Smiled at the sight of Mig. (Gaming)

by EffortlessFury , Friday, October 28, 2022, 06:55 (757 days ago) @ Joe Duplessie (SNIPE 316)
edited by EffortlessFury, Friday, October 28, 2022, 07:36

You cut out the point of that sentence.

I was irrelevant to my point.

I saw that pull quote in the video, and I would like to know the context.

Boom.

As expected, the quote doesn't say what it seems to say out of context.

What? Yes it does.

"We had people who we hired who hated Halo" is not changed when you add "because of 'X,'". They hated Halo, it doesn't matter why. Also doesn't matter what they wanted to add to the game they hate, they still hated it.

Bear with me for a moment, as this may not seem relevant at first.

"We had people who we hired who hated Halo because of 'X,'" says O'Connor. "But what that really meant was, 'I feel like this game could be awesome because of 'Y input' that I'm going to bring into it. I want to prove it, and I'm passionate about proving it.'

Players are often atrocious at providing feedback. More often then not they try to offer it by pointing at specific things and saying they're broken and/or offering advice on how to make things better. This is not optimal, as the player often does not understand what the intention behind the decisions was, and what they think is broken might be a side effect of another decision with decent reasoning, or it could be the result of a bug but the feedback doesn't point to the actual problem. Ideal feedback is given in the form of feelings and (missed) expectations. I feel like this should be faster/slower, I'm struggling to do x, y, z, etc. etc. Basically, people very rarely know what it is that is wrong, and incorrectly attribute the issues they are facing.

Frank saying, "But what that really meant was," stands out to me as a very important part of this passage, and frankly he should've left the first part out entirely. What Frank is doing here is noting that there were people who had misplaced emotions. Initially, they thought they "hated Halo," but after digging through that "feedback" with said individuals, they rooted out what those individuals' actual feelings and issues were. They didn't actually hate Halo, they had issues they thought could be solved. 343i hired some of those folk who made solid arguments, that they saw as valuable additions to challenge the status quo (because everything can always be improved) as they did not want to get complacent and just churn out carbon copies of what came before.

Here's another cool bit from that article that I actually hadn't read before.

"It's during that time you're questioning yourself: 'How is this going to work, will it be as I envision it in my head?" says Holmes. For Halo 4, he says there were a few epiphany moments that helped boost the morale of the team. One of the earlier ones that Holmes recalls was when the team completed a small piece of the Halo experience that he described as a "very traditional" Halo. User research showed that people thought it was a lot of fun, and it showed that the team was capable of making a Halo game that was true to what the series was about.

343 scrapped it, Holmes says, as it was too traditional."

Neat.

Now, I do agree that this may be an issue. I personally thought Halo 5 and Infinite were very good attempts at rejuvenating the series. I personally feel Halo 5 was a radical shake up ala Halo 2, though in ways that I can definitely understand the alienation some fans felt. Infinite is, IMO, the best Halo game since Halo 2 (mechanically speaking) as it feels like the Halo 3 I would've preferred. The question is...was the game they scraped like Infinite? That'd have been a terrible call. However, if they created nothing but a carbon copy of Bungie's Halo games...I do think, as of that moment in time, taking the risk to innovate was the right call. That's what Bungie would've done, after all.