Sony IGN: Bungie Devs Say Atmosphere Is ‘Soul-Crushing’ Amid Layoffs, Cuts, and Fear of Total Sony Takeover

[TwinIon]

36 minutes ago, Spawn_of_Apathy said:

I think a big problem was a bunch of their top talent was also getting burned out on Destiny. Some may have left if they didn’t get to work on something else. I think their mistake was making it another massive several hundred million dollar AAA game. They should have just done a smaller title, more inline with a AA or Indy title as a way to just take a break. A few small quirky games that give people time to explore creative ideas with an 8-12 month dev cycle. If one of the ideas explodes in popularity they can always expand on it. 
 

Without the expectation of Destiny 2 needing to fund itself, another AAA game, and whatever media projects Bungie was trying to cook up I don’t think D2 turns into the monetization, cookie cutter, hellscape it has become. 

I think you're right about talent getting burned out on Destiny, which is funny because Bungie went so far as to leave their publisher to get out of having to keep making Halo games. Then they go off and put themselves in the same position, but arguably worse, since they can't even really experiment with the kind of stuff you might do if you're making sequels and not just iterating on the same game year after year.

[crispy4000]

1 hour ago, Paperclyp said:

Controls aside, there had been nothing as ambitious from an FPS standpoint on a home console before Halo.

 

That's a pretty loaded statement right there, depending on how you define ambition.  A slight to N64-era Rare if anything.

 

Just with multiplayer: 4-player splitscreen with 4 added bots was possible in Perfect Dark.  Not a FPS, but by Conker's Bad Fur Day they had expanded that to Capture the Flag, without the use of the expansion pack.  Oh and asymmetric modes too. Bonkers.

 

There may have been other FPSs on the system doing something similar I'm forgetting.

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

1 hour ago, crispy4000 said:

If that’s true, it’s not what is being reported.  

Bungie leadership is in no position to throw Sony/Playstation leadership under the bus. 

[ShreddieMercury]

Perfect Dark comes closest in terms of ambition, but that's mostly because of the absurd quantity of features.

 

There was no other shooter before Halo that took a sandbox approach to combat encounters in quite the same way.  The AI routines are still impressive to this day, and make the game extremely replayable.  Grenades being mapped to a trigger, and only being able to carry two weapons were significant design choices that completely upended how you approached the game.  Then you have a large focus on vehicular combat that seamlessly switches between the first and third person perspectives.  The cooperative AI of the marines in these vehicle sections adds another layer that helps make each encounter feel unique and impactful.

 

On top of this you have the level design of things like "The Silent Cartographer", which blends together several set pieces within what's essentially a small open island, or "Two Betrayals", which pits two opposing enemy types against each other with you in the middle.

 

Maybe there were games in the PC space that were doing this at the same time, but I can't recall any.  Halo is often lauded for further popularizing the FPS on console, but like I said, I still don't think people appreciate just how revolutionary the game was and still is.

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

You know I completely forgot, Sony takes over and then the chance of significant portions of not entire pieces of Destiny 2 content becomes timed or even outright PS exclusive rise to near 100%. Just like when D2 was being published by Activision. 

[AbsolutSurgen]

2 hours ago, Paperclyp said:

Oh I don’t know about this. I think it absolutely deserves to be put on a pedestal. Not only were they good controls, but the game played super well both for single player and multiplayer. Controls aside, there had been nothing as ambitious from an FPS standpoint on a home console before Halo, and in a lot of ways the game was just as good if not better than the ones you mentioned. Some of it is certainly personal preference, but I think you’re selling it short. 
 

I always loved the enemy AI and uniqueness between enemy types, the polish of the games, the smoothness, they way they chose to balance the gunfights with your shields for like one on one encounters with other players, not to mention all the stuff going on that was like, more technical, like good online for its day, LAN play, customization / level creation and stuff like that. 

Halo:CE multiplayer was still not online, when online was the norm for multiplayer shooters.

The controls were only good if you ignore KB/M -- but, they were probably the first decent shooter controls on a controller (Bungie's way of tweaking the auto aim and acceleration on the sticks has always been top notch).

I'll be honest, when I played it at a buddy's house at the time, I was underwhelmed.  (Most of my gaming in 2000/2001 at that time was online Unreal Tournament and Quake 3.)  I found the pace of the combat really slow/floaty compared to what I was used to.

That's not to say it was a bad game, I thought it was a really good one.  But at the time, given the choice to play Q3 online or Halo:CE splitscreen, it really wasn't a competition for me.

[Paperclyp]

21 minutes ago, AbsolutSurgen said:

Halo:CE multiplayer was still not online, when online was the norm for multiplayer shooters.

