Foolishfellow
Banned
First of all, I apologize in advance for creating a new Halo thread. I know there were quite a few yesterday, but I feel like that was a result of Halo fans finally reaching a fever pitch with how the way Microsoft and 343 are handling this franchise. That being said, I feel like I have some specific grievances about this game that have not been addressed or have not been addressed in the sort of detail that I would like. Yesterday, was the first day on NeoGAF since a 1 month ban that I received for "being a hostile jerk" in a Halo: MCC thread shortly after launch. In that thread, perhaps I was being a bit of a prick. However, in my defense it was incredibly frustrating to watch people defend the actions of 343/Microsoft. One of the most frustrating issues that I argued over during the week after Halo: MCC's launch was the issue of lack of dedicated servers. Shortly after launch there was a thread questioning the disappearance of dedis and a person representing 343 came in and explained that p2p was only a fallback to be used when dedis were down. That seemed to calm a lot of NeoGAF users, however I argued that it's not good enough to know that p2p is a fallback. Furthermore I argued that if p2p is used more frequently than dedicated servers (in the case of MCC I have only seen the connecting to dedicated servers a handful of times), can you really advertise that your game is running on dedicated servers?
This game is broken at its core, and I'm not convinced that any amount of 1mb updates will be able to fix this game. Launching a broken/unfinished game at launch (and releasing incremental updates) just doesn't work with the way that development cycles are commonly structured. Prior to launch, many positions within specific projects are laid off and those that do remain are frequently moved to the next project. Teams that handle post launch updates and DLC are significantly smaller than the team that worked on the project in the years/months leading up to a game's launch.
In the case of Halo MCC, I am convinced that this game needs to be completely removed from the marketplace (specifically the multiplayer portion) and a full team of funded programmers needs to work on the game until it runs in a functioning state. Microsoft/343 marketed this title as the definitive Halo re-release. The Criterion Collection release of Halo, if you will. What we got was closer to someone's half-assed, middle school, Volcano science fair project.
It's also not fair, and completely anti-consumer to promise a product that does not currently even exist (See: the Halo MCC vidoc that was released prior to launch). Microsoft essentially said:
"We know we can really sell you on this idea. We have no idea how to actually pull off the idea, but we'll sell you an empty box of broken promises, take your money, and I'm sure our small team of post-launch developers working 15 hour shifts will be able to solder something together. It won't be pretty, but it will *sort of* work. It won't work nearly as well as any of the titles worked originally on their own... but it will *sort of* be playable... and Halo 5 will be out by the time this game is fixed, so we'll take your money for that as well."
If people want to talk about a real controversy in the video game industry and not the faux ethics controversy that was the original #gamegate (not the feminist, equal representation, movement that it morphed into *which I fully support*). People should be talking about how over the last 10 years AAA developers have been over promising and selling unfinished products in collaboration with the gaming media and twitch streamers who rarely ever bat an eye about being forced to review/recommend games before the final product is even available. There is currently an utter lack of respectable games-focused journalistic outlets that offer anything more than "this is the hot new game of the year", "this game is fun to play", "this game has pretty graphics." There is no video game focused equivalent the likes of Paris Review, New York Times, Cineaste Magazine, The New Yorker, etc. There's just a bunch of advertisers the like likes of ign, gamespot, gametrailers. And loudmouth, bigoted, youtube and twitch streamers. Nobody is expressing any sort of real outrage about being scammed, because all videogame journalistic outlets are essentially advertisers.
To conclude, here's my post-update 12.15.2014 notes from last night (all glitches were experienced within my 2-3 hours of playtime last night):
1. Entering matchmaking with a party does't work the majority of the time. If you're in a party and you hit a "connection failed" error, everyone will be kicked out of the party and when everyone rejoins all subsequent searches will hit "connection failed." This happens every time until everyone in your party does a hard reset of the Xbox one, and even that doesn't always fix it. This is the most significant bug that I've encountered and basically prevents people from consistently being able to join matchmaking as a party.
2. Post update, the game will sometimes put in you in in-game chat even if you are already in an Xbox Live party. You're able to hear everyone in your party, but your voice is only registered via in-game chat. There is no way to switch out of this unless you completely disband the party and do a hard reset of your console.
3. Post game I encountered a bug (as party host) where your stuck in the post carnage report view and unable to return to the matchmaking list. To fix this you need to go to your xbox dashboard and force close the game and re-open it.
4. In Halo CE Beaver Creek if you melee someone and you're close to a wall (one of the bases) sometimes you will fall through the map.
5. Halo CE still has significant input lag for jumping and melee. Hit registration seems to be marginally improved post update, but lack of dedicated servers makes host advantage fairly significant.
6. When playing a Halo CE matchmade game (and if your team is good at Halo CE) you will often encounter opponents that did not vote for the Halo CE map. More often than not, these teams are not very good Halo CE players. Your team will subsequently destroy them with pistol and your opponents will quit out of the game (This happened 3 times last night). After all of your opponents have left the game, the game does not end. The game continues until the timer ends even if you have 0 players on your opponent's team. This bug needs to be fixed, and the need for a standalone Halo CE playlist remains because there are many players that have no interest in Halo CE. Similarly there are many players that have no interest in Halo 3-4.
