Halo is going multiplat...end of an era

[bikingjahuty]

This is just as wild to me as Sonic appearing on non-Sega consoles back in the early 2000s when Sega stopped making consoles. It kinda makes me wonder if the rumors/speculation about Microsoft doing the same and making Xbox a service via Gamepass is true. Master Chief is essentially the mascot of the XBOX brand and I can only assume this was necessary for Microsoft to do.


I've never been a huge XBOX fan, but I sincerely hope Xbox isn't exiting the console business. Having Sony and Nintendo as the only console manufacturers can't be healthy for the console gaming industry which is already struggling as it loses more and more ground to mobile and PC gaming.


https://www.gamespot.com/articles/halo-is-coming-to-playstation-for-the-first-time/1100-6535696/

[Warmsignal]

For sure it's the end of Xbox, which has been dead to me since the start of this gen.

Xbox has struggled to establish trust and true brand dependability since the very beginning, the closest they ever came to a success was Xbox 360 - affordable hardware, solid ports, decent exclusives, XBOX Live was very influential in that era.

But now we're in the 9th gen, also known as "hell", where corporate greed and boardroom idiocy reigns and destroys everything in sight, and that goes for Sony and Nintendo too. All of these companies are subject to enshitification, which boils down to individuals with too much money and authority over a company not being restrained at all whenever they come up with a dumb, hair-brained idea, and then it tanks the company / makes the product or service objectively worse as they continuously gas-light the public and tell us that it's actually so much better than ever.

Everything Xbox has done since 2020, I would argue is bad not only for Xbox but for console gaming, including Game Pass, the purchase of a bunch of important studious, the release of physical games with no media on them, underwhelming multiplayer trend chasing first party titles, continuous price hikes, etc. I might be sad if they hadn't turned into such bottom-feeding garbo in the past 5 years, but alas. They were always looking for the next big thing. Break into console gaming, but then spend 15 years trying to eclipse console gaming and move beyond it because the profit isn't good enough.

I'll never own a Series X, probably never own another so-called Nintendo console, and I've made peace with that. Console gaming as we knew it is going downhill fast, and we're just dinosaurs not realizing that the comets are already hitting, and it's over. The modern gaming market, save for indie gaming, is totally enshitified and begging for it's own destruction. Halo 1 the remake, just the game that everyone was clamoring for, and that's how you know it's the 2020s. I'm so excited. 

[bikingjahuty]

For sure it's the end of Xbox, which has been dead to me since the start of this gen.

Xbox has struggled to establish trust and true brand dependability since the very beginning, the closest they ever came to a success was Xbox 360 - affordable hardware, solid ports, decent exclusives, XBOX Live was very influential in that era.

But now we're in the 9th gen, also known as "hell", where corporate greed and boardroom idiocy reigns and destroys everything in sight, and that goes for Sony and Nintendo too. All of these companies are subject to enshitification, which boils down to individuals with too much money and authority over a company not being restrained at all whenever they come up with a dumb, hair-brained idea, and then it tanks the company / makes the product or service objectively worse as they continuously gas-light the public and tell us that it's actually so much better than ever.

Everything Xbox has done since 2020, I would argue is bad not only for Xbox but for console gaming, including Game Pass, the purchase of a bunch of important studious, the release of physical games with no media on them, underwhelming multiplayer trend chasing first party titles, continuous price hikes, etc. I might be sad if they hadn't turned into such bottom-feeding garbo in the past 5 years, but alas. They were always looking for the next big thing. Break into console gaming, but then spend 15 years trying to eclipse console gaming and move beyond it because the profit isn't good enough.

I'll never own a Series X, probably never own another so-called Nintendo console, and I've made peace with that. Console gaming as we knew it is going downhill fast, and we're just dinosaurs not realizing that the comets are already hitting, and it's over. The modern gaming market, save for indie gaming, is totally enshitified and begging for it's own destruction. Halo 1 the remake, just the game that everyone was clamoring for, and that's how you know it's the 2020s. I'm so excited. 

