Discussion Comfy Café #14

Chances are slim, but not zero.

 

To each their own, I guess. However, from the perspective of a gamer (and not just a Halo fan), 4 and Infinite are genuinely good on most fronts, criticisms of art style choices notwithstanding. 5 was a unique case: had the worst campaign/story of the series, but the best multiplayer.

343i was formed from staff at Bungie who wanted to continue the Halo series. In fact, 80% of the original Halo series's staff continued on at 343i till about 2019.

However, misinformation regarding 343i's composition and leadership fueled distrust and toxicity in the fandom. As with Star Wars, a vocal minority of immature brat toxic fans that were blinded by nostalgia started ruining things for everyone.

Yeah, the problem is MS Game Studios management. No matter what the staff at 343i wanted to do, it had to go through the wank stains at MS Game Studios.

Don't get me wrong: The staff at 343i also had their own share of mistakes. But they did learn from community feedback and improve; unlike MS, who only got worse with time.

How much did one ticket cost? And how many did you buy?

Did you just make mention of the sperm cell lottery?

Oof...

 

The Halo 5 Forge (modding tools and multiplayer map pack) were released for free on PC back in late 2016. Fans are porting the campaign to PC by having each campaign map run in a Forge session. This is possible because of some unique quirks of the Halo engine itself. The modding team (who call themselves Reforge) also plan to bring on Warzone firefight and some custom multiplayer stuff.

The Reforge team have already gotten the first two or three campaign missions running on PC. And the performance appears to be smooth. A sixth gen i5, GTX 1050 Ti, with 12 GB RAM can apparently run it on medium-high settings at 1920x1080 and 45-60 fps, with occasional stutters. That is honestly pretty damn good.

And, yeah, Halo fans are pretty damn dedicated. I recall when the famous CMT (Custom Mapping Team) were working on unique software called Open Sauce to bring Halo 2's campaign into Halo: Custom Edition for Windows XP and even port Halo 3 to Windows. In the case of the attempted Halo 3 port, the project died in infancy after a Cease & Desist from MS themselves. Note: This was before the announcement of Halo MCC for Windows.

You also had a dedicated team of fans working with former employees from Valve and Ensemble (not kidding) to port Halo MCC to Linux and they were successful.

You also have a Halo: Reach modding community which made a whole-ass mod (it is called Slipspace) where you can fly and use the actual warships of the game's two main factions. And, I kid you not: they got actual voice actors from the games themselves to do some lines for the mod. Insane!

Final nail, probably. No good can come from having a Halo game be developed by Activision.

Activision ruined the Destiny franchise when they held Bungie. They beat Destiny 2 to within an inch of its life and tossed it into a swamp with concrete weights tied to its ankles. They will do the same to Halo. They will ruin the story. They will fill it with generative AI slop. They will use it to push the worst propaganda.

Uh... AUD 100? Why, mate...? Why...?

 

I recall that some folks managed to port Witcher 3 onto Android and run it on a ZTE Nubia RedMagic 9 Pro. It apparently can run at 30-40 fps at 1920x1080 resolution. And that is on a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. The Snapdragon 8 Elite series do even better.