Horrible Leadership and Policies Destroyed Halo Infinite! 

I Blame Frank O'Connor.

Bro Joseph Staten is a true hero...

343 has some amazing talent at their studio but awful leadership It’s been that way since the beginning honestly

Both Frankie and Bonnie have done so much damage to Halo; I really hope it can recover with the next game.

Man. 4 to 5 builds and teams? I'm no developer, but that feels like something someone without a vision would do.

As someone who was in the military for over nine years, leadership is a very critical element when leading a group to achieve a goal. This case make the best Halo game possible. Sad to acknowledge what Halo Infinite should have been, but since Pierre has taken over things have been moving a lot better with Halo.

Let them know! Transparency and accountability!

Inexcusable, destructive levels of mismanagment.

We were robbed

What destroyed Infinite is desync, forced crossplay, desync, predatory store bundles, desync, lack of playlists and maps to play (till this day), oh, did I mention desync? Infinite is hands down the worst MP experience I've ever had, it's the only game I've played in the past ~30 years where your ping doesn't matter at all, everything else is irrelevant, no matter how great a game is (which Infinite is FAR from), it's destined to fail when the very core feature that is shooting doesn't work at all.

that "shut the fuck up and do your jobs" hurt to read. good lord I feel bad for all the people trying to make these games

I had a conversation with a game developer who emphasized that issues with a game are unrelated to the game engine. According to him, it all boils down to the coding of the game; the game engine merely serves as a toolset to facilitate integration.

I already wrote a comment like this, but it's been a while, but this is my feelings towards Halo Infinite. Halo infinite, no matter what lies you say to yourself, is a disappointment. The campaign was just okay and was carried HEAVILY by the story, and even then, that had many issues as well. The multiplayer does not need much of an explanation. However this game still means a lot to me. The excitement I had and my playthrough of the whole mcc and 5 will be a memory I carry for a long time. The way I finally became part of the Halo community was amazing. This game was bad, but my experience waiting for it was amazing.

This makes me appreciate 343i devs & ex-devs even more.

The actual state of the game itself is undeniable proof that something was wrong with the leadership of 343. The burden of proof is upon that particular leadership of 343i to prove that it was something or someone else's fault. Just play the campaign, or even look at who they entrusted to make a Halo TV show and tell me that there can be any other explanation.

Betty Ross should reframe from anything related to leadership of a gamestudio for the future. Dispicaple what she done to Halo.

Would love an update video one day about how devs are reacting to the leadership change, if the trauma and stress has at all minimized. Thanks for this, answers a lot.

Please let the next game be the first proper halo launch under 343. It has been years of compromised halo games.

Infinite aside why does it seem like 343 goes out of their way to change EVERYTHING done right in the originals??

Yeah this level of incompetent management was what really destroyed halo as a brand, but thankfully it seems to be improved as they are focusing on the quality side of releases

Yep. We were absolutely robbed. Halo Infinite is currently a great game, just wish more of the cut ideas made it across the finish line...

The leadership butchered the franchise so many times and somehow they still managed to keep their jobs while laying off the developers

More people need to watch this video. Just imagine what this game could have been if it weren’t for the way old 343 leadership and Microsoft handled things. I have always blamed Microsoft more than I did 343 because I absolutely know the devs there are talented, it’s just the MS doesn’t let them show it off enough.

Extremely well documented video, you can see clearly how much love and attention was put in Infinite, in every campaign section, music, cosmetic descriptions, the passion was always there, thank you for not just jumping on the easy-clicbait "343 bad" wagon

God it woulda been nice to get the other 2/3rds of that campaign and some desert and snow biomes... so much unrealized potential with Infinite's story. Boggles the mind how 343 just again and again drops the ball with this IP after having SO MUCH development time.

Morgan Lockhart's experience was all i needed to hear, ive felt the exact same.

People are always quick to point the finger at 343i for ruining Halo. But they always forget that Microsoft are the ones who make the important decisions. By the time Microsoft didn't stop what 343i was doing with Halo 4, Halo was DOOMED.

