ViolentP
Member
Limitations are not features.
-
Hey Guest. Check out your NeoGAF Wrapped 2025 results here!
Bungie: Do they deserve more credit?
- Thread starter HigherLevel
- Start date
Limitations are not features.
Some things Marathon did have that Doom did not include dual-weilding, voice chat, and AI soldiers that were on your side.
edit: Though apparently Forge and Anvil were not included in the box until Infinity, which came out in 1996.
Came out 6 years after Marathon.
edit: Though apparently Forge and Anvil were not included in the box until Infinity, which came out in 1996.
Muffdraul
Member
So, what *would* mean a developer is bad? Just curious.
oh right, how did i forget that...
Grady Durden
Member
So you're saying that Buingie deserves credit for everything that ruined FPSes?
I still don't understand why people claim that only having two weapons is a bad thing. It makes weapon management a lot more challenging which is a good thing.
pieatorium
Member
Unknown, I think there was a rumour of an MMO?
Apparently some sort of sci-fi MMOFPS game for Activision
Windom Earle
Member
Absolutely, they deserve credit for fooling the public into buying the same game for a decade.
StalkerUKCG
Banned
Clearly you havnt been playing them...
Am I being trolled.
Please don't go there.
...sad times. I probably will not have time in my life to really commit to an MMO again for another 30 years... :-(
I really like bungie for the most part (even if I thought ODST and reach were less than stellar).
kyubajin
Member
If (like me) you're not an Xbox gamer, you probably heard about Halo and thought: what's the big deal? I've been doing most of it for years on the PC and now they want me to pay a fee for doing the same thing? How about no. Then I switched to Mac and relinquished PC gaming forever only to realise that Bungie were one of the best and more supportive Mac devs ever.
Their games sell millions and even the disappointing ones are guaranteed 9 and 10 ratings. They're regarded as innovators that brought a workable FPS setup to consoles. Their scenario design and emphasis on open, sandbox gameplay has influenced game design for a decade. I'm not sure how much more credit Bungie deserves. Did you really think they were going unnoticed or something?
PC FPS games have had local multiplayer capability almost since the FPS was invented.....and most games supported more than 4 players.
Console FPS games have had local multiplayer since at least Goldeneye.
The other stuff he listed pretty much ruined online play for me -- playlists mean I get stuck in all kinds of dumb gametypes and maps I don't like. Rankings and persistent rewards mean people take the game way too seriously and act like douchenozzles. They also get in the way of simple drop-in/drop-out gaming.
Weapon limit was probably the least problematic thing there, though I think it often introduces a problem where you're scared to take along highly-specialized weapons like rocket launcher, shotgun, or sniper. It makes multiplayer more interesting and balanced, but in singleplayer the wrinkles it introduces have mostly gotten annoying over the last 10 years.
PC FPS games have had local multiplayer capability almost since the FPS was invented.....and most games supported more than 4 players.
Console FPS games have had local multiplayer since at least Goldeneye.
The other stuff he listed pretty much ruined online play for me -- playlists mean I get stuck in all kinds of dumb gametypes and maps I don't like. Rankings and persistent rewards mean people take the game way too seriously and act like douchenozzles. They also get in the way of simple drop-in/drop-out gaming.
Weapon limit was probably the least problematic thing there, though I think it often introduces a problem where you're scared to take along highly-specialized weapons like rocket launcher, shotgun, or sniper. It makes multiplayer more interesting and balanced, but in singleplayer the wrinkles it introduces have mostly gotten annoying over the last 10 years.
FieryBalrog
Member
lol
In theory, sure. But in deathmatch weapon management is mostly limited by where you sprint to in terror after spawning bare-ass naked, and in SP a two-weapon loadout just means a lot of backtracking if you make unlucky picks. You end up just enforcing hard matchup tiers that are (mostly) unsolvable by the time you first make visual contact. A system where you can carry all the weapons rewards quick thinking and quick inputs based on what the enemy pulls out, and means shit like aim-assist no-scoping or shotties with hilarious short-range damage boost can go away because the sniper no longer needs to be able to make emergency close-in kills and the shotgun no longer needs to be just as useful as a rocket launcher.
I'll admit it is pretty awesome in co-op, though, where your team can put together an arsenal between them and everyone gets their moment in the sun/you don't all twitch-focus the same enemy.
BakedPigeon
Banned
Yes and I support them in their goal for world domination.
Yeah, I'm not sure how much credit they should get for their work in the 360 era. Halo 1 revolutionized singleplayer and Halo 2 revolutionized console-based multiplayer.....but after that? It seems like the campaign quality took a big dip at the expense of a multiplayer-focus......and the multiplayer got a lot more muddled due to the needless complications of armor abilities. Just matchmaking got to be a hassle if you weren't interested in buying all the map packs. I still pop in my Halo 3 disc for multiplayer every now and again and there's entire playlists that I'm locked out of because I haven't bought all the DLC.
Maybe I have hazy, rose-tinted memories of Halo 2, but didn't most of the multiplayer maps become free after a period of time? That dedication to keeping the playerbase consistent seems to have disappeared.
Maybe I have hazy, rose-tinted memories of Halo 2, but didn't most of the multiplayer maps become free after a period of time? That dedication to keeping the playerbase consistent seems to have disappeared.
BakedPigeon
Banned
Ya Mt. Dew sponsored the Halo 2 map packs so they became free. I'm quite surprised Halo 3 has not become free yet. Ive bought a few of the map packs at least 2 or 3 times since its release.
Anticitizen One
Banned
Halo was extremely influential on this generation of consoles. We probably would not have gotten mass effect, gears of war, resistance and several other sci if trilogies if it wasn't for halo. Not to mention stuff like Haze and Too human.
