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Bloomberg (Jason Schreier/Dina Bass): How Halo Infinite Went From Disaster To Triumph
- Thread starter digitalrelic
- Start date
I agree that this story is a little light. Anyway, I hope there are positive changes at 343. I don't know how Microsoft can expect smooth continued development on Halo projects with such high turnover. It's apparent that it's bad for business in this particular industry.
engines really seem to be blowing up on folks. when you don't have an army maintaining things, making large games seems to be a hassle
Great article, though I do miss Jason's deeper dives. His Bloomberg work always seems so much shorter than his previous stuff.
I'm a huge Halo fan and am so glad they managed to stick the landing with Infinite. Thank god for Joe Staten.
I feel like Infinite is going to be held up as a shining example of 'a delayed game is eventually good' for years to come. I hope other devs at different companies can use Infinite's success to argue for the extra time they need on their own projects going forward.
I'm a huge Halo fan and am so glad they managed to stick the landing with Infinite. Thank god for Joe Staten.
I feel like Infinite is going to be held up as a shining example of 'a delayed game is eventually good' for years to come. I hope other devs at different companies can use Infinite's success to argue for the extra time they need on their own projects going forward.
when your load now outweighs the plane, you need a bigger plane
A very good read.
Perhaps it is time for:
1) Partner with id soft to use their engine or switch to UE5 (assist by Gears team)
2) Bonnie Ross to depart from 343i? I mean she is the head of 343i and 343i is supposed to be the best studio of XGS, but the result is the weakest team of XGS. The management needs to be changed.
I hope the cut-off contents can be added back as free DLC expansion to the campaign.
Perhaps it is time for:
1) Partner with id soft to use their engine or switch to UE5 (assist by Gears team)
2) Bonnie Ross to depart from 343i? I mean she is the head of 343i and 343i is supposed to be the best studio of XGS, but the result is the weakest team of XGS. The management needs to be changed.
I hope the cut-off contents can be added back as free DLC expansion to the campaign.
Yeah, at some point technical debt starts dragging the project around basically.
Also, that hard rule on use of contractors and 18 months expiration is asinine and shady, and MS has been using that in all their software divisions for decades, nit just gaming.
Sometimes is does work though, didn't Square switch FF7R to Unreal and it looks amazing with pretty much no bugs apart from the low res door.
It's a feel-good story so long as 343 does't adopt the "BioWare magic" mindset Jason talked about in his Anthem article.
Like Infinite, Dragon Age Inquisition had a troubled development that managed to pull things together in the end. This successful end result caused the studio to put off making any changes to their development approach, meaning there was nothing preventing Anthem's development from undergoing the exact same issues. And y'know, that didn't exactly work out.
We just gotta hope that 343 can re-examine the last 6 years and chart a new course.
Like Infinite, Dragon Age Inquisition had a troubled development that managed to pull things together in the end. This successful end result caused the studio to put off making any changes to their development approach, meaning there was nothing preventing Anthem's development from undergoing the exact same issues. And y'know, that didn't exactly work out.
We just gotta hope that 343 can re-examine the last 6 years and chart a new course.
Calling for a management change now seems silly. They are releasing a game that is getting great reviews and putting up killer numbers. If anything, Bonnie Ross will be getting a raise. Why is "fire the women" so often the suggestion?
I'd be fascinated to see how they managed to avoid crunch despite having these issues. Credit to the management team for avoiding it. Their developers must have appreciated it.
in an age where graphical features and complexity gets a higher rate of diminishing returns but the scope gets bigger and bigger; putting out solid products become mostly a human resource issue; and not a technological one. Next to the fact that efficiency in your workflows becomes paramount.
That only makes sense if your game is designed around that engine's strong points.
That only makes sense if your game is designed around that engine's strong points.
OP
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Same thing happened with CDPR with CyberPunk after the Witcher 3's success as well.
Difference with 343 though is that they ran into major issues, the game was forced to be delayed by over a year, and they appear to have drastically changed their development approach for that final year+. So hopefully this was a learning experience for the studio.
Bloomberg isn't selling to the public, they're selling to finance/Wall Street types who pay tremendous sums for realtime access to many different types of data.
I think calling for people to lose their jobs without knowing the internal situation is a bit uncalled for. Even if I agree that the management should take a hard look at what needs to be changed to make the work practices more sustainable.
AAA is monstrously complex and seems to have no signs of slowing. I can only imagine the pressure to develop new engines or maintain widely used ones.
Please, don't get me wrong. This is nothing about "Fire the women".
Whoever managed 343i in the past years shall be responsible for the messy management and development hell.
Yes, 343i turned MCC through years and Halo Infinite seems to be the best Halo yet in 343i era. However, some damages on Halo's fame were already there and the messy management of 343i is part of the reason.
And it is just my thought. I am happy to see 343i being better.
It's kind of depressing if so much inefficiency, chaos, and added stress was somehow still calculated to be some degree more cost effective than the alternative.
Sad to see the situation of the contractors. In jobs that involve creativity, employment stability is essential for the employee to be able to do his work.
