Well, This is Interesting...
Well, This is Interesting...
For almost a year now we have all complained at some level about the Halo 4 game that 343 first provided and has tried to fix, with many of us at some point just throwing our hands up in the air and either leaving the game entirely or reducing our exposure to just a small part of its functionality. During that time, when questions were asked, many times the answer was "we can't do it because it is too difficult" or whatever. How many times have we seen Jessica Shea (BS Angel) tweet something to that effect? I have never quite believed the "too difficult" excuse but have thought things were done a certain way or not done at all because of managment and resource decisions, or just plain incompetence (the lobby system for example). The video I just stumbled on lends credence to what I have felt all along. It's a little juvenile but does raise some interesting questions. Judge for yourself:
That mod has been out for a month or so. Maybe the conjecture is correct but the viewpoint is too simplistic. Just because a feature can be implimented in the limited setting of a Jtagged xbox does not automatically imply that it will work in the default global retail environment. Software certification is an important step and cannot be ignored. The modder's solution may work well locally but perhaps it breaks many other things along the way. One thing left out of the video was that the cutscenes crash it or some other type of failure. I've yet to read about the modders having a workaround for that. Even if they did, could they guarantee the xbox would perform flawlessly in every other expected way?
here response:Hi, Timothy. Thanks for the email and sharing your thoughts.
First, I'd like to apologize that you feel like we lied about this. Earlier this year, we explicitly stated this feature was not being added to the game. You can see one of the tweets I made about that here:
https://twitter.com/bsangel/status/29...
You'll notice I didn't say it wasn't possible, because it is (as is nearly everything, to be honest). This was simply a case of us not having time to completely polish this feature to an acceptable shippable state. If you read the notes about this mod, you'll notice several bugs with it. Post-launch, we were hoping to have the bandwidth and resources to finish this feature, but unfortunately that didn't come to fruition.
In a perfect world, we'd be able to complete all the features the community wants. Time is a finite resource, though, and sometimes hard decisions have to be made. Some people won't always agree with our prioritization (I suspect you don't with this one in particular), but we always do the best we can, with the resources, tech and time we have available.
Hope this clarifies things a bit, and thanks again for reaching out. The fact that you cared enough to do that is appreciated. :)
Jessica
Oh, I see he posted an email reply from bsangel, on youtube.
I always read "too difficult" as "It takes too much of our resources to get it done".
I presume this is because 343 didn't really remake Halo; they more or less modded the existing engine and had to figure it out themselves (and honestly did a pretty solid job along the way). They'd probably have been able to do the things they wanted to do or were asked to do by the community if they had their own engine and what not, though. That last part's clearly total conjecture, though.
I'm pretty sure a number of devs on the H4 team were former Bungie employees, so I'm not sure how much they had to figure out themselves. Having said that, they didn't do all that bad on H4, they just released the game IMO 6 months earlier than they should have. Had this come out in May and not November, it would have been significantly improved. Hard to say though whether they would have fixed a number of bad development decisions to begin with, like Sprint, Loadouts, a lack of good maps, etc.
I remain solidly wary of Halo 5. I'm a killer app kind of person (in this case, literally), so it would probably be the main reason for me to drop $500 on the Xbox One. I already have streaming on my 360, I already have a lot of good games which won't play on the X1, so I'm highly skeptical the game is going to be worth $600 at this point. (A lot of people ooh and ahh about Destiny, it looks like a fun game but it has a lot of similar elements to BF/CoD/Borderlands, and I'm an arena gamer type of guy - equal starts, equal numbers.)
If H5 includes sprint or even a hint of loadouts I'll probably skip the XBone and remain playing the old Halos for a good long time, and buy H5 and the X1 a year later when there's a decent price reduction.