Is it fair to blame 343 Studios’ incredibly, laughably incompetent handling of the Halo franchise for this? And by this I mean the obvious death of the Xbox as a gaming platform. Or, from a different perspective, could Halo have actually saved the Xbox if the games had been amazing, or even just good?
Infinite growth is impossible, so they switched to squeezing something until it breaks, then identifying the next thing to squeeze. Eventually, they run out of things to squeeze, and switch to squeezing the people directly.
And it started with convincing console gamers it is necessary to pay for multiplayer. Whole ecosystem has been about trying to squeeze consumers for all the money they have. Even the locked proprietary hardware feeds into it of normalizing lack of control over hardware.
But, it is Microsoft at the top so not surprising.
Given how tedious the American Revolution one was, essentially running on rails with your character inserted into key episodes, the Civil War episode would have sucked. Presumably you’d have been riding shotgun with Harriett Tubman and/or General Sherman in a succession of semi-interactive cut scenes, repeating until you shot/stabbed enough confederate NPCs to be rewarded with possibly a short break of open-world exploring as a treat.
It would have been garbage. Either they would have had to severely restrict the player in absurd ways to make sure that no one played the game “wrong,” and then posted edgy youtubes about it. Or they would have had to narrow the scope and strip so much context that it would be basically impossible to tell it was supposed to be the American civil war, other then seeing some union flag props around.
Meanwhile Battleblock Theater and Castle Crashers are still receiving updates 10 years later. Goes to show how far a game can go if you put a little effort into it.
Castle Crashers my beloved! Those games, plus games like No Man’s Sky still receiving free updates 9 years later. Made by real humans with no shareholders to please who are passionate about the games they create.
gamespot.com
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