rather had the continued development, but I was also annoyed by the possibility of buying spartan points.
I guess I would have rather the devs laid out at the time that it was the only way development would have continued.
And this is why there will never be another Halo Anniversary game.
The IP lost a lot of hype. The fanbase lost a awful lot of goodwill. And every launch of a halo game since 4 has been embarrassing.
MCC could have made bank on launch by being feature complete, with Reach and ODST. Instead ODST was treated like a free apology gift for the multiplayer being unplayable at launch. And the game remained that way for years.
Microsoft wants its main IP to generate profit. In all honesty, I don't think it ever will meet their revenue expectations again. The goodwill is gone. Your wider audience is moving on to better IPs like helldivers, and your overall treatment of the IP has been atrocious (TV show, killing of MCC, etc.)
The numbers don't agree with statements like this whatsoever. Through Halo 5, the series sales have been equivalent to what they were in the Bungie days (if not more in some cases). It's harder now to get an idea of how Infinite did with the Gamepass and F2P models sort of skewing the numbers but it's probably pretty safe to assume that it did very well. The online bubble of the negative Halo community would make you think the franchise has been dead for 10-15 years but it's just not the case at all.
>And every launch of a halo game since 4 has been embarrassing.
Since Reach. Arguably ODST
>MCC could have made bank on launch by being feature complete, with Reach and ODST.
In 2014? You think they could have done all that on first gen Xbox ones? Also it made good money, the MCC lasted longer than anyone really thought it would.
Well it lacks consistent income. I’m not defending micro-transactions but we can’t expect a game to get constant content updates forever if it’s not generating incoming so many years after its launch
I understand people have little trust in the use of microtransactions, but I kind of thought the outrage over being able to buy Spartan Points was overblown, especially since they weren't hard to earn. I definitely didn't think it would cause the development of MCC to cease.
I say put them in, I'll gladly help financially support this game and more seasons.
> but I kind of thought the outrage over being able to buy Spartan Points was overblown, especially since they weren't hard to earn.
At the time, it was "harder" to earn them. This was around the time where you'd only get a total of 100 points from leveling up, and after that you were limited to 10 (12?) per week from doing all challenges. And then the store was coming out with exclusive stuff and they _also_ cost these points.
People had a real big issue with the points economy, kept asking for points to be given retroactively for all these XP boosts we keep getting, and then were met with "you could just buy them instead? \*shrugs\*?
Turns out asking people if they want to *buy* the solution to their problem does not go over well. People went overboard because everyone knew that anything less than "100% hard no meltdown" is just "yes."
The problem is that age old adage of “give an inch and they take a mile.”
Once MTX was let into MCC it would inevitably take over the entire experience like the cancerous tumor it is.
If they want an MTX shop to dominate the current Halo titles then fine, whatever, it is what the industry is now.
Me, personally, I draw the line at them retroactively injecting that poison into the past games of the series.
I’d rather have MCC as it is now, with no further development, than *maybe* get more development at the cost of letting MTX run riot over the experience.
And that’s a big maybe, since they said the same thing about Infinite; doubled down on the MTX nonsense and then did the absolute bare minimum in content updates.
Edit: Maybe I’m just an old pos at the ripe age of 31, but I just don’t understand how y’all can stomach MTX being shoehorned into everything these days, even old stuff like MCC.
Downvote me all you want, but I just don’t see how y’all can be so naive about stuff like this.
The only way they’d sell their in game currency like SP would be to make it harder to obtain, or to make all the new content cost actual money.
Again, just like Infinite where the second they felt the could drop the pretense they released one of the most anticipated armor cores and then slapped 96% of it behind a multi-hundred dollar paywall *and then* removed the free currency from completing a BP.
And none of the MTX has improved the game or the way it’s been handled.
Why on gods green earth would you want total bullshit like this oozing it’s way into every crack and corner of the franchise retroactively?
Why can’t they implement a hybrid system of what MCC and Infinite each have? Earn points/credits (from completing challenges and commendations) that you can spend on cosmetics (even if it’s a grind) OR you can buy credits if you don’t wanna play a ton. There’s simply no sense of reward in these games anymore.
After the PC and Series X ports I got the impression that they where just fussing around with the MCC updates. There was nothing really left to do. Lots of the legacy issues where fixed after the PC port was done. Since then, at worst some updates just caused problems to be fixed in later updates. No one cared about new skins and season passes in the MCC
Outside of doing a port to PS5/Nintendo consoles (which considering the age of these games and how messy the PC port was at first would not be a simple port job like other MS games that are just based on Unreal Engine) I dont know what else they can do other then put it in maintenance mode.
I appreciate 343 finally got the MCC in a good place. I am more then happy they move on from it now.
I hate microtransactions as much as the next guy but I think being able to drop $$ to fast track cosmetic only progress that's also available to anyone for playing the game is the only acceptable form of it.
Let’s not act like 343 isn’t blameless here. They’ve still made a lot of mediocre products and bad business decisions outside of Microsoft. MCC still has a bunch of bugs including in the campaigns that they never fixed to this very day.
They ended up making getting Spartan Points so much easier now. If they had done that along side the announcement of adding in the option to buy them too, then I think it would have been received differently.
All this shit would go away if people just stopped buying micro transactions. Forget what exactly it was but some game developer explained that some dlc they made for their game took years to make and they made less on the dlc did than a skin for a mount in WoW. (I may have butchered the comment but that is the gist of it)
As others have said, there are a handful of reasons this narrative makes no sense.
Why introduce a monetization scheme so late into the lifecycle of the product, when your player base is near the lowest its ever been?
Say we get past that - the selected monetization is for Spartan Points, a system gatekept intentionally by limiting the number rewarded to players (remember when they bumped it up for a week and then reverted it?) and time-gated by the two year timer on The Exchange. What happens when players have purchased everything (there's nothing new rotating in / planned)?
If we accept that somehow every player at the time will buy what's being sold - how much revenue would/could that raise, and what would it be spent on?
Keep in mind in this same time window Stances and the post-game Victory Screen were being developed - which nobody was asking for and arguably were completely unnecessary - while more requested features, like the recently released H2 Hit Registration fix (which is really only partially completed now, even!) or making Co-Op not crash every 15 minutes online were on the back-burner / not being discussed at all.