I mostly agree with all of this. This generation has been absolute trash. Aside from the convenience of being able to play games on a console, I've more or less regretted buying a PS5 since the first year I bought it. The only bright spots have been playing Gran Turismo 7 (which is for reasons a live service game...*sigh*) and the handful of multiplats I've enjoyed on it, but could have easily enjoyed on my PC. It's not like buying the physical discs means anything anymore, but I'm a creature of habit I guess. I honestly thought Nintendo was going to save physical media, but instead used it to manipulate people into thinking they owned something when it fact it was just an extra, unnecessary step to playing the game they just purchased (ie. key cards). If anything, Nintendo has just hastened the demise of gaming even more.


As for XBOX, I honestly forget the Series X/S even exists. To my knowledge there have been no exclusive games on it, which isn't much better than the PS5, but at least the PS5 still has some brand identity and reason to buy it over the other two consoles. I didn't care for the XBOX One and only recently bought one for $50 so I could play the maybe 10 exclusive games on it that appealed to me. I liked the 360 and the OG XBOX though, and it does make me sad to see Xbox more or less confirming their demise as a console making with this news.


Having just Nintendo and Sony means even less effort will likely go into getting consumers to go with one console or the other. Sony will just become the defacto platform for PC ports that someone who doesn't want to tinker around with PC games will go to, and Nintendo will just continue to be Nintendo for better or worse. Either way, I think console gaming is dying and that's not just my opinion. Mobile and PC gaming sales are going up more and more each year whole console gaming has been stagnant at best, if not going down more and more. I really hate the direction gaming is going in general. If not for the few bright spots that appear on modern gaming platforms each year, I'd likely go 100% retro. Needless to say, bikingjahuty in 2015 could have never imagined things becoming this dismal in just 10 short years.

[BinaryMessiah]

I fondly, to this day, remember a conversation I had at 16 with a Game Crazy employee. I read in OPM a rumor that Halo was coming to PS3 (this was all around the mysterious PS3 pre-launch window) and he got pretty heated (remember I'm just a kid and this is a grown man) saying Halo will NEVER come to PlayStation. It literally can't. Microsoft owns it and would NEVER allow it in a million years.

People have been crying out to end the console wars, but competition breeds innovation. Without competition everyone will stagnate. I honestly just want the industry to crash. Every major AAA studio to fold, get gutted, and sadly the cycle will start all over again. Smaller to medium size indie studios will buy up franchises and start out small and form more major corporations.

It's not like buying the physical discs means anything anymore

I'm not sure what you mean. I had my internet go out for 3 days about a year ago. I bought a 2TB SSD for my PS5 and every disc installed offline. Sure, we won't get patches when the service goes down one day, but everything installed off the disc. I installed probably 30 games both PS4 and PS5.

[bikingjahuty]

I fondly, to this day, remember a conversation I had at 16 with a Game Crazy employee. I read in OPM a rumor that Halo was coming to PS3 (this was all around the mysterious PS3 pre-launch window) and he got pretty heated (remember I'm just a kid and this is a grown man) saying Halo will NEVER come to PlayStation. It literally can't. Microsoft owns it and would NEVER allow it in a million years.

People have been crying out to end the console wars, but competition breeds innovation. Without competition everyone will stagnate. I honestly just want the industry to crash. Every major AAA studio to fold, get gutted, and sadly the cycle will start all over again. Smaller to medium size indie studios will buy up franchises and start out small and form more major corporations.

It's not like buying the physical discs means anything anymore

I'm not sure what you mean. I had my internet go out for 3 days about a year ago. I bought a 2TB SSD for my PS5 and every disc installed offline. Sure, we won't get patches when the service goes down one day, but everything installed off the disc. I installed probably 30 games both PS4 and PS5.