The controls were only good if you ignore KB/M -- but, they were probably the first decent shooter controls on a controller (Bungie's way of tweaking the auto aim and acceleration on the sticks has always been top notch).

I'll be honest, when I played it at a buddy's house at the time, I was underwhelmed.  (Most of my gaming in 2000/2001 at that time was online Unreal Tournament and Quake 3.)  I found the pace of the combat really slow/floaty compared to what I was used to.

That's not to say it was a bad game, I thought it was a really good one.  But at the time, given the choice to play Q3 online or Halo:CE splitscreen, it really wasn't a competition for me.

You are saying some pretty untrue things here. The controls are good without needing qualifier. They’re just good. You might prefer KB and mouse, that might be a more accurate way to play, but the controls were excellent for the time and hold up with some minor tweaks. 
 

Online was absolutely not the norm for multiplayer shooters. It was for PC games, but at that time that was a different realm. 

[Paperclyp]

Hell in 2001 I bet 56k was by far the most common internet speed. 

[Paperclyp]

3 hours ago, crispy4000 said:

 

That's a pretty loaded statement right there, depending on how you define ambition.  A slight to N64-era Rare if anything.

 

Just with multiplayer: 4-player splitscreen with 4 added bots was possible in Perfect Dark.  Not a FPS, but by Conker's Bad Fur Day they had expanded that to Capture the Flag, without the use of the expansion pack.  Oh and asymmetric modes too. Bonkers.

 

There may have been other FPSs on the system doing something similar I'm forgetting.

Rares games were certainly options rich from a multiplayer standpoint, but those games were a lot more limited in scope due to the tech I suppose. And I never enjoyed the single player of 007 or perfect dark all that much. Same with timesplitters, which was options rich but as a total package wasn’t doing what halo was doing imo 

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

2 minutes ago, Paperclyp said:

Hell in 2001 I bet 56k was by far the most common internet speed. 

I did a Google search and it came back saying that broadband households didn’t reach half of the market until 2007, so yep. 
 

man, I remember being able to select the 128kb/s options in Napster to download music in the late 90s. I really was spoiled by my dad being a nerd. lol 

[Paperclyp]

My dad was very frugal but likes tech and one day some dude was in our basement in rural Nebraska and I’m like dad who is that guy, he’s like eh he’s putting in a broadband modem. I was in shock… immediately went out and got a PS2 network adapter. I think I had Tony Hawk 3 already and it came out maybe before the adapter even did and I was dying to try it out. I also remember reading an egm article about socom and they talked about how it came with a headset and I was like wait what how do you talk over the internet haha.  
 

Exciting times. 

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

Yeah my dad had a broadband modem. I remember when he used the house phone line to pass the internet around the house so all we needed in our PCs was a NIC adapter with a RJ11 port. I could then use my PC like a router to pass the internet out the Ethernet port to my Xbox. 
 

I played Halo:CE on X-Connect and PGR2 ON XBLG. lol 

[Paperclyp]

4 minutes ago, Spawn_of_Apathy said:

Yeah my dad had a broadband modem. I remember when he used the house phone line to pass the internet around the house so all we needed in our PCs was a NIC adapter with a RJ11 port. I could then use my PC like a router to pass the internet out the Ethernet port to my Xbox. 
 

I played Halo:CE on X-Connect and PGR2 ON XBLG. lol 

My dad (who hated video games) got so tired of me hogging the modem downstairs he bought like a 50 foot cable to run up to my room 2 floors up. I don’t think he even told me he just left the cord there and I understood. 

[AbsolutSurgen]

1 hour ago, Paperclyp said:

You are saying some pretty untrue things here. The controls are good without needing qualifier. They’re just good. You might prefer KB and mouse, that might be a more accurate way to play, but the controls were excellent for the time and hold up with some minor tweaks. 
 

Online was absolutely not the norm for multiplayer shooters. It was for PC games, but at that time that was a different realm. 

If you say so.   Many games still don't let controller and KB/M players play together

Games are games.  As someone who played both, I typically gravitated to different styles of games on my PCs vs. consoles.

If you're making the point that console shooters of the era were typically significantly worse than playing on PC, I wouldn't debate you.

1 hour ago, Paperclyp said:

Hell in 2001 I bet 56k was by far the most common internet speed. 

You probably only needed a 28.8k modem to play Quake 3.  I honestly don't remember if I had high speed in my apartment in 2000, or whether I got it in my first house in 2004.

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

…and here’s where I go back to wanting the earth purged of all executives, especially C level and board members. 