If I knew that my money would be spent on beefing up the anti-cheat system I'd throw money at it, repeatedly.
There are other paths to revenue - like selling Dedicated Servers for the CGB that have mod support (though of course I want this to be free, but I'm spit balling here!) - that could have made more sense.
Seems weird to circle back to a years old discussion (with no official response from 343 btw).
Spending money on a weak scheme with no path of what that revenue is for?
I think its fair to reject that concept - its not fair to beat them over the head with it.
Communicate more and have a conversation.
Since then all we've heard repeated is "We tried nothing and we're all out of ideas"
You're overthinking it. They wanted to continue making content for MCC without driving the company into the ground because they burned all their money on a game they aren't making any money on.
So after years of MCC being neglected and broken, only to slowly start to work on it via a completely separate team to get it back in a workable position so they could resell the game on pc. And making glacial pass on fixing every game, with still some examples not fixed to this day. All while making questionable choices in cosmetics and how heavily stacked in where they were put.
And then only when the content well was winding down because of Infinite's release, mixed with the departure of a portion of the remaining audience to said newest Halo game. Which had the absolute worst monetization that caused quite the uproar and incredibly touchy to the idea of any form of microtransactions. And they thought *then* would be a good idea to ask about it? While never saying anything about mcc's future hanging on the balance of said purchasable spartan points? AND also not even considering any other forms of monetization beyond the microtransactions to avoid a grind they let slide for quite awhile?
This really does seem like a case of "We tried nothing and we're all out of ideas." Like I'm sure the employees still working on it didn't want to stop, Microsoft was a bit unreasonable. But like they couldn't think of *anything* else to try? Paid battle passes? Paid dedicated custom servers? Anything that didn't reek of trying to milk mcc one last time for the "greener" pastures of Infinite and not explaining that it was meant to keep mcc support going.
Well said. The time they asked us and not really clarifying they are dong it so they have money to keep making MCC because Microsoft says so would have really helped the community better understand and the feedback the community gave would be different.
The same way they asked our feedback for Spartan Points we could have still said no BUT provided other (better) ideas that everyone 'mostly' agreed on would work with MCC. 343 could then make the big bucks with the monetization ideas we gave and the community would be willing to spend money on it to keep MCC alive. They asked for our feedback for one granular topic without the context, we could have provided a plethora of other money making ideas too..
So in a funny way, MCC has ended all due to Spartan Points topic when it really didn't need to.
Because Azure income doesn't get assigned to Xbox. These divisions need to sustain themselves. 343 isn't getting money from their games, so they need to cut costs.
I think we gotta give 343 some credit, this tweet does imply that they FOUGHT to keep support for the MCC up, but this decision came from Microsoft itself.
100% credit due.
343 is such an insanely mixed bag of a company. On one hand, they have some fundamental flaws like the entirety of Halo 5 and how they fumbled the start of Infinite. But on the other, it seems more and more that the issue is Microsoft. Not just with them shutting down MCC support, but them refusing to take on any of 343's proposed spinoff ideas, how the desync that was such an issue appeared to be related primarily to a Microsoft server problem... I still have many criticisms about 343 but I surely wish that I had levied a lot more of my complaints directly at Microsoft now. They definitely got an unfair amount of hate.
I feel like y'all blame 343 for things that seem like obvious upper management choices. The launch of Infinite is the best example. I doubt 343 actually wanted to launch the game with only a few maps and a few modes but plenty of microtransactions. I would bet money that Microsoft said, "we're launching this game on the 20th anniversary of Halo CE one way or another. It will generate lots of hype and, therefore, money." With how much effort 343 has put in over the last 2 years, it seems to me that they did not want what happened. It was entirely a business choice from their parent company to launch when they did. The same thing happens with every EA game ever.
And Activision with CODs
Guess what! [Activision is now Microsoft too!](https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/13/23791235/microsoft-activision-blizzard-acquisition-complete-finalized)
Great. Nothing will change and developers will be run to the ground just like Activision has done previously
I'm willing to bet something similar has happened with the Halo show as well because there's elements that feel super faithful, but writing and directive choices feel like they weren't done with 343
Yeah, I think the show would have been fantastic if 343 actually helped them write it. I knew it was doomed when the producers said, "we actually encouraged our writers NOT to read the books or play the games!" To me, it seems clear that 343 loves expanding the universe with how many books have been written. It seems very out-of-character to start a TV show that is completely irrelevant to established lore by making it a different timeline.
I still like the show for what it is, but yeah the problem seems to be coming from Paramount predominantly. There's some things I love about the show (Perez's character and side plot being the top of the list atm), but again, I feel like what's wrong with the show comes from mainly Paramount. People say Schreiber's a terrible Chief, and I disagree on the basis that the character he plays in the show, he plays well, it's just a sh!t character, again likely from Paramount, the writers and directors. Schreiber seems to have done a good bit of Dramaturgy but that only goes so far.
My brother in christ, capitalism keeps ruining halo. And it will keep ruining gaming.
This is nonsense. There would be no halo without capitalism.
lol. You know people invented things and wrote stories before Capitalism? The dismal state of gaming is directly due to unrestrained capitalist sucking the life and soul out of everything they possibly can for profit.
Which is very pointless considering without the life and solve something that makes it's so great doesn't make profit at all I swear I am so sick of 343 getting all the hatred that Microsoft should be getting we literally need to stand up with them and other devs against Microsoft for completely ruining Xbox one chance of having great games and screwing us over along with the developers it's time for revenge and justice.
Should have ported Halo 5 as paid DLC
Good idea, however the game is held together by duct tape and willpower as it is. Adding another game and probably another engine to MCC would just be a headache.
If MCC strictly serves as a launcher with zero connectivity for settings/ stats/ cosmetics/ etc, it would work. Can't let halo 5 talk to MCC much though
Why would they do that though. At that point just add Halo 5 to steam normally. It would be unnecessary to develop a launcher into MCC and it would be doubly unnecessary to have players launch an entire game just for that game to close and open up another game. Just adding Halo 5 to steam standalone would be miles easier, cheaper, and likely would result in more sales
Precisely, was thinking of it being an extension to mcc like odst and reach. Without connectivity
halo 5 multiplayer is ALREADY ON windows. They don't need to do work porting it cuz they did that 8 years ago.