Most disc based games are glorified CD keys now. They possess a relatively small amount of data on disc, while the majority of the game requires a 20+ GB download. I've played a few games this year that were a 100GB+ download just to play the game. The PS4/XBONE suffered from this also, but not to this extent. It's not a problem now (other than constantly having to manage internal storage space just to play a new game), but it will be when Sony and Microsoft inevitably shut down their content servers on these systems. It essentially takes ownership away from you and either forces you to buy the game again on a newer, supported platform or accept that you now have a PS5 or series X/S collection that are more or less unplayable paperweights.


I'm with you on wanting the industry to crash, and I mean crash hard! I want pretty much all AAA studios to go bankrupt and the industry to become mostly unprofitable so big money interests, investors, and large corporations remove their claws from it since it will no longer be a source they can use to fuel their never ending greed. I realize this isn't likely going to happen, but you have to figure something has got to give. It really feels like we're coming up on a major crossroads in video game history, if we're not already there. One of the big three console makers unofficially conceding to their competition could certainly be a catalyst for something much bigger down the road. But if it ever gets better again, it will first have to become way, WAY worse. Or things will just get worse and worse until most of us have moved on from modern gaming. Who knows.

[Warmsignal]

I fondly, to this day, remember a conversation I had at 16 with a Game Crazy employee. I read in OPM a rumor that Halo was coming to PS3 (this was all around the mysterious PS3 pre-launch window) and he got pretty heated (remember I'm just a kid and this is a grown man) saying Halo will NEVER come to PlayStation. It literally can't. Microsoft owns it and would NEVER allow it in a million years.

People have been crying out to end the console wars, but competition breeds innovation. Without competition everyone will stagnate. I honestly just want the industry to crash. Every major AAA studio to fold, get gutted, and sadly the cycle will start all over again. Smaller to medium size indie studios will buy up franchises and start out small and form more major corporations.

It's not like buying the physical discs means anything anymore

I'm not sure what you mean. I had my internet go out for 3 days about a year ago. I bought a 2TB SSD for my PS5 and every disc installed offline. Sure, we won't get patches when the service goes down one day, but everything installed off the disc. I installed probably 30 games both PS4 and PS5.

I could never imagine a lot of the shitty things that go on nowadays, gaming or otherwise ever happening at one point, but now they routinely do and it's just normalized.

As far as game discs, it depends on the game. Ubisoft, Microsoft, and I believe EA (the usual suspects) refuse to put data on their discs as of late. Then some smaller publishers are also dabbling in online requirements just to play the single player mode. Usually games that are more multi-player focused (unfortunately a lot of games now) but offer a single player, tend to have this asinine restriction about accessing the game at all offline.

I'm so sick of every developer squandering all of their time and resources chasing that ever elusive multi-player hit that ain't gonna happen. It used to be most games were a single player campaign, with a multi-player mode as an afterthought. Now it's reversed, multi-player focused games with maybe a single player adaptation of a game that was built for multi-player. It's getting so old.

[bikingjahuty]

Following me discovering Halo was coming to PS5, I did some more research on what's been going on with Microsoft and the XBOX brand over the last year, and good lord does it seem dire! This all definitely looks self inflicted via a combo of extreme greed, woeful mismanagement, incompetence from the top down, and a lack of understanding when it comes to the modern gaming landscape. I said, this was the end of an era in the thread title, but I'm starting to realize just how right I was about this. If XBOX actually does make a console next gen that isn't a 1500+ gaming PC I was be completely shocked. It looks like Microsoft is betting everything on Gamepass being the future of XBOX, and if this Halo news is anything to go off of, it's maybe not working out the way they thought it would.

[weirdfeline]

This isn't a big deal and not sure why the internet is acting like it is. Once Forza hit it that was it, nothing is off limits and then of course we already had a Gears remake hit. This would've been interesting had it happened with Halo Infinite years ago. The weird thing is that they still don't have every Xbox new release on PlayStation, perhaps some people may have played Keeper if it was on a platform people own. If you're asking yourself "what's Keeper?" that's exactly my point. It's a brand new first party Xbox game that released about a week ago.