ElRenoRaven
Member
Well you also had Bungie pushing to make them free. That's why With Halo 2 all maps eventually became free. With Halo 3 and beyond MS just would not budge on that hence them not going free after Halo 2.
GillianSeed79
Member
I think I'm the weirdest fucking person on the planet because Reach was amazing to me and was the first Halo game that got me interested in the franchise. From what I gather everyone hated Reach though with the armor abilities and such.
Searching on Xbox Live, I see that the Halo 3 Mythic Map Pack is still 400 points, and it was released nearly 2 years ago. It was only like 3-6 months before the Halo 2 maps went free, IIRC.
To Bungie's credit though, the Halo 3 Heroic Map Pack is free. It looks like it was released in December 2007 and went free in March 2008 (3 months).
The Legendary Map Pack is 160 points, which is probably a steep discount from the original pricing. My Googling tells me it was released in April 2008 and was first discounted from $10 to $5 in December 2008 for a temporary XBL sale (7 months later).
So they haven't been as bad about it as I thought, but there's really no reason I should be locked out of playlists for map packs from 3-4 years ago.
On a multiplayer perspective Reach is very disappointing, but I had a great time with the Campaign, and it has a ton of features to keep you playing. But, Multiplayer is what keeps people playing, and since it was lackluster a lot of people are going to trash on it.
I'm a huge Halo fan, but I thought Halo 3 was really bad and I haven't even played ODST. I played a ton of Halo 2 and enjoyed it, but compared to Halo CE it is very disappointing. The series is pretty depressing to me as a whole, it went downhill immediately after the first game.
I kinda felt like the 360 Halo campaigns were inferior because difficulty was created by limiting your grenade count and by throwing a dozen enemies at you at a time. I liked it better when the enemies were stronger but there were fewer of them. Makes it easier to find cover and even if you were down and out you were only a couple good grenade sticks away from evening the score. In the 360 games you couldn't carry as many sticky plasma grenades and it seemed like the plasma grenades dropped off enemies less frequently. So it just felt hopeless when you were completely surrounded by 10 dudes and only had 1-2 plasmas on you.
RobotChant
Member
Bungie like others, basked in the light as a 1st part dev. When they left, so did the constant acclaim. It doesn't help that they are a tight lipped company.
I think they still get a lot of love these days, just not the constant adoration that 1st party devs get. And because of their history, people don't talk them up like they would a neutral company (Valve/Blizzard).
I think they still get a lot of love these days, just not the constant adoration that 1st party devs get. And because of their history, people don't talk them up like they would a neutral company (Valve/Blizzard).
Not following here. In your first paragraph, you claim that exclusivity results in acclaim. But in the second paragraph you seem to think that platform neutral devs are more likely to be talked up.
On top of that though, I'm not sure that Valve and Blizzard are really neutral. Blizzard hasn't produced a console game in probably 15 years, and Valve heavily prefers the PC. Though I guess in the console wars you can argue that PC-preference is essentially neutral.
The Librarian
Banned
lol @ border. The pricing for the map packs is MS's fault, not Bungie's.
Um, what?
What drugs are you on?
Halo fans didn't enjoy Reach whereas people less familiar with the series did. Which goes to show how different Reach was from previous entries and simultaneously silences any of the ignorant people claiming Bungie only made the same game.
That someone can contribute so little and yet be so ill informed/ignorant slightly frightens me.
BakedPigeon
Banned
I still have not played Reach's single or multiplayer past a few stints at a friends house. Which is totally weird since I have played 1, 2, and 3 until I was blue in the face.
If you played and loved Halo multiplayer prior to Reach then your best bet at this point is to leave Reach and wait for 4, which from the minute glimpse we've seen, looks something like a return to the style of gameplay we're used to.
I loved Reach's singleplayer regardless, felt fresh and different from any other Halo, yet clearly set in the same universe.
Haunted
Member
They get plenty of credit. The fact of the matter is that they're not even close to the tier of devs mentioned in the OP (and in some posts afterwards).
Halo CE was definitely a milestone game, but they haven't come close to achieving anything close to it in the time since then, mostly because they were stuck with the franchise and only got the option to iterate on it.
I can understand where the OP is coming from, though. You spend too much time in the community threads of the respective game you sometime lose sight of the bigger picture. Appreciation for Bungie in HaloGAF threads is obviously on a completely different level than in general threads, and you get so used to the atmosphere in the community bubble that you feel it's the "correct" one and feel the need to voice that to the larger general community. I do admit that the same thing basically happened to me with SC2GAF.
Halo CE was definitely a milestone game, but they haven't come close to achieving anything close to it in the time since then, mostly because they were stuck with the franchise and only got the option to iterate on it.
I can understand where the OP is coming from, though. You spend too much time in the community threads of the respective game
TheBioLover
Member
They are praised quite a lot already......so...?
This post is horseshit. Halo's influence on the industry has been huge and isn't something imaginary. Halo 1 delivered a blueprint for modern day shooter (although the sad thing is it remains unmatched in the AI and weapon sandbox departments by any other dev), Halo 2 introduced matchmaking, Halo 3 stat-tracking that other big FPS games are only now just catching up.
To say that they are lower tier than Valve, Blizzard, Infinity Ward or whoever else is just blind hatred.
I lol'd
Trust me, the biggest critics of Bungie are in the community thread. Reach for example gets tons of flack for introducing bloom, questionable design decisions, poor map selection, changing lore to "fit" the game, theater being borked etc.
Microsoft and 343 Industries get tons of it too there, the charging of the mappacks, playlists being removed, DLC barely showing up, Firefight getting shafted etc.
Similar threads
- Poll