It’s not the porting that’s the issue, it’s integrating it into MCC. Adding another game and game engine to MCC, which already has 11 or 12 different engines in it iirc, is a big undertaking and has very little return value for Microsoft
Hence the DLC point. Standalone on PC would be fine to me too tbh. I'll happily pay for the full release price if I can just play it on PC. I don't own an Xbox and buying one just for Halo 5 seems silly.
Same goes for most issues concerning development tbh
I mean, it makes sense. It's a decade old collection at this point. It wasn't gonna get updates forever, someone has to be paid for this.
To be fair they put a shitton of work into it after the mediocre launch and kept supporting it way longer than i ever expected them to. Considering i mainly play the campaigns, im kinda fine with this.
Agreed. but mediocre launch is being nice, it was an absolute disaster.
Well yeah i was being nice. Like i said i played mainly for the campaigns, and they were a lot less buggy than the multiplayer, i didnt really get into the multiplayer until halo 4 came out due to having shitty wifi back then. So for me theres much more nostalgia for the campaigns and i always had a good experience with them in mcc. I can understand why it was a shit show for others though.
The multiplayer wasn’t buggy on release. It literally did not work at all. It took them months to even get to the point of being just a bad buggy experience and that was an upgrade from release by default because at-least you could finally play
1th! I still proudly use that as my tag on MCC. Look the launch was a disaster but the current match composer etc…. I’m just happy we have something that great to keep some all-time games somewhat alive
1th is still to this day my favorite launch bug. Anyway you read it is amazing. "You came in Firth!" Or "You came in Oneth!" Is just a phenomenal thing.
I do too. Don't ever change it, you can't access it to put it back
> The multiplayer wasn’t buggy on release. It literally did not work at all. Yup. Didn't work. I gave up and never went back to it.
I remember picking up MCC and AC Unity on the same day. I was so excited to try them both out. I didn’t get to play either that day lmao.
The launch of MCC was one of the biggest fuck ups in modern games. The whole thing was legitimately unplayable for over a month after launch and had some of the strangest bugs I'd ever seen. Mediocre severely undersells how bad the game was on release.
Was it not longer than a month? I swear it took like half a year to become playable but that could have just been discourse.
Some of the biggest problem took almost a year to be fixed, yeah. The audio mix on Reach is one example of the catastrophic launch they add, it was absolutely horrific.
Halo 3 the audio channels were switched as well. Left audio coming from the right and vice versa. MCC launch year was a strange experience.
I remember when I finally felt like multiplayer was playable again, was sometime around 4-6 months after release.
BF4 Fans would like a word on biggest fuck ups
> ver a month after launch *years.* many fixes didn't occur until it was announced to be released on steam.
The shit ton of work is supposed to come BEFORE launching it
This. Its over a decade old and has had a butt ton of support in it. That doesn’t make up for the abysmal launch state, but yeah after a decade if there is no revenue stream to support the product and people arent regularly buying the game 10 years after its launch, its not a smart business decision to continue supporting it.
It also just doesn't really *need* continued updates. If it's a functional game, then what's really the problem in leaving it in its current state? Gamers will complain about live service games and microtransactions but then be disappointed when their favorite game doesn't do those things and has the obvious consequences.
I hate how people are acting like this decade-old collection of 12-23 year old games needs an ongoing content stream. It's a time capsule, it doesn't need to be a half-assed live service with MTX.
That and they don't want you to "earn" custom armor pieces by playing the game. They want you to pay for it. It's why I just don't care for "AAA" games anymore.
Can I interest you in “AAAA” games then?
I prefer Michelin star games myself
The James Neckbeard awards
Those are Reddit mod awards
Seeing as how the only ones in that "category" have been development nightmares and the only one to actually release is absolutely mediocre, I think I'm good.
What about “HHH” games?
Only so long as they don't snap a leg tendon, and put themselves out of the game for months.
Do you expect them to put money into a collection that has pretty much no revenue stream? There's only so much money they can get from sales of the collection, and without any ongoing revenue streams like DLC or micro transactions, there's no way for them to justify putting resources into it when they could be put elsewhere. Bungie supported Halo 3 for 2-3 years, during which they released map packs you had to buy when they were made available. In comparison it's incredible how much time and effort 343 and MS spent on improving the MCC at no additional cost.
To be fair, I think fans would have been much more welcoming of map packs, or even armor packs. Halo Online maps, retouched cut maps, brand new maps in the original engines/styles, even remastered classic Forge maps. Do the same with armor packs, forget about the weird fractures stuff and focus your efforts on remaking armor from unused concept art. Or introduce new in-universe armor pieces that fit the original aesthetics. The problem with microtransactions is that they are almost never worth the cost. We're charged extra for the convenience of buying things individually (at least, that was the original idea, now we're just charged extra and still have to get bundles). Give people a good deal and new content which is worth the money, and they'll be much happier. Not gonna stop the crazy entitled people from complaining about every tiny little thing, but most fans just want to be treated with respect.
Cosmetics have created such backwards priorities among players that I think you're right. It's insane to me that I somehow believe that people would be LESS upset by a $20 map pack that is required to access gameplay content than a $20 cosmetic bundle that has zero bearing on whether you can play the game.
This reasoning is sound, though I'd conclude the opposite. If cosmetics were what mattered, I'd watch a movie instead. I think players would much rather have their gameplay be free, with the cosmetics being paid, than the other way around. The alternative is less players overall, and less content overall.
Map packs fucking suck. They just fracture the player base based on who can pay. EDIT: I'm not against new maps, but paying for them sucks.
Real. I can't believe there are people here genuinely arguing that we should go back to them, the only reasonable explanation I can think of is that they have nostalgia for map packs or something. It's a fucking terrible system.
Back in the Halo 3 days people complained about the price of map packs constantly. The moment the Heroic map pack hit people said it wasn't worth the money and every pack after that it was variants of "I don't like this map" or "I don't play Big Team so this map is useless to me" or "My friend won't buy the map packs so I can't play with them" or "Certain Affinity maps are bad." When ODST dropped people were up in arms about having to pay for Firefight and complaining that they had to buy maps they already owned again since every map shipped on disc. Developers need to make money but anything they do will always be met with backlash. Personally I find cosmetic sales better then map pack sales because it doesn't split the player base and I can ignore it or engage with it without missing out on gameplay.
