Its so bad , imagine facebook for work. Want to find out more about apples? Great you go to the yammer apple group and there it is a single tile with a post in it and then you have to click to see replies. Searching is terrible also because maybe you want red delicious info., Welp even if you get really specific get ready for any and all replices with red and delicious on them inside that sub yammer
Unknown Soldier
Veteran
Mine too, I also refuse to look at it or use it. There are already so many other communication tools, don't need another useless tool.
We use primarily cisco's Jabber and to a lesser extent teams.
Never heard of yammer!
cheapchips
Veteran
We don't don't know what form ray tracing will take yet do we? It could just be a shiny elite armour reflections and not the ray traced GI the game needs.
I had the impression RT GI can be cheaper than reflections (by nature, it's diffuse and low frequency), but I wasn't sure on the conditions.
someone went rampant towards the end.
Anyways, it seems to look good with shadowed areas (steps). The reflective concrete was a bit much.
On a side note, would like to see more SSGI comparisons for Gears 5.
someone went rampant towards the end.
Anyways, it seems to look good with shadowed areas (steps). The reflective concrete was a bit much.
On a side note, would like to see more SSGI comparisons for Gears 5.
Wow. Can't say I'm surprised for most of this stuff. Assembling a huge team artificially with people from all over the industry, throwing them a pile of cash and a huge franchise which had always been in the hand of a single dev that wants nothing to do with it anymore. This simply has EVERYTHING to fail. And fail it did, with Halo 4 & 5.
But what a disapointment to discover that after abandoning that saga completely and starting from scratch, they only didn't. They clearly wanted to start from a blank slate with infinite, and ambition was not a problem. Then why the hell not go for a more thorough rewrite of their technology? Even if that would have taken them an extra year or two. That would've actually been good. Make it next-gen exclusive then... If they wanted a halo for SX launch, let it be a low effort Halo 6 finishing whatever bollocks story they had planned, using same engine and even a lot of the assets, while the big boys work pre-production for making infinite RIGHT, from the start.
And the fact thar they rely as much on short term contractors is also quite worrying too. Another obvious recipe for disaster in a complex and long project such as a AAA game. That also has me thinking about all all studios MS has aquired. I hope they really are leaving them as alone as they claim to, because these testimonials about 343 show that MS still doesn't get the art of game-making and what it takes for a studio to work properly.
I would say that 343i seems to the only major company really failing on the operational side of things here among their studios.
I think a lot of things that goes wrong really comes down to management, tools, workflows, checkins etc. It's not the only place AAA I know of suffering like this. People burn out, people leave etc. Things don't get done even though 'everything is on track'. etc etc. Burn out culture is real in game development and having shitty tools and workflows will just exasperate those problems. People will burn out faster, less work done. More contractors, less efficiency, more burn out etc.
Most successful companies are using tried and true engines and workflows and likely have a lot of this part handled.
COVID makes all of this worse for companies already struggling. And for some companies the deadlines aren't changing. Makes the goal all the more impossible.
Last edited:
Silent_Buddha
Legend
I don't know that it's so much that MS doesn't get it, although the Don Mattrick/Phil Harrison era sure did screw things up royally for MS Game Studios, but that 343i was given a blank check and complete freedom to do what they wanted (other than Phil Harrison trying to shove microtransactions into everything)...and 343i management had no clue how to make a good Halo Game.
Thus far, Matt Booty has been almost completely hands off with the newly acquired studios. From what the new studios have been saying, he's only stepped in to help when asked for it, otherwise he let's them do their thing.
Basically how Microsoft Game Studios operated prior to Lionhead regularly missing deadlines and MS feeling it had to step in to fix things at Lionhead.
Regards,
SB
Well, MS did BUILD 343 out of thin air. So the very conception of the studio comes from MS, for one thing. And the whole thing sounded like a bad idea to me. Studios need to to be battle-tested. You don't assemble a bunch of disparate people and hand them off your best IP and a multi-million budget and expect them to come up with something solid.
Next, going off from the testimonials, their over-reliance in contractors (and many of them short term, and with little perspective of getting hired for real in the end of the contract) was an extention of MS's way of doing things. So there is that...
Also, for me hoping MS woukd just leave their aquired studios alone, that is a gross simplification though. Gamers love to hate on publishers when projects go bad, and praise the devs when they do good. But very often, a good publishers knows how to empower a dev studio's creative force while also keeping them from going into pitfalls of their own making. A bit of direction and realistic limitations can be the difference from development hell and a GOTY.