It is similar to what happens in the brain drain (when scientists leave their original country because of a lack of opportunities). All the accumulated knowledge is lost.
It is similar to what happens in the brain drain (when scientists leave their original country because of a lack of opportunities). All the accumulated knowledge is lost.
Like DNF was eventually good? Plenty of games get delays, not all of them work out.
Such a nice article. I hope Jason stays back and also we see TC , 343i, Id Soft and Machine Games all sharing tech and ideas.
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Seems the "culture" was pretty irrelevant and not inherently problematic
1. Faber existed prior to the slipspace rebranding. Whether that rebranding was cause the tech debt was fixed, no idea
2. While possible, there are 2 major downfalls. One being they would need to remake everything again in unreal and 2 being engines have quarkes in them that make a game feel a certain way. Getting UR to feel like Halo would not be an easy task. Hell, theres a reason Destiny and Halo feel similar, cause their engines are both rooted in the Blam engine
3. Ya, contractors are tricky and usually there is an upgrade path internally for full employment. Not sure aboutr MS's inner workings though
4. Good question
5. Based on the unfiltered interview with IGN, he plans to stay there for awhile
The time limit for contracted workers is standard in any industry. As for studios using contracted workers, also extremely common at the likes of Ubisoft etc. But 343 definitely took it to the extreme, no doubt in a panic to get the game out the door ASAP.
Like, I know he can't really say "we thought the brand alone would sell this" but, this line is ridiculous.
Cause people don't know what happens behind closed doors and they will always blame whatever figurehead they can find for problems. I mean I remember seeing people calling for Pete Hines to be fired over the bugs in Fallout 76. The dude works in the marketing department. People have no idea.
Yeah, I really hope so. They've got a great foundation to build on w Infinite, these devs deserve a smooth decade going forward!
Speaking as someone with development experience (embedded devices, not games but still), it's possible, but it's very painful, difficult, and expensive. A lot of the time, the code written by someone who is long gone, and because it's so old, any documentation for it is nowhere to be found. The goal for rebuilding such code, is to basically have it do the same thing it's doing already, but maybe to have it be more easily expanded, or be more stable. Unfortunately, the initial goal being to just have it do what it's already doing means you need to dedicate a ton of effort for basically no progress in the shorter term. Then, when it comes to budget planning, it's easy to cut rebuilding systems that already "work", so the tech debt just continues to pile on. It usually takes some loud complaining from the dev side to finally convince management that it's something that has to happen, and it usually happens too late, which makes the work to fix it more than it could have been.
The stuff about different teams being like fiefdoms competing for resources is 100% apparent in the final game.
You can see the teams in charge of UI, progression, customization etc probably all take a backseat. Probably full of contracters.
Covid likely made it worse. The game was 2/3 scrapped in 2019.... and then soon after covid hits.
You can see the teams in charge of UI, progression, customization etc probably all take a backseat. Probably full of contracters.
Covid likely made it worse. The game was 2/3 scrapped in 2019.... and then soon after covid hits.
Those contractor restrictions would seem to work against Microsoft's triple A game goals, considering these huge games usually take years to make. I have to assume this is a mandate from leadership, and they don't carve out exceptions?
The amount of contractor use in games in general is gross and exploitive all the same though.
The amount of contractor use in games in general is gross and exploitive all the same though.
But if the primary reason in sticking with the current engine with at least some Bungie-era code was to maintain that Halo feel, idTech wouldn't have been a more alluring option than Unreal, would it?
Yeah. I'm happy for Jason that he's no longer having to deal with those G/O Media headaches, but it's a drag that the constraints of word counts and a non-gaming audience mean we'll never see something like his Anthem post-mortem again, at least not at Bloomberg.
I'm sure they'll take ideas from the initial concept, but the BOTW-like world and mission structure is long dead.
When it feels like 5 games are made at the same time and internal teams are fighting for budget/resources, it sure seems like the culture has some issues. It looks like there isn't an abuse/crunch culture there (from this brief article), but that doesn't mean there aren't any issues.
Still, there's barely anything here. Hopefulyl Jason can go into more details in another article in the future.
They arent going to switch engine. They've got slipspace to a nice place and will iterate over it to optimise and stabilise it better. On top of adding new features. They built the entirety of Halo's 10 yer plan on Slipspace, if they had to change it would have been an option years ago, not now.
What bugs me the most about his articles sense he moved to Bloomberg is that all of them seem to be 85% explaining what a video game is and the 15% I'm actually interested in is squeezed into half a paragraph at the end
Damn the stars really aligned for Halo with GamePass.
The staged release with campaign launch coming up, a few months later releasing campaign co-op and then they can use the cut content as staged releases in the future really plays to the monthly subscription model.
Infinate will constantly be relevant and talked about over the next few years and be one more justification for keeping your GP sub active.
The staged release with campaign launch coming up, a few months later releasing campaign co-op and then they can use the cut content as staged releases in the future really plays to the monthly subscription model.
Infinate will constantly be relevant and talked about over the next few years and be one more justification for keeping your GP sub active.