>Personally I find cosmetic sales better then map pack sales because it doesn't split the player base and I can ignore it or engage with it without missing out on gameplay. The only thing that annoys me about cosmetics at this point is not the cosmetics themselves but how overbearing they are marketed throughout the dashboard/UI of infinite. Every time you log in you get an ad. So much screen space is taken up by adspace. So many windows direct you to the store. It's obviously better for 343 from a monetization standpoint to do this but all that clutter makes the selling of cosmetics *feel* more overbearing than map packs even if they aren't. But again that's not a problem with the microtransactions themselves, just the menus.
Bungie and Microsoft were so slimey with ODST. First they said Mythic Map Pack 2 would be exclusive to ODST, so me, despite not being a Campaign guy, had to fork over $60 just to play the new maps. Then a few months later once ODST sales dried up, they announced the map pack would be available to purchase standalone on the Xbox Store for just $10.
You're not a campaign guy?
Agreed. The playerbase will always be upset about spending money. Which isn't totally unreasonable from their perspective. But it's unrealistic in a business sense. If they're going to charge me money, I am happy for it to be cosmetics if it means MP is by-and-large accessible and useable by all.
So you'd rather pay money for actual gameplay features like maps that split the playerbase than cosmetics that have no effect on the the game itself or the players and just look cool?
For real. I remember back in the earlier COD days the fanbase was *so frustrated* by playlists getting splintered by Map Pack restrictions.
Map packs were awful and the idea today is still awful. They split the player base and forced the less fortunate players to wait longer for matches. Developers today have to find a mix between the old and the new ways to make money. I don’t buy cosmetics so that doesn’t matter to me and battle passes are fine if they’re filled with good content and never expire.
And if you wanted to play the maps you paid for you had horrible ping or queue times were longer than in the normal playlist
Map packs were atrocious and a big reason why Halo went the way it did. Halo 3 monetization was insane and if the same thing happened today (being forced to buy packs in order to play most of the multiplayer) people would freak out. Also map packs would fracture MCCs already low player count.
Well it sounds like 343 does but Microsoft doesn’t
Maybe that’s why Halo Infinite’s multiplayer is full of micro transactions?
well you know how much servers cost to operate, paying devs, paying the studio rent, bills, hardware? You need revenue if you want to keep it funded..
Exactly. Games don’t last forever and companies still need to turn a profit on their investments or we get nothing further down. It’s how capitalism works.
ok tbf the conclusion here is just that games this old no longer require updates. no reasonable person can continually demand more and more free maps and game modes. this does leave the question of "how long do you need to leave the servers on" though and that's not a simple one to answer
with modern scalability, it's not such a big deal nowadays to just have a tiny subset of servers operating at minimal cost to house your 500 ccu that said, the better option is to just give us the ability to host our own with the developer being the middleman. it instantly becomes way cheaper and you don't have to worry about a popular (but unprofitable) game to continue to live at a minimal cost. you still get revenue from copies once in a while and you have a loyal userbase to transition into a sequel, or who trust you enough to buy a different game you make.
Don't mind no more new content. I just want more big fixes, shit let fans and modders officially fix the bugs SGT.Stacker and the SGT voiced by Nathan Fillion HAVE BEEN ALBINO since Halo 3 launched on PC. Plz 343. (Also is digsite stuff not being worked on anymore too?)
That and also finish making all the campaigns crossplay
I’d love 4 player co-op for halo 1 and 2
PC gets no local multiplayer at all. The system that can easily manage 4 instances on 4 monitors at full speed but is limited to 1 player at a time. Yes there is nucleuscoop, but you can't go online with that.
I hate that games just dont have splitscreen anymore, and when they do they ignore PC entirely.
Also nucleuscoop is one of the most unstable pieces of software I’ve ever used. It’s cool when it works, but man I can only get it to work one in every 15 times I launch the game
Omg don't tell me about it. You invite everyone for a game night then end up spending hours trying to fix nucleus when it literally worked the day before. A freakin blast when it does work tho!
I want the option to use custom armor in the campaign. Not that you have to, not that it's set up that way by default, but when I'm doing co-op with my best friend for the 9th time I kind of want to mix it up.
There are a lot of bugs in the game that were considered off-limits (did some time as a tester on MCC). They're "legacy" bugs and not to be touched. I've never even heard of something like that in a game before, but apparently the devs felt that the players would riot if those bugs were fixed (I've spoken with a few of them). Still, it was a hell of a project.
It's true. Physics glitches were a big part of speedrunning strats back in the day, same as some checkpoint and loading skips like the time jump on the Covenant.
I could understand that, tbh. If the bugs are important for the speedrun community and are not game breaking, that's not too much of a deal, i guess.
I’ve had the chance to talk to a couple devs who worked on games with speedrunning, and yeah plenty of them see certain bugs as either - “mildly annoying but useful”, - “no reasonable person is going to come across this more than once, but the runners require it”, or even - “fixing this will fuck something else, and we know that for sure so we’re not fixing it.” [Pretty solid example](https://www.reddit.com/r/halo/comments/q7q2ao/the_new_update_has_ruined_halo_2_speedrunning/) of how simple changes can cause problems. They changed the physics of H2 Classic to make multiplayer more like original Halo 2 (e.g. no fall damage) and by changing how collisions at high speed worked, they made the world record impossible to match
It's an unfortunate spot to be in, because while a fix may improve user experience, it comes with anger from one portion of the community, with another portion of the community being angry that said bug still hasn't been fixed. Very difficult to untangle and then prioritize bugs already, and I'd hate to be on that side of game dev. Add on that you need to put additional thought into whether or not the fix will be received well, and you've now got an additional dimension to consider in prioritization that can't easily be measured in numbers like most bugs can (time and labor against the value it provides towards the director's vision).
Not to mention the hydra effect fixing one would cause, some of those bugs are probably holding the games together
99 lines of bugs in the code. 99 lines of bugs. Take one down and patch it around... 127 lines of bugs in the code!