[dhaabi]

This isn't shocking. First was Forza, then Gears of War. What few franchise exclusives Microsoft ever had that they built for themselves is gone, and that's been known what was to happen since their long-term goals are to get GamePass on as many platforms as possible.

Most disc based games are glorified CD keys now.

Obligatory DoesItPlay mention.

I'm with you on wanting the industry to crash, and I mean crash hard! I want pretty much all AAA studios to go bankrupt and the industry to become mostly unprofitable so big money interests, investors, and large corporations remove their claws from it since it will no longer be a source they can use to fuel their never ending greed. I realize this isn't likely going to happen, but you have to figure something has got to give.

Like you said yourself, this is very unlikely to happen as long as there are people, even if their numbers are few, who are willing to pay for diminished returns while being exploited. For instance, there has been backlash against content subscription models (in general, not just with gaming) with some percentage of people forgoing it. But if prices can be increased high enough to combat fewer subscribers, then the company in question still profits. How long they're able to profit, though, is the question worth asking. How long are people willing to pay for a sub-par product?

Also, I find it worth commenting on that you champion the thought of AAA gaming failing. While indie gaming will always exist and would be what's left in the industry were large companies to abandon it, that seems be of little interest to you based on past discussions. Until people's expectations change that's often met (or attempted to be met) by high-budget AAA games, the industry can't correct itself. This is what most indie and anything beneath AAA gaming has figured out, or at least held onto. Not every record-breaking hit needs to have a budget in the tens of millions (or more) to be successful, and I'd argue that no game needs that kind of overinflated budget that skews toward the higher end that's been reported for some titles. Above all, gameplay should be a project's focus; fortunately that's something that indie and lower-budget gaming knows and regularly excels at providing.

People have been crying out to end the console wars, but competition breeds innovation. Without competition everyone will stagnate. I honestly just want the industry to crash. Every major AAA studio to fold, get gutted, and sadly the cycle will start all over again. Smaller to medium size indie studios will buy up franchises and start out small and form more major corporations.

I am not saying this with any defense, but what you've mentioned is how capitalism is designed to function.

I'm so sick of every developer squandering all of their time and resources chasing that ever elusive multi-player hit that ain't gonna happen. It used to be most games were a single player campaign, with a multi-player mode as an afterthought. Now it's reversed, multi-player focused games with maybe a single player adaptation of a game that was built for multi-player. It's getting so old.

In this specific instance regarding the remake for Halo: Combat Evolved, the game will actually not offer an online multiplayer mode while instead focusing on the single-player campaign just as the original game previously did. I suppose that could change and be added as a post-release update, but I doubt that for whatever reason.

[bikingjahuty]

Ideally I would want to see lots of smaller indie devs occupy the vacuum left by the downfall of most of the big AAA studios. While there would undoubtedly be a lot of poorly made indie games in this space, I'd also imagine new, good, exciting franchises would emerge and hopefully become the new face of gaming. I just feel like the industry needs a hard reset. I still enjoy some new games that get released, but I'd rather see something much better rise from the ashes of the old industry rather than get scraps here and there while the overall landscape of gaming continued to rapidly decay under its own greed and ineptitude. 

[sworddude]

Smaller studio's = less bloated budget = more efficiency in funds spend on the game

Not to mention with lower budgets come less micro's filler, and low risk idea's.

This is a good thing.

[Warmsignal]

I'm not gonna say that I've found nothing of interest on my PS5, but it's the emphasis on the particular gimmicks of the day, the snail's pace of releases, and just the lack of diversity that really sucks. I guess if you're a big souls-like fan, then you're unbothered by the state of gaming currently because that's half of every new single player game that comes out. Currently, probably over 2/3rds of my PS5 games are indie or medium budget games. But it seems like any time a game releases that bucks the current trends, it's ignored, shit on in the reviews, and nobody buys it.