EDIT: Halo MCC is literally the wikipedia definition of shovelware:
"Shovelware is a derogatory computer jargon term that refers to software bundles noted more for the quantity of what is included than for the quality or usefulness.[1] The term is also used to refer to software that is ported from one computer platform or storage medium to another with little thought given to adapting it for use on the destination platform or medium, resulting in poor quality."(Wikipedia)
This game is broken at its core, and I'm not convinced that any amount of 1mb updates will be able to fix this game. Launching a broken/unfinished game at launch (and releasing incremental updates) just doesn't work with the way that development cycles are commonly structured. Prior to launch, many positions within specific projects are laid off and those that do remain are frequently moved to the next project. Teams that handle post launch updates and DLC are significantly smaller than the team that worked on the project in the years/months leading up to a game's launch.
In the case of Halo MCC, I am convinced that this game needs to be completely removed from the marketplace (specifically the multiplayer portion) and a full team of funded programmers needs to work on the game until it runs in a functioning state. Microsoft/343 marketed this title as the definitive Halo re-release. The Criterion Collection release of Halo, if you will. What we got was closer to someone's half-assed, middle school, Volcano science fair project.
It's also not fair, and completely anti-consumer to promise a product that does not currently even exist (See: the Halo MCC vidoc that was released prior to launch). Microsoft essentially said:
"We know we can really sell you on this idea. We have no idea how to actually pull off the idea, but we'll sell you an empty box of broken promises, take your money, and I'm sure our small team of post-launch developers working 15 hour shifts will be able to solder something together. It won't be pretty, but it will *sort of* work. It won't work nearly as well as any of the titles worked originally on their own... but it will *sort of* be playable... and Halo 5 will be out by the time this game is fixed, so we'll take your money for that as well."
If people want to talk about a real controversy in the video game industry and not the faux ethics controversy that was the original #gamegate (not the feminist, equal representation, movement that it morphed into *which I fully support*). People should be talking about how over the last 10 years AAA developers have been over promising and selling unfinished products in collaboration with the gaming media and twitch streamers who rarely ever bat an eye about being forced to review/recommend games before the final product is even available. There is currently an utter lack of respectable games-focused journalistic outlets that offer anything more than "this is the hot new game of the year", "this game is fun to play", "this game has pretty graphics." There is no video game focused equivalent the likes of Paris Review, New York Times, Cineaste Magazine, The New Yorker, etc. There's just a bunch of advertisers the like likes of ign, gamespot, gametrailers. And loudmouth, bigoted, youtube and twitch streamers. Nobody is expressing any sort of real outrage about being scammed, because all videogame journalistic outlets are essentially advertisers.
To conclude, here's my post-update 12.15.2014 notes from last night (all glitches were experienced within my 2-3 hours of playtime last night):
1. Entering matchmaking with a party does't work the majority of the time. If you're in a party and you hit a "connection failed" error, everyone will be kicked out of the party and when everyone rejoins all subsequent searches will hit "connection failed." This happens every time until everyone in your party does a hard reset of the Xbox one, and even that doesn't always fix it. This is the most significant bug that I've encountered and basically prevents people from consistently being able to join matchmaking as a party.
2. Post update, the game will sometimes put in you in in-game chat even if you are already in an Xbox Live party. You're able to hear everyone in your party, but your voice is only registered via in-game chat. There is no way to switch out of this unless you completely disband the party and do a hard reset of your console.
3. Post game I encountered a bug (as party host) where your stuck in the post carnage report view and unable to return to the matchmaking list. To fix this you need to go to your xbox dashboard and force close the game and re-open it.
4. In Halo CE Beaver Creek if you melee someone and you're close to a wall (one of the bases) sometimes you will fall through the map.
5. Halo CE still has significant input lag for jumping and melee. Hit registration seems to be marginally improved post update, but lack of dedicated servers makes host advantage fairly significant.
6. When playing a Halo CE matchmade game (and if your team is good at Halo CE) you will often encounter opponents that did not vote for the Halo CE map. More often than not, these teams are not very good Halo CE players. Your team will subsequently destroy them with pistol and your opponents will quit out of the game (This happened 3 times last night). After all of your opponents have left the game, the game does not end. The game continues until the timer ends even if you have 0 players on your opponent's team. This bug needs to be fixed, and the need for a standalone Halo CE playlist remains because there are many players that have no interest in Halo CE. Similarly there are many players that have no interest in Halo 3-4.
EDIT: Halo MCC is literally the wikipedia definition of shovelware:
"Shovelware is a derogatory computer jargon term that refers to software bundles noted more for the quantity of what is included than for the quality or usefulness.[1] The term is also used to refer to software that is ported from one computer platform or storage medium to another with little thought given to adapting it for use on the destination platform or medium, resulting in poor quality."(Wikipedia)