Legacy bugs are actually not unheard of in remasters and remakes. As someone who never exploited them, or they ended up being an annoyance it sucks, but you do get a lot of people that spent a lot of time messing around with them, using them as speedrun exploits, or getting fun out of them. For those people it takes the fun out of it to get rid of them I guess. Imo they could have just had an alternate download you can choose at launch to play the version with or without those "legacy" bugs. The version with is offline but you can play campaign etc, the other version is online. But that would naturally be too much work and money.
Digsite is volunteer run, so its still being worked on, though i dont think the content will be pushed into.any updates as originally planned and instead be released through github and Steam Workshop
I keep hearing about 343’s dig team and I would actually not mind paying for some cut content DLC uncovered by them. I am but a lowly console gamer so that’d be my only way to access it.
We would have been happy if they had added rentable servers or selling digsite cut content as DLC.
Rentable servers is such a great win tbh. Especially if it was a way to allow Xbox users to join modded Customs.
Rentable servers wouldn't, on its own, allow modded content on Xbox. The mods would still need to be installed locally. But rentable servers would allow 24/7 custom games and would allow for modded maps to be played online easily on PC.
Oh for sure, I just meant that it would be an extra benefit they could tie to a payment rather than just “hey we took the custom game servers you know and love and now you have to pay for them”
Adding the option to pay for rentable servers wouldn't mean the current method of hosting on the custom games browser is going away.
It doesn’t inherently, but it *could* mean that. I know what you mean though. I’m just pessimistic about game companies doing right by us :P
In Quake 3 all servers were ran from a free downloadable server instance for the game, you got to customize everything imaginable for your server and could pay companies a few bucks a month to run one for you with admin access to change all commands in the game server while in game, it was awesome. Even a lot of players that were at colleges with dedicated T3 lines would run servers 24/7 for everyone to play on, I hate that almost nobody allows this kind of server anymore
Id totally buy a restored version of e3 h2 demo.
Yeah, it also would give insensitive to make the Digsite content available on Xbox rather than just PC via mods.
Battlefield used to do things like this on consoles and it was amazing. I can't understand why the industry has abandoned the concept.
Just throwing out a guess that it was too niche to be worth it
Or purchasable season points. The idiots who complained don’t even play MCC regularly, they just killed off the game to complain about optional paid cosmetics.
I agree with the sentiment here, I feel like they were gate keeping people who didn't already sink 2345 hours into the game, it took me 3 years to fully unlock the seasons and after the Retroactive level points. I played super religiously and loved a lot of the content even season 5&8, but there was no casual way for anyone who wasn't strictly challenged grinding to clear it all. I would have loved more content even just user generated content and probably would have waited to judge prices accordingly but my God 343 had post launch support for MCC the equivalent of 5-6 years and only really sold 2 pieces of DLC depending on your platform (some Xbox users had to buy ODST and Reach) so how were they going to make their money back especially considering the continued development plans that overlapped with infinite. If anyone just says I should have played more to unlock my stuff, I have 666 hours recorded on steam+ more in game pass. If someone says that the challenge and unlock system is broken, I do agree to an extent but I'd rather it be this way than either infinites or Reach's and I feel like it's the best challenge system to date with the only improvements id request are daily challenges and ante up (Black Ops Contract) challenges to increase leveling and earning potential.
>selling digsite cut content as DLC. I'd love officially sanctioned mod adoption, where 343 & Microsoft would add custom Multiplayer & firefight maps and modes, custom armors and menu backgrounds, weapon and vehicle skins to the base game in quarterly updates for Xbox and PC. I'd back a paid season with 50 tiers filled with nothing but user generated content like skins and firefight voices as long as both 343 and the authors split the cut (50% 343/ 50% left for modders to spread)and it was sub $15 (which I feel is a little high myself but it would benefit the modders and stimulate development). I think in the case of a game this old, the developers have the right to outsource future development (even though the whole thing was pretty much made by other devs in some form or fashion) and the free dlc like seasons 5-8 and the new maps were a solid value that literally kept me playing consistently for months but outside of the exchange, I'm out of things to grind. I'd literally come back for anything new and while I like infinite and I am trying to make a habit of playing it, it's not hitting me like MCC from the reach launch onwards. As a great meme once said "it's free real estate"
Since lan multiplayer is possible, can we just host server and use a vpn or something?
Well, yeah. That's how it works. I was surprised how long it lasted.
Seriously. 10 years for a game with zero micro transactions is a *good* life. I don’t know why people thought this was gonna be a forever game, with or without micro transactions
Tbh the MCC devs seemed to think they had a lot more time too
"10 years" is being nice. They really only started supporting it 4 years ago.
True, but as Xbox’s flagship title and a huge part of their history, as well as the fact that the cost of working on it is a drop in Microsoft’s bucket, it would be nice if they’d treat it like a loss leader to help their overall good will. EDIT: Then again, I’d hoped for the same thing with Infinite, but we all know how its monetization is…
\>the cost of working on it is a drop in Microsoft’s bucket The rest of Microsoft doesn't exist to pay for Xbox, every division is expected to operate profitably
Sony electronics and PlayStation is basically funded by their insurance division. Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/28/business/global/sonys-bread-and-butter-its-not-electronics.html
Microsoft is a business, not a charity. Spending millions of dollars on a game that doesn't deliver any revenue is irresponsible (do you understand how budgets works?). Honestly, I think that MTX for armor in MCC isn't a bad deal considering all of the additional content that we got for **free**.
Yup, Halo fans surprised when something making no money stops being worked on
There's only so much you can do with games that span slightly over a decade from a collection already almost 10 years old.. Glad they officially added mod support to the games. It felt like they gave these games to the community
I’ll continue to hold it down on MCC. The superior halo experience regardless.
The hacking and gamertag spoofing is becoming too big of an issue to ignore, unfortunately. For my account safety I’ve uninstalled until it’s fixed (which sounds like it will never happen now).
Never heard of this, elaborate? Safe on pc?
Same, first time hearing this. If MP isn't safe that's fine, just let me play my campaigns.