Every triple A developer now is half ass. It's never about the passion anymore, it's about sucking the gamers dry.

Wake me up when they decide to bring back Spartan booties.

It sucks to hear all this but I’m glad these people were able to share their experiences. Now we can more accurately see who’s at fault for this franchise assassination

Halo is dead and gone, boys. It's never coming back. Just enjoy the time we had. As a wise man once said "its better to have loved and lost then never to have loved at all"

If this is trauma then everyone I know is damaged beyond repair. That’s everyday life in the military. You have to remember people are just people. You give someone power and they’ll use it. Same goes for rank. Unfortunately it goes to some peoples heads, or when people are under stress and not natural leaders capable of applying pressure in the correct way you get the “stfu and do your job”. But if someone is being lazy, wining and skating/shamming then yeah, stfu and do your job. To say this is trauma is laughable. Everyone’s just soft. But please. Make the damn game. If COD can crank out game after game after game I don’t see any reason you can’t come up with something. Even a spin off title with Spartan IIIs in SPI armor or another ODST title vs insurrections or Helldivers style drop and objective game.

Basically the upper management screwed over this game so hard I never get my upper management tangled with development of games and stuff like let the devs make the game

I’m going back through playing the older halo games on legendary in chronological order and wow I’m mind blown how much better Halo Reach is then any new age halo game. Bungie really had a banger and gave it up to produce a very okay looter shooter. I love destiny but oh halo was peak and it’s sad to see how 343 Shat on it.

What an absolutely strange way to end this video. No, things are not looking up. They finally reached seasonality as promised just to immediately abandon it. They have moved resources over to whatever game is next.

One difference Bungie had back in the day is that they didn't have to deal with any Microsoft interventions. They were given a budget and a release date and that was it

343 are not being held hostage, bonnie ross literally said they were after a broader audience

Amazing, absolutely amazing- How leadership absolutely failed on almost every possible level. This game had everything going for it. Fans were excited, we liked the visual style. Everyone was ready for Halo to be back. And it was, until people finished the campaign, got bored, and the devs, once again, had to work just to detangle the code so they could get new content in. Halo Infinite is what it is now. I really hope 343 and microsoft leadership learn THEIR lesson, but I know they probably won't. I really hope the next halo doesn't repeat the same mistake, but as much as it hurts...there are other games to play.

I’m so unbelievably freaking sad. Any one of these features they were working on would have changed the halo landscape and they all got scrapped. Im so so happy we finally have better leader ship and things are looking up tho :,)

The Crusher looks like a Picific Rim kaiju!

It's a shame we haven't gotten a proper Halo game since 2010, Halo 4 was Call of Duty, (I didn't even play Halo 5) and Infinite is a disaster from start to finish This video could be a lot longer

Hearing the words "Zelda like experience" really hurt my soul more than anyone can ever know, I really hope they don't drop the open world aspect in the next entry and really expand on those ideas they had originally. I want something truly special, something that can give me hope I once had for this franchise.

The fact that 343i is still allowed to make Halo games, let alone Halo 7 after Halo 5 and Infinite, shows how incompetent Xbox truly is and why Sony is kicking their ass.

I wasn’t sure if there was an issue due to the massive change in story direction after Halo 5. If you look at the ending of Halo 5 and Halo Wars 2 they seemed to be setting up a totally different game.

Hearing this truly breaks my heart for halo bruh. How you fumble this badly!!!

Give halo to Sony they’ll make it good again

Great video, very informative! I’m so pissed!

Halo's been destroyed since 2012.

Give him, AND new Armor 3 difference enemy groups, flood, awakened , burnished. Cortana needs to be a little more sparky and atleast hot !

You're right, it did. So did with their MASSIVE franchise. 🥺

Looking up, they’ve cut the team in half on infinite, abandoned the vehicles and weapons whey were working on, and are just adding new armor to sell while the community makes maps for them.