I learned just the other day the studio behind the latest Visions of Mana game abruptly went under. Apparently, that was flop of a game even though it isn't a bad game. Mindseye was another game that had my attention as a change of pace from the landscape of hero-shooters and souls-likes, and of course it flopped hard too. There was Unknown 9 Awakening, which I thought looked like an interesting new title, flopped like a fish and folks shat all over it. The new Vampire Bloodlines 2 game intrigues me a lot, but a lot of folks again are whinging about it and saying it sucks. Is it me, or is there a pattern here?

I think it's maybe not entirely just the industry itself that has a problem, I think gamers are a very fickle bunch who don't know what they want, or when they want it. Which is why all we get now are re-makes. They predictably reward sameness and shun risk, and I've seen it time after time. It can't be that it's really that hard for an underdog team to put together an ambitions new game, but almost every time it ends in bad reviews and financial failure. I don't think any of the previously mentioned games are bad, I wish they were more successful. I think those games are made for folks like me, who just want to see a new IP come along and do things on it's own terms, eschewing the conventions and "standards" set by all of the biggest AAA hits of the day. I don't care that every game doesn't do something the particular way another popular game does it. I just care about having a new adventure, with a new IP, and some fresh ideas. That's all it really takes for me to enjoy a game. I'm not an obsessed flaw hunter who gets easily taken out of the experience the moment the game doesn't do what I intuitively want it to do. Call me Pollyanna but I think games are just meant to be met half-way by the player, and to have fun with them.

I think the industry understands that if you do anything unproven, or on your own terms, or cut any corners, you could loose your ass. It's a double edged sword. So they're content to just do stuff that is proven, and just print money, because apparently a lot of gamers cannot get enough of the idea of re-makes and remasters. A phenomenon that seldom has any appeal to me, whatsoever. Gaming today is quite the conundrum of issues.

[kamikazekeeg]

I'm just bummed that this feels incomplete without the original multiplayer.  They did the same thing with the Anniversary version I believe when I think for many people, including me, the original game was made what it was because of the multiplayer.  I loved the original campaign and I didn't get around to playing the Anniversary edition, so this is the perfect time to replay it, but I'm fully expecting this to be like a full price or near full price game for what is generally a not very long campaign that tons of people have already played multiple times in the past.  Cool for people that never played the game, hence it being on Playstation now...

[telly]

Most disc based games are glorified CD keys now. They possess a relatively small amount of data on disc, while the majority of the game requires a 20+ GB download. I've played a few games this year that were a 100GB+ download just to play the game. The PS4/XBONE suffered from this also, but not to this extent. It's not a problem now (other than constantly having to manage internal storage space just to play a new game), but it will be when Sony and Microsoft inevitably shut down their content servers on these systems. It essentially takes ownership away from you and either forces you to buy the game again on a newer, supported platform or accept that you now have a PS5 or series X/S collection that are more or less unplayable paperweights.

This is just not true. The large data files you're talking about are data being installed to your machine from the disc. It is not being downloaded from the internet. Pre-installing the game data from the disc to the console has been pretty much standard since the late PS3 era. The Wii-U was the last home console to load all data from the disc actively while playing. Wouldn't make sense for RDR II and Last of Us 2 (for example) have "data discs" in the physical package if the data comes from the internet.

Google any PS5 or Xbox game you want on DoesItPlay. The vast, VAST majority of games on both PS5 and Series X (85% for each) contain all major content on disc and can be played without downloads. Where this gets complicated are the updates needed to make the games run smoother, which highly depends on game to game.  Pretty much every game has some update that needs to be downloaded, you just need to check which ones have the more serious problems. Some games do need updates from the internet or else they are unplayable, but it's still about 10%.

The only games that you're really talking about are online-only games, of which only comprises about 3% of the PS5's library and 4% of the PS4, at least everything that's been fully tested so far.

[Warmsignal]

It's still ashame that nothing approximating the final build of the game is ever on the disc from any major publisher, not even thoroughly bug tested. That's the version we get to own down the line.

The consoles do often treat the discs as a key for download when online, as they want to just give you the latest version of the game to install. It believe it only installs from the disc if you're offline.