GamerKickHalo Infinite lost 98% of its players on Steam since release
Taasz/WoofThe game feels so hollow, like it’s only job is for you to unlock cosmetics.
Wonder why… I reinstalled it last week to play the campaign again and it kept crashing…
I knew Infinite would be shit when they started that whole thing about armour coatings and whatnot.
Customising your Spartan has been a key of the games for years. To slap that behind a paywall is (in my eyes) totally unforgivable.
I have so many great memories of playing halo split screen locally and online with a friend as a guest player. The fact that I have to venture into third party applications like Nucleus Co-op just to do what was once a standard halo feature, makes me so frustrated.
Well that explains the lack of custom games at least. Sad it’s a fun game it just needs more content.
Yeah cause they never update the game. What, do you want me to play Oddball for the 356th time?
Why is this news? I mean people finish games and move on…
True of single player, campaign-focused games. Not really the expected outcome for games focusing on the online multiplayer experience.
Maybe unpopular opinion… Should Halo invert its focus? Currently it’s multiplayer first, singeplayer second. If the multiplayer modes cannot maintain a playerbase then its not going to be a main driver of success. The battle royale and hero shooter crazes haven’t left much room for the Halo multiplayer format to succeed these days: most of the potential players are focusing on something else.
I think if they could deliver kickass campaigns consistently that they could keep Halo as a successful franchise. If they keep chasing multiplayer it’ll fade into obscurity soon enough.
ID software (makers of doom), would make a halo game better than anything 343 could put out.
The single player on rails experience is desperately needed.
id would be great for Halo! The only reason I wouldn’t want that is because I want them sticking with whatever they’re working on and already passionate about.
Idk, the whole Doom Eternal soundtrack disaster between ID and MG made them sour in my eyes
That’s an issue with the management being assholes, but not being incompetent. The game was great, and asshole behavior can be fixed or the assholes can be replaced. Incompetence is harder to correct.
I know, just pointing out. Although from reading Mick’s open letter on Medium, they were incompetent at one thing: communication and setting deadlines (not too far from what Reddit was doing with the 3rd-party devs!)
I played Halo for the singleplayer. The first 2 games were wonderful.
BonfireOvDreamsThe big player battles still to this day have broken lobbies. You can’t filter game mode in big player mode either. Which means if you don’t care for slayer and you get thrust into a slayer match, too fucking bad. Matter of fact, don’t leave or they’ll temp ban you. Also, their netcode will kill you through walls as you turn a corner because fuck you.
I put in at least two dozen hours into the multiplayer because there is a lot to love when things are going smoothly, it’s just unbelievably unpolished for the amount of money sunk in. They seem to have no idea what the fuck matters to players in an online space, or at the very least don’t care.
They ruined Halo a decade ago, and it seems they are just gonna milk whatever shit gets stirred in until the franchise dies.
Really sad. I managed to reach Onyx rank but the FOMO was real (even though they said there would be no FOMO).
The gameplay was actually really good, but the busy-work to complete challenges ruined the experience for me.
When playing a competitive shooter, the top priority should be winning. When I need to remember to kill three enemies with the shock rifle, run over five people, tea-bag my own teammate and get a 360 no-scope with my finger in my ass, I’m not thinking about winning or playing how I want.
Also 343 were just cunts about everything the entire time.
There’s a lot going on around Infinite and Halo/343 as a whole that makes titles and articles like these really difficult to understand and have an honest discussion around. Even though not many people play on Steam, there are other ways to play it on PC and Infinite is still the 6th-most played game on Gamepass, with it still being relatively popular on its main platform - Xbox. At the same time, though, there are some long-standing and glaring issues with 343’s Halo, and it’s not terribly surprising that Infinite didn’t end up capturing and retaining the playerbase it maybe ought to have.
On one side, people in the gaming community (and the Halo community) eat up articles that go “XYZ game is DEAD because-” as it allows some pretty easy grandstanding and attention (or over on reddit/twitter, imaginary internet points farming). For the most part, Infinite is in a pretty okay state in terms of content (after 1.5 years) and player levels, and an article like this one is easy rage-bait for people to interact with.
On the other side, it’s not terribly surprising that this happened. Before Infinite, I would argue that all of 343’s games were resounding flops - not monetarily, they all sold well, but in terms of quickly diminishing playercounts, negative reactions from the community, meager launch content, or even flat-out not working (looking at the initial launch of MCC), 343 had yet to hit a homerun with Halo. The first few weeks of Infinite were great, but the cracks started to show quickly. Bugfixes were non-existent - such as when the BTB playlist broke in December and it took 2 months for 343 to fix it. Content delivery was also non-existent, the game shipping with very few modes and maps with the supposed 3-month seasons being delayed into being 6 to 9 months long, with the bulk of updates being for cosmetic content or modes that had been there on launch-day for other Halo titles. The challenge and cosmetic systems were explicitly frustrating and designed to be so, under the pretense of making people grind/play more, but which ended up having the exact opposite effect and drove players away. Shop and cosmetic prices were ludicrous, and there was no consistent stat or rank-tracking systems. No Forge. No custom games browser. Theater doesn’t work. Etc. Etc. Etc. Etc.
