After 14 Years, I Believe I Am Done With Halo · 8:07pm Sep 27th, 2017
Such a shame that the Halo 3 nostalgia wave ended with something like this.
A bit ago, Halo fans received news that famed map maker MultiLockOn had received a job offer from 343 Industries. The hiring process had apparently gone so far that he had quit his job at Treyarch, taking a $10k / year pay cut, putting a $2k down payment on an apartment in Bellevue, and was in the middle of moving his possessions across the country...
...When 343 pulls the job offer out from under him around two days ago. Apparently over critical and hyperbolic posts he had made in the past, revealed by an anonymous, throwaway reddit account. The sore thumb would be "no one at 343 deserves their jobs".
For his part, Multi has been the most professional one could possibly be in a situation such as this. Yesterday he accepted complete responsibility for the posts he had made in the past, complete with begrudgingly congratulating the anonymous reddit account, and saying he doesn't blame 343 for the choice they made. Community members largely respected him for his professionalism and learning his lesson. There is also a large amount of community members, myself included, directing anger towards 343 Industries and this anonymous redditor.
I don't believe any longtime Halo fan worth their salt can say with a straight face that 343's offerings are superior to Bungie's titles in any way. When it comes to my matches played online:
Halo 3 / ODST: 1697 games
Halo Reach: 1140 games
Halo 5: 675 games
Halo 4: 492 games
Halo Reach, especially; when I was a long-haul commercial driver, and had almost NO free time. I consider it to be, in terms of longevity and player investment, the best Halo game to date. You know, when the actual ranking system had NAMED RANKS and none of this lazy SR-45... SR-46 bullshit. When you could play ANY part of the game and it would contribute to your rank.
It's not 343's reaction to his comments that is the worst part to me, it's the fact that their HR department had let the hiring process get as far as it did before they discovered the comments, and that they had to do so through an anonymous post on Reddit, and not doing their goddamn jobs as HR reps.
At this point, I am very glad I didn't purchase Halo Wars 2.
343, you're on a sinking ship. Halo CE Anniversary multiplayer was shoehorned into Reach, Halo 4's multiplayer was shit, the Master Chief Collection STILL isn't working correctly, and Halo 5's campaign was outright false advertisement. On top of that, you don't have a fucking clue what made Firefight fun in ODST and Reach.
I'm probably going to save myself $60 and watch a Let's Play of Halo 6's campaign to see how they screwed the pooch on that one.
There is a silver lining to all of this. As of four hours ago, Multi woke up and got four emails from different AAA studios with job offers.
So my congratulations to Multi. Take your talent to a developer that deserves it.
Is this matches you personally played, or all matches played period? Because if it's the latter, I'm shocked at how few matches there were.
I abandoned this ship when Halo 5 launched with almost no maps and a free-to-play game economy with no other modes installed. Firefight was pitiful and now this? This just seals it for me:
Halo is dead.
343 are parading its corpse around demanding money from everyone so they can slap you with it.
4680157
It might be matches going on right at the second he checks? It's in the same range as 'current player count' for various steam games.
4680157
Whoops, mis-worded that. Matches I personally played. For Reach, you needed around 6,000 to get to Inheritor.
4680158
Agreed. Halo 5 was bare bones, and Reach launched with EVERYTHING.
Yeah, never been a fan of Halo because of its parent company. They don't really treat their employees very well.
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Not to mention that in Reach, you could customize your helmet's attachments, the visor color, each shoulder individually, what was mounted on your left forearm, what you had on your left hip, the armor on your KNEES! In Halo 5 you get to choose your helmet and everything below the neck. And then they inflated the fee-to-pay market with 300+ armor designs that were scrapped from previous games so they could force people to buy more to get whatever armor they wanted.
4680174
I am ashamed to say I gave into that at launch. Shelled out $30 until I got Recon.
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Ah, okay. I've never played Halo, aside from fucking around with friends in local multiplayer years ago.
Halo 3 was the reason I bought a xbox360 after loving Halo 1&2. ODST/3 I played online sooo much and sunk more hours than I ever thought I would into making custom maps and playing with folks on them. It was amazing.
Halo Reach was also epic. Both were simply fun games and some of the most polished shooters I've ever played.
I'm not sad that I havent bought a Halo game since as I regard it as Bungie's mojo, not theirs. I took one look at 4 and decided nope. Halo 5 only cemented that and turned me away from Halo after years of being a big fan and calling it my fave game series... So yea, I understand your sentiment.
Although I still play H2 on my mac sometimes since they never relased 3 on the PC and its fun to play LAN.
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I uninstalled the moment I finished the terrible campaign. One of my friends convinced me to play firefight with them and I made an entire blog detailing what's wrong with Halo 5's version: https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/659477/remember-when-firefight-was-fun
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I kind of, SORT OF understand if they struggled with Halo 4's multiplayer. It was their first foray as a studio.
But Halo 5? No. Warden Eternal, the same boss, three times? Fireteam Osiris, with three characters we couldn't give less than a fuck about, for 12 out of 15 missions? Hell, why not make the Rookie the player character of Osiris instead of killing him off in New Blood? Firefight, ESPECIALLY the final round, wholly dependent on eight players constantly throwing heavy vehicle and power weapon REQs at the boss?
Fuck that.
i don't really care about Multiplayer. i only played the Campaign because no money for Gold membership. i stopped playing a long time ago when i had to sell my 360.
and yeah, Halo 5 was complete false advertising. Halo 2 did it as well, but all we thought was that we were gonna be on Earth more then just 2 missions. That's very tame compared to what they did with 5 with a compeltely different story to what we were supposed to get from the ads. what the fuck, 343?
I actually only got my first taste of Halo recently, having been in a playstation household until the XBone, and I recently picked up the masterchief collection so that I could expiriance what I had been missing all these years...
And while the first game impressed me for being far ahead of the curve for its time, and clearly being what inspired a huge wave of games that followed in its footsteps, it was the second's campaign where I started to have to really sit up and pay attention as they fixed almost all the issues I had with the first game and polished everything up to a degree most modern games can't match, other than some unfortunate checkpoint positions...
And the third game put its hooks into me like nothing had in years.
To say I was excited for more when I finished that and started the fourth was an understatement... but judging by the tone here, I think everyone knows how that went.