 

Employees in one department recalled a post-layoffs Q&A session where a department head was asked if leadership taking salary cuts to prevent layoffs had been considered, only to respond that Bungie was “not that type of company.”

 

irredeemable prices of shit. And not just the ones in charge at Bungie. 

[Paperclyp]

5 minutes ago, AbsolutSurgen said:

If you say so.   Many games still don't let controller and KB/M players play together

Games are games.  As someone who played both, I typically gravitated to different styles of games on my PCs vs. consoles.

If you're making the point that console shooters of the era were typically significantly worse than playing on PC, I wouldn't debate you.

You probably only needed a 28.8k modem to play Quake 3.  I honestly don't remember if I had high speed in my apartment in 2000, or whether I got it in my first house in 2004.

 

This is an age old debate. I cannot refute that a KB / M player will generally defeat a controller player because the interface is more precise. It just doesn't diminish the controller interface as its own thing, and many people who enjoy both (including myself) will often opt for the controller for a variety of reasons. 

 

It does not surprise me in the least that a PC centric player around the release of Halo would try it out and not take to it. It's designed around the pad, not just the actions of the buttons but the speed at which it moves and how the battles play out. It's not meant to be a fast twitch thing the same way Quake is. It's more about consistency and strategy over the span of 10, 15 seconds vs a fraction of a second that twitch shooters were made for with the mouse. Normal to have a preference, but I would question anyone who would try to argue Halo is not a major pillar of the gaming industry without doing so in a backhanded compliment way that you used to see more often (but you reminded me of ). 

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

Halo CE might feel simplistic and limited by today’s standards, but it feels tight for a controller FPS title. And the controls for vehicles, especially the feel of the warthog are still among the best on a controller. I’m amazed when more modern FPS titles manage to have less intuitive controls than a game from 2001. 

[AbsolutSurgen]

15 minutes ago, Paperclyp said:

 

This is an age old debate. I cannot refute that a KB / M player will generally defeat a controller player because the interface is more precise. It just doesn't diminish the controller interface as its own thing, and many people who enjoy both (including myself) will often opt for the controller for a variety of reasons. 

Controllers and KB/M both have their places.  FPS shooters are one of the places that controllers don't shine -- they require lots of auto aim, and are imprecise and slow.  I opt for a controller on a lot of games -- for instance I would never play a DMC game with a KB/M.  The two games I am playing right now -- Forza Motorsport and Dave the Diver, I am choosing to play with a controller.  I would rather gouge my eyes out than play a Far Cry game with a controller (and I love me some Far Cry).

 

15 minutes ago, Paperclyp said:

It does not surprise me in the least that a PC centric player around the release of Halo would try it out and not take to it. It's designed around the pad, not just the actions of the buttons but the speed at which it moves and how the battles play out. It's not meant to be a fast twitch thing the same way Quake is. It's more about consistency and strategy over the span of 10, 15 seconds vs a fraction of a second that twitch shooters were made for with the mouse. Normal to have a preference, but I would question anyone who would try to argue Halo is not a major pillar of the gaming industry without doing so in a backhanded compliment way that you used to see more often (but you reminded me of ). 

I'm never been a "PC-Centric" gamer.  I played a lot of console games -- in 2000 in particular I didn't play a whole lot, because I kinda got sucked into online shooters -- but in most years I was playing at least as much on consoles as PC.

IMHO, Halo was designed around the limitations of console controllers. 

I don't know what a "major pillar of the gaming industry" is.  It was a very good game, in a year with a lot of very good games.  I personally liked MGS2 and DMC a lot more (which are all best played with a controller).

 

[On a tangent, I am now a PC-centric gamer, because for the first time in history, you can largely play all of the games on one platform.]

[Paperclyp]

It means it was the basis on which many if not most other games in the genre borrowed from. 

[best3444]

Ok. You guys need to get a room at this point. 

[Paperclyp]

I find that FPS games without too many special actions you can perform I prefer on a mouse, but certain games with a lot of maneuverability my fingers can’t keep up on the KB as well as a pad. Like, going from sprint into a slide into a platforming jump type of thing, my keyboard skills just aren’t up to it but I can perform that stuff very easily on a controller. So it’s not even genre specific for me. Also it drives me crazy in single player games that you have no fine control over your walk speed on a keyboard like you do with a joystick.  

[Keyser_Soze]

3 hours ago, Paperclyp said:

Hell in 2001 I bet 56k was by far the most common internet speed. 

 

Netzero / Juno internet ftw!

 

I think around 2001 / 2002 was the first time we got cable TV but I think by the time I got an Xbox I had cable internet.