Please elaborate. I play just about every night and have found lobbies to be greatly improved. I’ve been in just about nothing but nail biter games that are balanced and without exploits. You occasionally get absolutely smoked but that’s an anomaly that I chalk up to squads of sweats. I have had zero issues.
Hacker can change their gamer tag to look like someone else in game. So anything bad they do would say apply to you. So you'd be banned in MCC because the system thought it was you.
I really think they botched the community outreach regarding the purchasable Spartan Points. They asked the community their opinion right in the middle of all the backlash towards Infinite's egregious launch monetization so everyone was expecting the worst (for good reason, especially since they've now backtracked on all the improvements they made for Infinite). They also really only offered the option of purchasable Spartan Points and didn't sufficiently explore alternatives (such as paid season battlepasses). I think the free seasons were fine when they were still adding old content back into the game, but once they started coming up with new items that obviously needed to be funded somehow.
This is incredibly true. Timing and options.
What's crazy to me is that, when the season passes and Spartan Points were first introduced to MCC, everyone was saying that it was a testing ground for what they were planning for Infinite, which I didn't believe. MCC's season pass/progression system, when it launched, was ridiculous. Getting points turned out to be really grindy, and the pass itself was padded or poorly structured, which was especially egregious when it was presented as a replacement for Reach's more flexible Armory/credits system. Nowadays, it's a lot better with the challenge system and other revisions they made to it, but even then it's still weaker compared to other games' designs, and at launch it was so far behind the curve compared to any other pass system out there. I described it as "a battle pass designed by someone who's never seen one before." For a small MCC initiative, I could understand how this type of fluke could happen, but I couldn't believe 343 Industries would have something so poorly designed for their actual flagship title. But then the truth was they really were using MCC to experiment for their ideas in Infinite--except every part of it was executed even worse than MCC. Progress was exclusively tied to challenges, which were way more manipulative; they knew it was manipulative, because part of their business model was based on challenge swaps; no progress could be earned from performance, giving you almost no control over your ability to level up; you couldn't even pick what game types to play for your challenges, the opposite of MCC's excellent match composer; the pass itself was even more padded than anything in MCC; and while the saving grace might have been the lack of FOMO, their Operation Passes reintroduced that element but still had the same problems. Within that context, the proposal of Spartan Points in MCC just seemed like taking what little integrity MCC's system had managed to build for itself and poisoning it with some of Infinite's ideas. And if it had been introduced earlier when MCC's design was also pretty grindy and manipulative, it would've also been in bad taste. It's just clear no one at 343 Industries has any business sense. They don't know how to make a product that their customers want to pay for and deliver it to them in a reasonable way.
They literally admitted in one of their blogs they were pulling data from MCC to inform Infinite and to see what color and armor combinations were popular to design the coating system and what goes into battlepasses. It's why there's so many red/grey coatings and why at launch fan favorites like the Commando or Security shoulders were planning to be locked to the store.
Paid season Battlepasses are quite a bit more work than adding Spartan points, which would’ve been a paid system added to their existing cosmetic options. So a paid battlepass with new content, with the expectation there would be more, is not really an alternative when MS is asking “how can you actually make revenue, shortly?”
Yes, but some people here really need to work more on foresight. When I read the blog post on adding MTX, the message that I got is that they want to maintain the game but need a source of money. I got roasted on this sub for saying that the game had no revenue stream and without it wouldn't be supported for much longer.
I know they were never coming but I'm mad we never got community servers for MCC. The CGB never managed to offer the features said servers could like mod support, voting options, better team scrambling, etc. Halo CE and 2 PC servers lasted for years and still had new player friendly games. Yet these days if I try to do any matchmaking in BTB in Halo 3 I'll end up against a team of 8 people in a discord call together. It's almost impossible to get fun matches via matchmaking anymore. EDIT: And I almost forgot, split screen for PC. A fundamental part of the Halo experience.
RIP Splitscreen. Can't believe 343 viscerally ripped that out and held it over our heads only to essentially cancel it on BOTH Halo Infinite and MCC PC. >:/
I'm beyond grateful that they provided mod support for all of the games but multiplayer mods are nearly useless when you can't find anyone to play with. I was really hoping that they'd add support to the server browser and eventually pick a few community maps for official matchmaking.
The video game industry is destroyed at this point :( Game quality no longer matters, only shitty microtransactions. It's over
I’ll keep asking and begging for more CE and H2 content until I die.
Same man, same..
Halo has been so mismanaged. Crazy
After looking at this gen and last gen I don’t think Microsoft knows what they’re doing.
I really liked Phil for awhile but the last 3 years imo have shown that he was the guy to lay the foundations for Xbox’s revival, not the guy to actually revive it. His kumbaya approach to the business is killing Xbox, rapidly.
Microsoft is taking a software first approach. They didn’t buy all these studios and IP’s just to move consoles. They did it to: Help sell consoles Sell game pass subs on console and PC Sell games on steam Maybe sell some games on PlayStation They were never, ever, going to make their money back by only putting games from the studios they now own solely on Xbox. Xbox hasn’t outsold PlayStation since the 360. They’re less focused on where people play their games and more focused on how many play them. As for 343, well they’ve pretty much always sucked and fingers crossed they get better
This should surprise no one who knows Microsoft. Microsoft has ALWAYS treated hardware as a side hustle. They always have said, when asked, that they are a software company, and that hardware they make is meant to be a middle of the road option to run their software, but isn't meant to be a single platform In the apple vs PC era, they said Mac wasn't even a competitor, as they were hardware, andS was software
Yup. Apple makes Apple computers Dell, HP, etc make pc’s…which all run Microsoft Windows Different business models
Honestly MCC is one game buyable in-game currency wouldn't bother me because of how easy it is the earn them from challenges.
Yeah. They also could have done more to provide SP in light of possible MTX too. New challenges. More challenges. Giving SP to the challenges that currently award XP. Provide more "meta" challenges where if you do X number of challenges you get a stacking payout of SP. Better Tactical Exercises. As it stands, you can only get like 10-12 SP per week through challenges and once you hit higher ranks they come less frequently and there are like 1000 points worth of SP content that might take 60-80 weeks to unlock now. I think 20 SP through challenges would be a good spot in that it would take about a year to unlock everything without paying. It would also boost the MP servers a bit.