This was a very good video. Nice job! 👍👍

I punched the air like 8 times watching this

Couple things here: 1. I don’t doubt it may have been a toxic, stressful work environment and sympathies to the staff. But calling it trauma is a bit melodramatic, you’re a developer on 6 figure salary in Seattle, not a soldier on the front line in Ukraine. 2. Saying Microsoft ‘rushed’ 343 instead of giving them enough time is a bit rich - halo 5 and halo infinite came out more than 6 years apart.

Leadership? These guys still breaking the game when they update. The devs have no idea what they are doing as well. Close to 10k games played. Its broken. Lets blame the higher ups when the devs arent ablt to code properly. Lol

And to think the Crusher creature was gonna be replacing the hunters, but then cut the crusher to bring the hunters back😊

Ive talked with some devs and they all share the same sentiment. Leadership = ass, Slipspace = ass, and Microsoft = ass. In the end, even if all of the people were doing what they could, there was nothing that could save the game. Im surprised it launched as it did tbh

Not only Halo infinite but All Halo franchise

I knew leadership was bad, but not to the point of treating their team like that. "Shut the fuck up and do your job" Are you kidding me? Absoluetly unacceptable. I really want to know who those leaders were. I want to check their resumee to see how they were trusted with Halo. What did, whoever hired them, saw in them that made sense to handle them Microsofts biggest IP? It's so sad knowing that there are so many talented people working/that worked at 343, but none of their talent was used. I wish they would have given up. I wish they would have mass-quit, and left Microsoft and the 343 leaders with that hot mess so they lost all progress and money. Maybe that way they would have opened their eyes. It has been a decade of fail after fail. At this point, the only thing that would bring my passion for Halo back, would be a Reboot. Scrap everything after Halo 3 and continue from there. It will not happen, so for me, Halo is dead.

Recently I've returned to Infinite for Firefight, but the lost potential still makes me angry. Then I saw this video and it made even more angry. Now I just want to put Phil Spencer, Frank O'Connor, Brian Reed (for his damage to Halo 5) and Bonnie Ross in an eternal purgatory of playing Halo 2 on Legendary, with no breaks.

I hope microsoft learns from their mistakes with this one, because it had so much potential to be literally the best selling game since the release of the original bungie franchise, and they laughed in the face of potential in the desire for quick money. Tbis is the direct result of desire for money over desire to please the gaming community. We all just want to play a decent game for once, how difficult is it to pull that off? Theres an unlimited amount of time to use, yet they have to make themselfs believe there's a timeline they have to follow. If they just simply released halo in the best quality it can be it would endlessly beat anything they could pump out in a year or 2. Look at elder scrolls, they are giving it the proper amount of time because they already know its gonna be a flagship release thats gonna kick ass. Do the same with halo, its not that difficult. Theres more money in spending the proper amount of time than haste, it doesnt take a genious to figure that out. Theres tons of people over there, the fact that not a single one of them cared to see the signs just shows how impressively unprofessional microsoft is. What happened over the years? Did they all start doing drugs or something? Good lord lol

I liked Halo Infinite for what it was, and the weapon sandbox was fantastic. But I always suspected that a lot of stuff was missing. But 2/3 of the game being cut? Any wonder why often feels empty and much of the story is told through those stupid data pad collectibles. Also.. The Pilot, Cortana, and the weapons EXCESSIVE facial animations. Holy cow

Microsoft policies discarded great ideas. Microsoft and 343i fucked up Halo pretty good, to the point of no return. Microsoft simply was throwing out the chances of making good money.

