Surprised by the hype, it feels like they've aimed to replicate the Ubisoft open-world gameplay just when everyone is getting bored of that formula.
Visually it's now solid for a cross-gen title with some obvious lighting and material improvements. Animation still seems a bit off, lack of foliage movement especially stands out.
I really hope they have more terrain types to show like ice, snow, jungle but the cutscenes seemed to span quite a lot of the story and never diverged from the generic Halo: CE look and feel.
It's not the formula itself that people are tired of, it's the implementation. Far Cry's done it for six games now with vaguely similar settings, scenarios, and stories, and for Far Cry it's now so expected it's predictable.
For Halo this is the first time it's doing some of these gameplay ideas, and integrating them into established Halo game design, within a Halo world design. That alone will make it feel pretty new. It's like the Mario Odyssey games with their gameplay hook; it was nothing new to those games per se, but they integrated that into Mario game design and a Mario aesthetic/world/lore which enhanced it and made it feel fresh and new.
Additionally it's not like 343i are going to simply copy those Far Cry elements and drop them wholesale into their game; Infinite'll have its own takes on those ideas and utilize them in a way fitting for that specific game.
Yep same.
I'm 100% there for the arena multiplayer, it looked great in the latest video update.
I'm actually very surprised by the reaction to this trailer here, if this was a 3rd party game I don't think anyone would be praising the graphics or gameplay mechanics on show.
But people can like what they like, I'm not one to judge. If people with a strong affinity to the franchise are happy with what they see then so be it.
That's a weird take tho since the game mechanics in the new campaign footage is more or less the same game mechanics in the multiplayer. So, if you thought the multiplayer looked great, how does the single-player suddenly look "not great" when it has the same shooting mechanics, same game mechanics (more or less), even better visuals, same physics etc.?
Both things can't be true once you realize that; either the campaign looks great, or the multiplayer wasn't as great as you say you think it was. Because the only thing potentially up for debate with Infinite by your logic is the actual story, of which it's obvious 343i tried their best to not spoil too much of in the new footage.
Sony sold a reskinned map of NYC with snow, added 8 hours of content, and sold the Miles Morales expansion for $50. People on this forum didn't bat an eye. So why would a brand new open-world Halo game not be worth $60?
Yeah, if there are folks trying to say the game's not worth a $60 purchase due to missing content, but ignore that it'll probably still have more content in spite of that than certain other games or expansions released for $50/$60 beforehand on other platforms (some of those also being cross-gen to boot), then that's looking kind of sus.
I get it's complicated somewhat by Infinite's campaign being playable via GamePass, so some people might be asking why pay $60 at retail for the campaign when you can just pay $10 or $15 to play it through GamePass, and that's a question Microsoft themselves have created. But we don't know if there are other plans for those who buy game outright. For example it could include access to some upcoming DLC content without needing to subscribe to GamePass to access it.
If that's the case then they can still justify selling the game at full MSRP retail even tho the MP is free and the campaign can be played through GP. But we'll probably have to wait a little bit before speculating further on this.
I wonder when we will see a platform like Xbox or Sony take advantage of access to all the studios they own. Imagine a game developed just as you say, Forza team on the environment and 343 team on the action.
I'd go one further and imagine a game were 10 levels are built around 10 different engines/studios. One game world but a greatest hits from each studio, sort of a continuous game theme/characters/story through a Love, Death+ Robots deal. Contra did this really well back in the day, I struggle to think of a modern game crossing multiple genres per mission/chapter.
That could be neat, but it could also end up being a disaster. "Too many cooks in the kitchen" kind of thing. All those teams with all those creative visions likely clashing. Another issue would be optimizations for multiple platforms. For Microsoft in particular, since they support PC Day-1, trying to optimize that many unique engines in a single game for console, PC and cloud would likely be a nightmare regardless of what GDK does to alleviate that type of thing.
I get what you're saying and it would be very cool, but it'd have to be done with a single engine robust enough for that type of game. Dreams on PS4/PS5 (and hopefully soon PC...yeah I'm port-begging but this one makes sense!) comes to mind, you can make many different types of games in that engine. And from there, have creatives from each of the studios build something in that engine fitting an anthology like Love, Death & Robots (or older stuff like Memories or Robot Carnival).