Even though Infinite is in a decent spot now and I find it fun to play, it’s not surprising at all that the playerbase is at levels lower than it should be. No, Infinite or Halo aren’t “dead,” but 343 has done a good job at whittling down a titan of a franchise into a middling AA-level game that only the most die-hard fans care much about.
This is a pretty good, nuanced take at the current state of Infinite. There’s a lot they’re to like, but it’s been hampered by a poor execution. It seems like they’ve started to hit a good stride with S4.
Yeah, there’s unfortunately very little room for nuanced takes with Halo. It’s either one extreme of “343 killed my dog” or the other extreme of “343 literally cannot do any wrong.”
There’s a lot I enjoy about Infinite, I even had a great time playing a few matches today with a friend. The art direction and sound design is superb. The gameplay feels like a great iteration on the original games while still having modern sensibilities to it. New weapons and equipment manage to fill both traditional and new roles without being too out of place or boring. Maps are all generally good to great. The frequency and types of content/updates since Season 3 have been what Infinite needed from the beginning.
At the same time, like I listed in my previous comment, there were some huge issues that took arguably too long to be resolved. I’m glad the game is in a good spot now and I truly enjoy it, I just find it to be a shame as if the game launched in the state it is now, Halo may have seen quite the revitalization.
PanjaFor what it’s worth, I just started playing again and have no problem finding games. Most searches are near instant. I’m not Onyx level or anything so can’t comment about how it is the higher you get.
I think it’s worth mentioning the most of players of Infinite don’t play it through steam but rather through gamepass on PC
The vast majority of players are also on Xbox, Steam metrics are a pretty terrible view in this instance
R00botThat’s overall numbers, not percentage. It’s reasonable to assume those other ways of buying/playing it have dropped off similarly.
Sure but Online dropped first for free so people were happy to pick it up on Steam
The campaign release was later and was included within GamePass so people made the switch then, in fact there was a large drop in Steam numbers the month after the release of Campaign likely due to people swapping over to GamePass
I’m not denying a loss in player count across all services, that absolutely has happened (and to a degree is expected to happen no game maintains the peak players) i’m saying that Steam metrics are very poor for tracking Microsoft releases
Sea of thieves has lost around 66% of average players compared to 2020 on Steam despite the fact it actually has a much larger active player count now (Though of course less than the 2021 peak)
ArotriosThis is article is pretty much clickbait, as it doesn't count Gamepass players. However, I absolutely agree that the game had core issues which were completely bungled at launch, and prevented it from maintaining its player base. Chief amongst these were horrible desynch and the choice to remove collision, which made melee combat a game of whackamole - you'd literally smash a player with a hammer, and as you're smashing, they'd pass through you and hit you from behind. Trying to play competitively was an exercise in frustration, compounded by the lack of customization and microtransactions.
It's a pity, because it's a beautiful game and the PVE open world was excellent (although limited in scope). If they ever instate collision and fix the desynch issues, I might play again, but after beating the campaign there was no reason to keep playing while the PVP was in such a poor state.
JoeKroganThey kept breaking the game on steam deck every release to the point that I and many others stopped caring also battle passes and FOMO tactics… I play it occasionally but the story has always been the draw for me. Now they are just changing the story every game.
Game play itself is OK but every game starting with halo 4 has had a terrible plot because they won’t commit to a story.
killall-qAt least Infinite’s battle pass system doesn’t have FOMO, because paid battle passes don’t expire, and you can buy old battle passes at any time. Starting with Season 2, battle passes give back enough credits to buy the next battle pass, which means you only need to buy 2 battle passes to have full access to every battle pass.
All the FOMO is in the events (limited time mini battle passes) and weekly rewards.
OmegaCorrect me if I’m wrong or if they’ve changed this. But don’t you get a double experience (not sure the term they use) boost with the current battle pass? So, playing older battle passes without the current pass means slower progress.
At least it’s not locked out, but still crappy FOMO tactics.
I thought Halo 4 had a good story. They shouldn’t have teased the Didact at the end if they weren’t going to keep him in Halo 5.
Halo 5’s overall plot was a fine continuation of the Prometheans. Unfortunately 2/3 of the game was “follow John”. But the Guardians were a cool stand-in for the rings and evil-Cortana was beyond formidable. It set up a lot of stuff to be epic in Halo 6.
Halo Infinite was just poopy.
This was my issue. I really enjoyed the campaign but I kept trying to play multiplayer on my Deck and it wouldn’t work, or I would have to come up with some weird workaround and then it wouldn’t work later.
I wanted to like this game so much. :(