They layed off about 1/4 to 1/3 of 343, acknowledged its a failure, and asked fans if they are straight up done. It's a subtle as walking into a room saying whoops and letting out a massive fart.
In order: "No" Because I just started. "3" I'm not jumping on any bandwagons. "Yes" Breezed through the Joint Fire event.
No shit Sherlock. They got rid of most of their story team, pretty much all of the heavily experienced veterans, all the contractors (a big portion of staff), ditched their own engine, lost most of the fanbase one way of another, and made it very open to other people creating Halo projects. Something very big was pointed out, a big reason the layoffs happened was because Microsoft was making room for Activision Blizzard. Literally, the announcement for layoffs came exactly one year to the day they announced they were acquiring them, and guess how many employees they have, 9,800. Guess how many people Microsoft layed off, 10,000. Leadership is out of control at Microsoft, they are making blunder after blunder and are shocked when things go south. All the priorities are in the wrong place. There will truly be no change until there is a massive shackle in Microsoft in leadership. You can do shit to fix a sinking ship if the captain keeps ramming it into fucking icebergs. I have completely lost all faith they will recover until that happens. Now just wait till Starfield flops as well and then they will see how little the fans support them anymore.
Ooooof They damn well knew what terrible state this game would be in and were actively working on it's replacement than actually working on and creating more future content to make the game itself better.
I imagine the next Halo game, if there is one, is gonna quietly shove away the Endless and the Banished much like this one thew the Created plot and Cortana aside.
I would bet some good money it's going to be a 4th reset of the story. It's very clear they are done with this story because they got rid of the campaign team and were too busy building a replacement than the actual game. Since it's switch to Unreal 5 most likely, I will imagine it will be created by a new lead dev studio with their own idea for what Halo should be hopefully. Or it's going to be the 4th shit Halo game in a row and the franchise will die completely.
Around a quarter of their staff is gone and they were already working on its replacement well before the game was actually finished. They were straight up setting halo up to fail from the start, no wonder so many people left. The more that come out and the more I hear, the more bewildered i become. Imagine if Nintendo fucked up mario this hard. There would be massive backlash, but more importantly, they would have stopped it long before it became even remotely this bad. Back in 2020, I legitimately had the Halo Infinite series X in my hands that I was gonna buy and I got all the way up to actually buying when I hesitated severely because something just felt off. I am beyond glad I didn't because I never knew how bad the situation actually was. I remember I got a shit ton of flak when Infinite launched because I smelled through the bullshit immediatley and called it out, but yet a lot of people critized me saying its better than Vanguard and 2042 and that its a good game. Just an FYI, Battlefield 2042 is now outperforming Halo by a pretty sizeable number. I know I have been shitting on Halo a lot, but it truly is deserved and a long time coming. I genuinely want to know, who the hell greenlit all this and let the literal Xbox flagship game become so mismanaged to the point they genuinely may not be able to recover from.
One of the best villains Halo has with one of the more interesting stories and they flush it down the drain. Absolutely brilliant move there MS.
IMO Halo needed a hard reset after 4. What a lot of people seem to forget, is that just about everything in 4 was set up by Bungie. If Bungie had made the game, it would have been the same story, but the tone and ambience would have been much better. So I think 4 was the perfect epilogue to the universe. And while there were a lot of other cool and unique ideas added afterwords, the overall story direction in 5 was the worst thing they could have done. The wrote themselves into a box, and then when they couldn’t commit to that, they simply wrote it all off for Infinite. I think that was 343’s biggest problem, really. They never committed to anything. They did something, and then if it wasn’t recieved well, instead of trying to improve upon their ideas, they abandoned them, and that resulted in the story being dragged through the mud. I’ve long since felt that a reboot that is a remake of CE that lets you play as Chief and/or Noble Six was the best way to go. But, considering they seem to want to focus on Multiplayer games, it seems like the franchise is going to go the route of Call of Duty. Which if so, while not the end of the franchise, might as well be the end of the Halo we had all loved. Gone with the golden goose, in with the cash cow.
Well, while all you killjoys are doomin and gloomin, I'll be enjoying Season 3. Already cleared the story event.
