I love this (Gaming)

by Schooly D, TSD Gaming Condo, TX, Sunday, October 23, 2022, 12:19 (544 days ago) @ Morpheus

For a couple of reasons.

One, the video itself is very well edited and produced. The guy has skill.

Two, there's no external commentary or narration: it's just clips laid alongside each other. Despite this, it still communicates the idea much more clearly than a hundred Here's why 343's Halo SUCKS (UPDATED OCT 2022) videos and is all the more impactful for letting you feel the message rather than comprehend it.

Too many people have thought for too long that 343's Halo can be fixed by rational analysis and implementation. Sprint needs to be gone, sprint needs a longer cooldown, there aren't enough armors, there are too many armors, the reward system needs the value of X raised and Y lowered, the H1 pistol needs to be brought back, the maps are too vertical, the maps aren't vertical enough, it's too competitive, it's too casual, etc.

Of course all the prescriptions are pointless. Their only worth is as fodder for YouTube videos and forum posts. The root cause of the decade of dissatisfaction is that 343 cannot make a good Halo game because they're not built to make a good Halo game. Halo-era-Bungie was so made: a small (ish) team of freakishly talented and preternaturally motivated engineers and artists working mostly independently (some key bits of... creative input notwithstanding) to see their child flourish.

By contrast, 343 is just another department in the giant Microsoft corporate blob and suffers from many of the defects that come from being another department in the giant Microsoft corporate blob: lack of ownership, frequent use of contractors, and institutional largesse. It was created to turn the Halo franchise into the next Star Wars and print money, not to create super slick, killer games and deliver them on schedule. And by that measure it's been a smashing success. Cry about bloom or season passes or battle passes or whatever to someone who cares.

Somewhere in the vast reaches of the internet is a small literature lovers phpBB forum of Amazon's earliest adopters, posting threads and screeds about the real problem with Amazon's current book listing UI and how things would be better if they got back to their roots and dropped the whole Amazon Web Services thing. That ship sailed, bucko.

Nothing can be done. It can't be fixed in the way you or I would like it. In that sense this video delivers just the hit I need: catharsis. Tuck me in and let me die.

(I still wouldn't be averse to periodic MCC nights)