Zelda has been my #1 Favorite up until BOTW/TOTK (Good Video Games, but Poor “Zelda Games”) followed by Halo (Original Halo), God of War, Elder Scrolls and Destiny. I’ve honestly gotten tired of Open World as no one does it like the Elder Scrolls. I’m not a fan of Halo being open world or at least not how it was in Infinite. Open World ruined my favorite Series because what they gave up to achieve the whole “Open World, Exploration, Your Choice”. BOTW/ToTK made GIANT LEAPS BACKWARDS in terms of what has sculpted Zelda in the past 20 years by potentially being the worst in the series for the following areas: - Story - Dungeons - Bosses - Side Quest (Like gathering Heart Containers to along with beating Dungeons to reach Max Hearts) - Music z - Not having Traditional ICONIC Items which make it feel like a Zelda Game. And I could keep going

To be fair, 6 years should have been long enough to have the game as a launch title had the studio not experienced all the other BS during those years of development. Halo 2 and ODST were probably the most rushed games in the series, but time crunch and incompitent leadership seem to affect the quality of the game very differently.

6:52 It blows me away (pun intended cause I'm no coward) that someone had to explain to these execs that rushing a game would be worse that not having it on the console release. These people really have no clue about the business they oversee. It's..well, believable but shouldn't be.

I feel for the devs but it began Development in 2015, I am not sure I can blame Microsoft for telling them to finish a damn project.

Wild that people can watch a video about who’s really at fault for the destruction of Halo, only to make the same “hurr durr fuck 343” comments. Actual brainrot. MICROSOFT LEADERSHIP IS AT FAULT.

Honestly ive never been in the cut 343 crowd of people. Never once did i believe that 343 should be cut off from halo and replaced. With infinite, the development issues, the leadership issues. 343 need to be stripped down and rebuilt from the ground up. You dont fix a system as broken as this, you replace it. Because those issues, they get built into the core of the studio. Layer by layer, brick by brick, until eventual the whole building becomes rotten. And the people who could make the game great, the actual competant developers and managers, either get shafted into obscurity by ego driven leaders into leaving the studio or are simply forced out because of contracts and legals. At this point im just ranting on, the franchise i love is slowly disappearing into obscurity and Microsoft, Xbox, 343 dont appear to understand that. Their strangling the golden goose assuming itll live and continue to lay the golden eggs.

343 should've be hauled not after the mild success of H4 but after the disaster of H5. OVER 10 YEARS! Over 10 years with this franchise and it's only been downhill even with the "wins" it managed to claw out.

343 has killed my love for halo. Gameplay and art style is pretty good tho

God they butchered this series lmfao

So instead of been 100% fault of 343 is just 98%....

Nice video man! Keep it up !

I blame Microsoft and Phil Spencer

I've said this before and I'll say it again but 343 and Halo are in desperate need of a workers union. a union would have nuked a large portion of these issues from orbit.

It’s been over a decade, the franchise is dead. It’s been about 15 years since Bungie was involved and we are all in our mid 20s and 30s. Just move on and play the classics till you get completely sick of them. If y’all got the meta Quest purchase contractors. There’s a Halo mod you can download right from the game and it’s pretty intense.

We need a games union

I think a lot of the information about the slipspace engine has been debunked, or at least challenged by other Devs who say its no harder to use than other engines or toolsets they have used. Guess its all a matter of perspective. What is clear is that leadership had no idea what they wanted the game to be. If I had to guess i'd put this down to a mix of incompetance and financial pressure from Microsoft/Xbox to be able to fully monetise something they expected to be a huge hit. Certainly the multiplayer experience hints at this. Changes in leaderhip and the 18 month rule for the contractors did the rest of the damage to this game

Yeah we have to remember that it's not the developers screwing up these things. It is always the execs. At the end of the day? The team can have billions of fantastic ideas and none of them make it through. And that makes it very frustrating for the developers. That said? All of Halo infinite's problems can be very easily solved. They don't even have to release another game. The main problems with the game are completely addressable. The main issue with the game is lack of content. So simply put it in. People had issues with the campaign story because the story danced around a whole lot of time that occurred between Halo 5 and Halo Infinite. So put that in. Let's do a prequel as a DLC expansion. Let's tell some other simultaneous stories that may have been occurring alongside the events of Halo Infinite via Spartan Ops. Just like in Halo 4. Spartan Ops was a great way of telling a narrative and expanding the story of the campaign. Plus Spartan Ops was like a strike in Destiny. Win-win. You get both a new co-op mode and more storytelling mechanisms. People want new maps, so put those in. Fix the other things that people are complaining about, like hit registration and what not. It can all be easily addressed. Halo infinite's story was not bad. It just avoided a whole lot of information that we cared about. So, again...put it in.