[crispy4000]

4 hours ago, Paperclyp said:

Rares games were certainly options rich from a multiplayer standpoint, but those games were a lot more limited in scope due to the tech I suppose. And I never enjoyed the single player of 007 or perfect dark all that much. Same with timesplitters, which was options rich but as a total package wasn’t doing what halo was doing imo 

 

You could say the the same thing about Halo 1 vs Infinite’s open world.  You wouldn’t call the former less ambitious due to the tech.  At least I wouldn’t.  It’s a different design, and the box they had to work with shouldn’t diminish the boundaries that were pushed.

 

I see Halo as a game that streamlined FPS controls on consoles and popularized splitscreen LAN.  It’s took enemy AI and the scale of environments to a place not feasible on prior gen consoles.  Regenerating health shields were its invention too, afaik.  Vehicles had existed in FPSs before, but none did the transition to 3rd person as gracefully.

 

All that should still take away nothing from other console FPSs doing ambitious things before it.  Like fully destructible environments, squad mechanics, body part specific damage, online multiplayer, difficulty modifiers altering level layouts, multiplayer bots, novel multiplayer modes for the time, etc.  There was no lack of ambition in console shooters before Halo.  It’s a false narrative.

[Xbob42]

Halo was certainly influential, and as someone who likes extremely fast paced shooters, to me its legacy has been nothing but a drag, essentially killing off one of my favorite genres of game and replacing it with this auto-aim husk, a nightmare Frankenstein of bits and bobs of what the genre used to be with sprinklings of Halo's design, but almost never learning from Halo. So many shooters these days are super low TTK, which when combined with auto-aim and slow stick movement, often amounts to ridiculous conga-lines of death like Call of Duty.

Of course, you can play these with keyboard and mouse on PC, but when the entire game has been designed around the limitations of a clunky ass gamepad (which might be amazing for Mario, but was never and will never be good for shooters, because velocity-based stick movement is a fucking ridiculously imprecise way to aim, which is the entire point of a shooter) then the experience is now doubly compromised.

 

It is what it is, which at this point is still quite popular, but I think it's a bummer. I had more fun playing Quake 3 Arena than every shooter I've played since combined, excluding maybe Tribes: Ascend, which while also a husk of its former self was still quite fun and unique.

 

Honestly if you don't understand it, think about Mario, now think about endless runners. If things had gone differently, endless runners could've did to platformers what Halo did to shooters. (Rebuilding an entire genre to suit the limitations of a more popular control scheme, if you somehow haven't been following along.) And to me, that's a bad thing.

[Paperclyp]

7 hours ago, crispy4000 said:

 

You could say the the same thing about Halo 1 vs Infinite’s open world.  You wouldn’t call the former less ambitious due to the tech.  At least I wouldn’t.  It’s a different design, and the box they had to work with shouldn’t diminish the boundaries that were pushed.

 

I see Halo as a game that streamlined FPS controls on consoles and popularized splitscreen LAN.  It’s took enemy AI and the scale of environments to a place not feasible on prior gen consoles.  Regenerating health shields were its invention too, afaik.  Vehicles had existed in FPSs before, but none did the transition to 3rd person as gracefully.

 

All that should still take away nothing from other console FPSs doing ambitious things before it.  Like fully destructible environments, squad mechanics, body part specific damage, online multiplayer, difficulty modifiers altering level layouts, multiplayer bots, novel multiplayer modes for the time, etc.  There was no lack of ambition in console shooters before Halo.  It’s a false narrative.

I don’t think I said there was a lack of ambition. I said it was the most ambitious to date (at that time), and I would stand by that statement. 
 

I also went out of my way to state what I liked about halo and not tear down any games in the process. I love the games you’re mentioning too. 

[AbsolutSurgen]

7 hours ago, crispy4000 said:

 

You could say the the same thing about Halo 1 vs Infinite’s open world.  You wouldn’t call the former less ambitious due to the tech.  At least I wouldn’t.  It’s a different design, and the box they had to work with shouldn’t diminish the boundaries that were pushed.

 

I see Halo as a game that streamlined FPS controls on consoles and popularized splitscreen LAN.  It’s took enemy AI and the scale of environments to a place not feasible on prior gen consoles.  Regenerating health shields were its invention too, afaik.  Vehicles had existed in FPSs before, but none did the transition to 3rd person as gracefully.

 

All that should still take away nothing from other console FPSs doing ambitious things before it.  Like fully destructible environments, squad mechanics, body part specific damage, online multiplayer, difficulty modifiers altering level layouts, multiplayer bots, novel multiplayer modes for the time, etc.  There was no lack of ambition in console shooters before Halo.  It’s a false narrative.