So yeah, if MS still has got that reverse midas touch, that turned SNES/N64 Rare into XB/360 Rare, to give one example, then I'd rather them leave their studios as alone as possible. But even that is still not ideal. Many studios are made up mostly of very tallented CREATIVES, that are not as tallented managers or scope-makers. They need a bit of that benevolent publisher's leash. Only problem is said publisher needs to know how to do use that leash, and MS has rarely proven me to know how to do that, while time and time again has proven the very oposite.
They should just make 343 go over to Unreal 5. If their tools are terrible then they should pivot and acquire better solutions. If MS wants a home grown engine and tools then they should create a developer group devoted strictly to that purpose.
If this is the final Halo thats going to be dependent on adding more content over time, then they should move over to a set of tools that will make that endeavor easier and efficient.
Or pull Bungie back into the fold but I remember devs having issues with Bungie's tools as well.
If this is the final Halo thats going to be dependent on adding more content over time, then they should move over to a set of tools that will make that endeavor easier and efficient.
Or pull Bungie back into the fold but I remember devs having issues with Bungie's tools as well.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
Agreed for the most part. However, apart from Double Fine Productions, I don't think that the acquired studios need a guiding hand, no matter how good or benevolent.
I mention Double Fine Productions because they are the one out of the lot that has been chronically bad at fulfilling their Crowd Funding obligations. The games have been fine, but often extremely late or unfinished. That said, for people that like their games and style, the games have generally been good to great.
Regards,
SB
I'm not sure about that exactly.
Aside from Crackdown and Halo, I would say their other studios have been successful at product delivery, (whether they were intended to be game of the year contenders is another topic) most of them being smaller projects.
Both Crackdown and Halo suffer at the same issues:
Scope.
Crackdown broke down under the pressure to deliver a cloud based solution
Halo broke down trying to make the blam engine do sometihng it's not.
Bungie is also having the same problems scaling Blam, which is why Destiny largely has massive problems with content creation and we see tons of re-use. There are loading areas everywhere, where if you somehow moved too quickly, you'd get hit with an abrupt loading circle. Other times many of their dungeons have entire 'loading' fights where you fight while the ghost is loading the next part of the level.
So I would say it's largely the engine that is holding both teams back from doing great things.
I'd probably go a step further an insist that XGS stop listening to its fans entirely. That's probably the biggest lesson they should learn from Sony Game Studios. GG pitched a game where you fight robot dinosaurs with a bow and arrow, the fanbase would have lost their shit and forced them into killzone 3. But now HZD is an established and loved IP. The same goes with God of War changing its style to away from what it was. And if ND asked fans what they wanted for TLOU2, it would have been more Joel and Ellie going around busting up people, and not the game they got today.
We can go on and on about how fans aren't really the best barometer to follow when developing a new title. They are good for feedback after a title is released, particularly around MP game balancing, but definitely should have no say in a future work in progress.
Last edited:
While bungie's updated their tools, they're both still using the same base engine, aren't they? Plus the management issues 343 are having aren't much different than what bungie had/has going on.
Being around Destiny from the beginning, I was under the impression that all the management that was the reason for all those Halo issues left along with bungie and all the good eggs went to 343. Now it seems they both got their share of the bad eggs. There's must've been something in the water at the studio when bungie moved to WA.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
Not so much that the people from Bungie that stayed at 343i were bad, but that the management team that was brought it wasn't suited to Halo. They wanted to make something that wasn't exactly Halo.
Regards,
SB
The question is when do we next see it and will it be shown with a newer build with better graphics. I guess more importantly is what state will it ship at. It sounds like ray tracing will come later. Is that because the game will launch before the xbox series x comes out or by later are we talking about next year.
GOODBYE DESTINY
then i remember Bungie said basically the same thing... "See that? all of that are playable space" then the final game got a bajillion of
1. Invisible solid wall
2. Invisible spongey wall
3. Invisible "ill suck you" wall
4. Invisible instant kill wall
5. Invisible area with "TURN BACK" countdown
hopefully 343i will be true to their words (I imagine it will be free to explore like Zelda BOTW but a bit more limited?)
So not a '6 months old' build? It would look 100 times better just with better animations and some movement here and there. It all looks very static. In the grand scheme of things, some pop in here and there can be fixed easily.
Similar threads
