Smiled at the sight of Mig. (Gaming)

by EffortlessFury , Friday, October 28, 2022, 07:29 (558 days ago) @ Joe Duplessie (SNIPE 316)

He brought up how game development costs have dramatically risen over the years. I suggested that a possible solution to that problem could be to invest into the tools used to create the games. The goal being to streamline workflows so that devs have an easier time quickly creating. For example, I always think of this awesome demo Kojima did showing off features of the Fox Engine used to build Metal Gear Solid 5. In just minutes, he's able to build a convincing scene. Cool stuff.

Fascinatingly enough, Chris Butcher remarked at GDC several years ago that it was, quite frankly, going to become infeasible for the vast majority of the industry to create their own engines in the future. That's why Destiny is technically still running on a modified BLAM engine. You simply can't start from scratch anymore. You're right that investing in tooling is important, it's just becoming difficult to do that properly in and of itself.

I said almost everything people complained about in H4, they doubled down on in H5. Meaning the art/sound redesigns, favoring player focused abilities over sandbox based design, and the removal of features previously available (H5 launched with no Forge, broken Theater, no file share, bare-bones custom games options, no splitscreen, etc.)

H5 tightened up the combat and brought it much closer to OG Halo than Halo 4

Eh, no? With H4 being what amounts to a Reach mod, the core handling was essentially unchanged. same with H2A.

H5 represented their first major changes to the BLAM engine, and it felt way different. Aim assist features were cranked way up to account for abilities such as sprint, thrust, and clamber. The crosshair was moved up to the middle of he screen.

Honestly, I feel like Halo 2 was the other Halo title to really shake things up. While it was definitely more sandbox based than Halo 5's changes, it took some of Bungie's sandbox elements and made them inherent, which I preferred as I never liked Bungie's implementation of equipment at any point in the series. Halo Infinite is a good compromise, IMO, but it only works because most of the equipment they designed feels good to use. I never felt that way with Halo 3 or Reach. Halo 5 and Infinite's "abilities" both felt good to use, their impact on the sandbox aside.