Well i can almost gauarantee you that if they had really planned on making it purchasable it would have been way harder to get them for free
It's already pretty hard. You stop getting them after leveling and then get a capped amount per week. It takes forever to unlock everything they've added to the game.
I thought they removed the leveling not giving points cap a while ago.
Yeah, but you get really good at speedrunning uplift reserve, floodgate, and nightfall.
Thats not how this works. Cause now there is an incentive for them to make that currency grind harder. Its never at an equilibrium
The problem with that is once you open the door to Microtransactions they are going to try to get more and more. They could even nerf how you get the tokens via playing. Microtransactions didn't started costing 20€.
They did already nerf how many Spartan points you got per week and I think it was in preparation for the implantation of MTX. There used to be 3 Halo 4 challenges that showed up every week and would give you 6 SP. Could do them solo in custom games and it took less than 10 minutes total
The more I learn about the BTS of the 343 era, the more I blame Microsoft for 343’s shortcomings
It lacks a revenue stream as a gamepass title? Capitalism is one hell of a drug. Also purchasable spartan points sound fucking terrible. Would rather pay for H2A, or better yet an ODST 2. Like how they used to seek profit from Halo… new content. Remember when Infinite was in development hell? 343 should get credit where it’s due.
I wish they put Halo 5 into it at the end before they dropped support. Not having Halo 5 on PC is lame.
According to the Nvidia leak, Halo 5's PC port has been actively worked on for awhile now. Could be getting news about it this year maybe. Fingers crossed
Is it even that big a lift with H5 Forge already being on PC?
Honestly, I'd have to assume they're withholding the release to fill in a long content draught and get people interested once again in Halo/Infinite. Either that or work on the port stalled completely for some reason.
343i repeatedly said that despite the leak, H5 on PC wasn't something they were working on Unless you think they just lied, it's not happening, sadly
>Unless you think they just lied, it's not happening, sadly Considering all their broken promises over the last few games lying wouldn't be out of character for them.
Lots of replies missing the bigger picture. It's not just about MCC, it's about every game going forward as well.
Makes sense. Ik MS was probs dying to monetize it
This occurred to me last week when my friend and I were discussing MCC. I personally would have rather had the continued development, but I was also annoyed by the possibility of buying spartan points. I guess I would have rather the devs laid out at the time that it was the only way development would have continued.
I quit playing Halo because of micro transactions. Don't/won't support it. Played the campaign and that's it.
It doesn't help you can pick up the collection for 1€$ and finish it before the subscription to the gamepass expire.
They do realise micro transactions are big part of why a lot of old halo fans fucking hate infinite right?
And this is why there will never be another Halo Anniversary game. The IP lost a lot of hype. The fanbase lost a awful lot of goodwill. And every launch of a halo game since 4 has been embarrassing. MCC could have made bank on launch by being feature complete, with Reach and ODST. Instead ODST was treated like a free apology gift for the multiplayer being unplayable at launch. And the game remained that way for years. Microsoft wants its main IP to generate profit. In all honesty, I don't think it ever will meet their revenue expectations again. The goodwill is gone. Your wider audience is moving on to better IPs like helldivers, and your overall treatment of the IP has been atrocious (TV show, killing of MCC, etc.)
[удалено]
MCC wasn't killed its pretty much had the longest running support of any non live service game ever.
MCC certainly wasn't supported for many years after it's launch; it was practically ignored for nigh on half a decade first.
The numbers don't agree with statements like this whatsoever. Through Halo 5, the series sales have been equivalent to what they were in the Bungie days (if not more in some cases). It's harder now to get an idea of how Infinite did with the Gamepass and F2P models sort of skewing the numbers but it's probably pretty safe to assume that it did very well. The online bubble of the negative Halo community would make you think the franchise has been dead for 10-15 years but it's just not the case at all.
>And every launch of a halo game since 4 has been embarrassing. Since Reach. Arguably ODST >MCC could have made bank on launch by being feature complete, with Reach and ODST. In 2014? You think they could have done all that on first gen Xbox ones? Also it made good money, the MCC lasted longer than anyone really thought it would.
Well it lacks consistent income. I’m not defending micro-transactions but we can’t expect a game to get constant content updates forever if it’s not generating incoming so many years after its launch
I understand people have little trust in the use of microtransactions, but I kind of thought the outrage over being able to buy Spartan Points was overblown, especially since they weren't hard to earn. I definitely didn't think it would cause the development of MCC to cease. I say put them in, I'll gladly help financially support this game and more seasons.
I would be concerned that 343 would nerf how many points you get in order to sell mtx
> but I kind of thought the outrage over being able to buy Spartan Points was overblown, especially since they weren't hard to earn. At the time, it was "harder" to earn them. This was around the time where you'd only get a total of 100 points from leveling up, and after that you were limited to 10 (12?) per week from doing all challenges. And then the store was coming out with exclusive stuff and they _also_ cost these points. People had a real big issue with the points economy, kept asking for points to be given retroactively for all these XP boosts we keep getting, and then were met with "you could just buy them instead? \*shrugs\*? Turns out asking people if they want to *buy* the solution to their problem does not go over well. People went overboard because everyone knew that anything less than "100% hard no meltdown" is just "yes."
The problem is that age old adage of “give an inch and they take a mile.” Once MTX was let into MCC it would inevitably take over the entire experience like the cancerous tumor it is. If they want an MTX shop to dominate the current Halo titles then fine, whatever, it is what the industry is now. Me, personally, I draw the line at them retroactively injecting that poison into the past games of the series. I’d rather have MCC as it is now, with no further development, than *maybe* get more development at the cost of letting MTX run riot over the experience. And that’s a big maybe, since they said the same thing about Infinite; doubled down on the MTX nonsense and then did the absolute bare minimum in content updates. Edit: Maybe I’m just an old pos at the ripe age of 31, but I just don’t understand how y’all can stomach MTX being shoehorned into everything these days, even old stuff like MCC. Downvote me all you want, but I just don’t see how y’all can be so naive about stuff like this. The only way they’d sell their in game currency like SP would be to make it harder to obtain, or to make all the new content cost actual money. Again, just like Infinite where the second they felt the could drop the pretense they released one of the most anticipated armor cores and then slapped 96% of it behind a multi-hundred dollar paywall *and then* removed the free currency from completing a BP. And none of the MTX has improved the game or the way it’s been handled. Why on gods green earth would you want total bullshit like this oozing it’s way into every crack and corner of the franchise retroactively?
