Halo Infinite’s campaign was mildly enjoyable and the grappling hook was a small idea that was fun. But, the amount of money they spent to achieve that “mildly enjoyable” game was staggering.

Indie developers couldn’t afford those systems to begin with, so there was nothing to cut. Then, some of their games got popular, and only a free of them still make boxed sets.

Don’t forget AAA is turning to so many F2P experiences.

The bit I couldn’t handle is, it’s a first person game with a less accessible “detective vision” where guards fill their detection meter super fast.

You could do fun stuff if you already knew the level layout and guard patrols, but exploring creatively without opening dark vision every 8 feet caused you to run into a guard and suddenly it’s a chaos run. The combat was not fun enough to dedicate efforts to that.

I think the moment where I stopped playing was when I was perched on an awning above the guards, and they still spotted me. Often, a conceit of stealth game verticality is that guards don’t look up very far.

Compare to Hitman: If you trespass, a guy escorts you out. If someone sees through your disguise, they chase after you with questions, not bullets. If one person sees you act illegally, they try to arrest you and you can grab the gun. With basic awareness, you can often prevent escalation to gunshots fired and backup called.

I maintain it was more an issue with basing their fight around spacing, than teaching via popups. I didn’t even mind the many enemies that had unintuitive concepts like feeding them grenades. Once you attune to them, they’re simple enough.

Even after they teach you all that about Marauders, it’s not just a matter of how to shoot them, and when - but when NOT to. Plus hoping for their AI to act reliably as described.

I mean, they were. I have personally heard from people that couldn’t be bothered to understand the Xbox SKUs for the possibility of buying one because of how horribly Microsoft names things.

After the betrayal of Mick Gordon, came the Dark Ages. Seems fitting.

Did they ever fire the game director that caused that whole controversy?

Someday I’d like to hope our game design sensibilities evolve enough that we can stop deflecting every negative review with “git gud”. There are absolutely things that hard games can design badly that don’t add to the overall enjoyment of the game.

Marauders were one of those things.

I’d love a new Wolfenstein-style game that diverges from the simple divide of giving them helmets.

It’s simple morbid truth that these people are human beings, who have committed their minds to unimaginable cruelty. It’d be fun to have more games about reciprocating that cruelty.

Mortal Kombat’s fatalities gave me a big ick factor when they leaned into cruelty and pain (and thankfully turned towards looney creativity to be entertaining). But I could see the former being a bit more valid when there’s universal reasoning behind why it’s being applied.

On this question of verification, I don’t have a particularly foolproof solution, but maybe there just isn’t one.

I can criticize the modern web for a lot of things, but as long as we have situations where we want to check whether an account is a real person, as opposed to FarmingBot #295038, they need something. I’m not a fan of phone verification, but I’d only criticize it when we have alternatives.

I’d even be in favor of some kind of one-way algorithm by which a trusted real-person-identifying entity could tell a random third party site: Yes, this is a genuine human.