Split screen local multiplayer had been around for years when Halo came out. It used to be a staple of multiplayer games, and was implemented in FPS games in the previous gen. 

[AbsolutSurgen]

6 hours ago, Xbob42 said:

Halo was certainly influential, and as someone who likes extremely fast paced shooters, to me its legacy has been nothing but a drag, essentially killing off one of my favorite genres of game and replacing it with this auto-aim husk, a nightmare Frankenstein of bits and bobs of what the genre used to be with sprinklings of Halo's design, but almost never learning from Halo. So many shooters these days are super low TTK, which when combined with auto-aim and slow stick movement, often amounts to ridiculous conga-lines of death like Call of Duty.

Of course, you can play these with keyboard and mouse on PC, but when the entire game has been designed around the limitations of a clunky ass gamepad (which might be amazing for Mario, but was never and will never be good for shooters, because velocity-based stick movement is a fucking ridiculously imprecise way to aim, which is the entire point of a shooter) then the experience is now doubly compromised.

 

It is what it is, which at this point is still quite popular, but I think it's a bummer. I had more fun playing Quake 3 Arena than every shooter I've played since combined, excluding maybe Tribes: Ascend, which while also a husk of its former self was still quite fun and unique.

 

Honestly if you don't understand it, think about Mario, now think about endless runners. If things had gone differently, endless runners could've did to platformers what Halo did to shooters. (Rebuilding an entire genre to suit the limitations of a more popular control scheme, if you somehow haven't been following along.) And to me, that's a bad thing.

That was so excited when the new Doom reboot came out -- it gave me hope (apparently false hope) that FPS games would return to their roots and give us the kind of experiences we enjoyed in the late 90s.  A world where controls were crisp, the action was fast, we could carry as many weapons as we wanted and we didn't stop and hide so health would "regen".

[crispy4000]

1 hour ago, AbsolutSurgen said:

Split screen local multiplayer had been around for years when Halo came out. It used to be a staple of multiplayer games, and was implemented in FPS games in the previous gen. 

 

Halo specifically was the first console game to do LAN, if I'm not mistaken.  I brought up splitscreen in that context. 

 

1 hour ago, Paperclyp said:

I don’t think I said there was a lack of ambition. I said it was the most ambitious to date (at that time), and I would stand by that statement. 

 

So a relative lack of ambition to Halo.  

 

I still don't think we see eye to eye on that.  To me, it's like saying that later GTAs were more ambitious than III.  It’s not totally wrong to say, since on a technical standpoint it's very true, but it also misses the the point of what GTAIII is due and what it did for its time.  Goldeneye is still that game to me, for console shooters.

 

Games like Red Faction and Rainbow Six also have core elements more ambitious than the others we’ve talked about, even if the whole package doesn't come together as well.

[legend]

Halo is not the cause of the current state of FPS shooters. Halo's style itself is overshadowed by the current trends and is hard to find.

[Bacon]

CoD4 is the base for the modern FPS.

Outside of a few games like DOOM, it all feels like an advanced version of CoD4, even some of the new Halos.

ODST was the last time Halo felt like true Halo.

I'd love to play a game that felt like I was playing Halo 3 again for the first time.

[AbsolutSurgen]

16 minutes ago, crispy4000 said:

 

Halo specifically was the first console game to do LAN, if I'm not mistaken.  I brought up splitscreen in that context. 

Playstation had a link cable that was supported by a bunch of games -- not technically the same thing, but functionally the same.

[AbsolutSurgen]

15 minutes ago, legend said:

Halo is not the cause of the current state of FPS shooters. Halo's style itself is overshadowed by the current trends and is hard to find.

It was probably just the beginning of a trend.  The cause was probably PC developers switching their focus to console development due to the larger install base.

[crispy4000]

3 minutes ago, AbsolutSurgen said:

Playstation had a link cable that was supported by a bunch of games -- not technically the same thing, but functionally the same.

 

I didn’t know about that!  Any of them do 8-player?

[Keyser_Soze]

3 minutes ago, AbsolutSurgen said:

Playstation had a link cable that was supported by a bunch of games -- not technically the same thing, but functionally the same.

 

Yeah, I was one of the dozens of people who had a link cable. I played Final Doom and Command & Conquer with my friend on Playstation at my house. Good times.

[AbsolutSurgen]

2 minutes ago, Keyser_Soze said:

 

Yeah, I was one of the dozens of people who had a link cable. I played Final Doom and Command & Conquer with my friend on Playstation at my house. Good times.

TBH, that cable was the only thing I have ever used to connect consoles together locally.  [Yes, did tons of LAN parties on PC.]