Microsoft's contract policy will single handly ruin the gaming industry. Not that it has already been ruined by bad management and greedy shareholders who know nothing about gaming.

I'm never buying another Halo game as long as 343 is making them unless they put a ton of blood and gore and it gets a M for Mature rating (which will be never 😂)

Now with Firefight I don't think Halo Infinite is destroyed lol The game is really freaking great I mean at least the multiplayer I am saving the campaign for a special occasion.

What is it with halo and bad development cycles😅 hopefully pierre hintze can turn it around for the better future

Without a doubt I believe them.

Holy fucking shit. Everyday theres a new fucking video explaining why "halo infininte is dead' EVERY GOD DAMN DAY

This Halo game was in fact, not "Infinite"

Frick Phil Spencer and Matt booty they could’ve prevented this but they sadly just don’t care about halo and haven’t in a decade.

343 is a shit game studio but these people complaining about the work conditions are cringe. Are there unions helping or are they apart of the problem, have they even unionized?

Sony Better than Microsoft 😂😂😂

Your falling asleep. Don't forget they hired Stanten. Don't forget Stanten left. You should be hoping that Activision takes over or we might just get another halo 4 bad leadership or not!

These devs talk like working at a video game studio was like storming Normandy Beach 😂

ASH RUM

I mean. It kinda sounds like the devs were too emotional to get the job done. Like idk man. They paid to do something. Like at my job. If my boss paid me and I end up crying about stuff and not get what he paid me to do done. I mean. He would probably can me right? 😅 Get the job done or gtfo right? The American way. Enough participation trophies. Do your job or F off. Not really that complicated. If video game development is too hard on you. Someone else would love that position.

Clickbait ah video.

No. Things are not "looking up for Halo" at all. Halo Infinite is still fucking trash. It is so far removed from being a Halo game that at this point they're just milking a dead corpse. The story of Halo has been destroyed in a way similar to what happened to Game of Thrones in Season 8. So much character building, so many sacrifices, are all gone and pointless. What they did to Cortana in Halo 5, and how they tried to "fix" their mistake can't be undone. Since the start this studio has shown that they give zero fucks about Halo. Halo 4 launched without the ability to change infected player's weapons, or proper forge maps, essentially killing custom games. The campaign was fine. I enjoyed it from start to finish. Halo 5 undid all of that. Think about the ending of Halo Reach and Noble team's sacrifice, and now think about what they did to Cortana in Halo 5. That whole campaign was trash. Halo Infinite actually killed Cortana and then paraded out a "clone" or "sibling" and said "Sorry, here's a replacement!". They forced us to play the entire campaign on a shit open world that gets boring after an hour, without co-op, and without the ability to replay missions. They SKIPPED the entire fucking CREATED story, destroyed the Infinity, and implied the death of pretty much every other character. You can't come back from that. The Banished are trash. Atriox is trash. I never could have imagined that they were going to make the side-characters from Halo Wars 2 the main fucking villain, and then say "The UNSC didn't actually survive the full force of the covenant, they were actually distracted by this other faction the whole time". Fuck that.

#Fire343

Great video ;)

2018 trailer part reminds me of that scene from Hazbin Hotel when the 343i team saw where they were going with Halo, Dev team-when did we start doing open world Halo? 343i heads/Microsoft-30 seconds ago 😅 Mr Voxx sir, when did we begin designing the Voxx Security........ Voxx-30 seconds ago

Bad leader is a bad leader fair enough and you can see it in how the game ended up. But Frack me trauma from being told to shut up or not being listened to. come on why are people such sensitive children now.