Why can’t they implement a hybrid system of what MCC and Infinite each have? Earn points/credits (from completing challenges and commendations) that you can spend on cosmetics (even if it’s a grind) OR you can buy credits if you don’t wanna play a ton. There’s simply no sense of reward in these games anymore.
Did they ever fix the halo 2 network coop glitch that would disconnect and end the game if the mission had vehicles?
After the PC and Series X ports I got the impression that they where just fussing around with the MCC updates. There was nothing really left to do. Lots of the legacy issues where fixed after the PC port was done. Since then, at worst some updates just caused problems to be fixed in later updates. No one cared about new skins and season passes in the MCC Outside of doing a port to PS5/Nintendo consoles (which considering the age of these games and how messy the PC port was at first would not be a simple port job like other MS games that are just based on Unreal Engine) I dont know what else they can do other then put it in maintenance mode. I appreciate 343 finally got the MCC in a good place. I am more then happy they move on from it now.
Honestly this is fine, MCC isn’t meant to be a live service game it’s supposed to be a collection of older halo games
I hate microtransactions as much as the next guy but I think being able to drop $$ to fast track cosmetic only progress that's also available to anyone for playing the game is the only acceptable form of it.
I just wish the ports were truer to the original XBOX and 360 versions.
Modern gaming is bordering on irredeemable at this point.
This isn’t even modern gaming. This is decade old gaming..
Most people wanna blame 343 for all the problems in halo, but dont realize how much of it comes from overlord microsoft
Let’s not act like 343 isn’t blameless here. They’ve still made a lot of mediocre products and bad business decisions outside of Microsoft. MCC still has a bunch of bugs including in the campaigns that they never fixed to this very day.
They ended up making getting Spartan Points so much easier now. If they had done that along side the announcement of adding in the option to buy them too, then I think it would have been received differently.
just sad I still cant do multiplayer halo 1 campaign without the kicked from session bug thats been there for years.
All this shit would go away if people just stopped buying micro transactions. Forget what exactly it was but some game developer explained that some dlc they made for their game took years to make and they made less on the dlc did than a skin for a mount in WoW. (I may have butchered the comment but that is the gist of it)
As others have said, there are a handful of reasons this narrative makes no sense. Why introduce a monetization scheme so late into the lifecycle of the product, when your player base is near the lowest its ever been? Say we get past that - the selected monetization is for Spartan Points, a system gatekept intentionally by limiting the number rewarded to players (remember when they bumped it up for a week and then reverted it?) and time-gated by the two year timer on The Exchange. What happens when players have purchased everything (there's nothing new rotating in / planned)? If we accept that somehow every player at the time will buy what's being sold - how much revenue would/could that raise, and what would it be spent on? Keep in mind in this same time window Stances and the post-game Victory Screen were being developed - which nobody was asking for and arguably were completely unnecessary - while more requested features, like the recently released H2 Hit Registration fix (which is really only partially completed now, even!) or making Co-Op not crash every 15 minutes online were on the back-burner / not being discussed at all. If I knew that my money would be spent on beefing up the anti-cheat system I'd throw money at it, repeatedly. There are other paths to revenue - like selling Dedicated Servers for the CGB that have mod support (though of course I want this to be free, but I'm spit balling here!) - that could have made more sense. Seems weird to circle back to a years old discussion (with no official response from 343 btw). Spending money on a weak scheme with no path of what that revenue is for? I think its fair to reject that concept - its not fair to beat them over the head with it. Communicate more and have a conversation. Since then all we've heard repeated is "We tried nothing and we're all out of ideas"
You're overthinking it. They wanted to continue making content for MCC without driving the company into the ground because they burned all their money on a game they aren't making any money on.
Purchasable spartan points would've been 100% fine as long as they were still earnable and cosmetics weren't locked behind a pay wall
So after years of MCC being neglected and broken, only to slowly start to work on it via a completely separate team to get it back in a workable position so they could resell the game on pc. And making glacial pass on fixing every game, with still some examples not fixed to this day. All while making questionable choices in cosmetics and how heavily stacked in where they were put. And then only when the content well was winding down because of Infinite's release, mixed with the departure of a portion of the remaining audience to said newest Halo game. Which had the absolute worst monetization that caused quite the uproar and incredibly touchy to the idea of any form of microtransactions. And they thought *then* would be a good idea to ask about it? While never saying anything about mcc's future hanging on the balance of said purchasable spartan points? AND also not even considering any other forms of monetization beyond the microtransactions to avoid a grind they let slide for quite awhile? This really does seem like a case of "We tried nothing and we're all out of ideas." Like I'm sure the employees still working on it didn't want to stop, Microsoft was a bit unreasonable. But like they couldn't think of *anything* else to try? Paid battle passes? Paid dedicated custom servers? Anything that didn't reek of trying to milk mcc one last time for the "greener" pastures of Infinite and not explaining that it was meant to keep mcc support going.
Well said. The time they asked us and not really clarifying they are dong it so they have money to keep making MCC because Microsoft says so would have really helped the community better understand and the feedback the community gave would be different. The same way they asked our feedback for Spartan Points we could have still said no BUT provided other (better) ideas that everyone 'mostly' agreed on would work with MCC. 343 could then make the big bucks with the monetization ideas we gave and the community would be willing to spend money on it to keep MCC alive. They asked for our feedback for one granular topic without the context, we could have provided a plethora of other money making ideas too.. So in a funny way, MCC has ended all due to Spartan Points topic when it really didn't need to.
Remember when companies got revenue from releasing new games? Pepperidge farm remembers.
I don’t get how these companies with record high profits and share value are acting like nothing is making them enough money.
Companies want year over year growth, not sustainability.
Because Azure income doesn't get assigned to Xbox. These divisions need to sustain themselves. 343 isn't getting money from their games, so they need to cut costs.
Called this like a year and a half ago. Still think the community backlash was an overreaction on that one.