OXM
It's one of the sad old rules of internet marketing that the voices that shout the loudest are often least representative of community reaction. 343's Frank O'Connor has seen plenty of extreme responses to Halo 4, a game which embroiders classic Halo principles with new enemy types, an episodic co-op campaign and a customisable loadout system. Speaking to the Metro, he discussed how 343 stays on good terms with crankier followers without handing over the keys to the castle.
"Your fans are your best friends, they're absolutely a part of our extended family," O'Connor began. "But you're absolutely right, you can't design a game by committee because... it's hilarious to watch reactions on the Internet. They're completely contradictory and yet people think that they're mathematically correct.
"So there is good information in there and we take information from test data, we take information from boring drawing numbers cycles that happen on servers. And we do look at anecdotal information, because often people can capture the essence of what they mean in a way that raw numbers can't on their own - and vice versa you can't do everything anecdotally.
"So we do take that all seriously, but there's some things where even where it looks like you have a kind of core element in the fanbase that is convinced something is wrong, or that something is awesome we know that their reaction to that is not based on gameplay, is not based on experience. It is not based on, say, three months of building a Spartan career. So there's a lot of things that we do that fans will object to or embrace."
The discrepancy between telemetry and comments has been picked up on by other developers. DICE's Patrich Bach, for instance, recently revealed that Operation Metro is Battlefield 3's most popular multiplayer map, despite frequent tirades on the Battlefield forums.
"It's not a monolithic community so you get all ranges of opinion across the spectrum and you have to look at that but you can't use it necessarily as a guidepost," O'Connor went on. "But you can absolutely use it as useful context for the decisions you've already made and the ones that you're tuning and working on."
The biggest fan misfires over Halo 4 are directed at its perceived similarity to Call of Duty, he elaborated. "The controversial ones are the ones where they think we're taking ideas from other games. So right now we've added this loadout system so you can customise your Spartan.
"Which is as much based on our fiction for the Spartan forces as anything else, but the irony is people say, 'that's lifted from Call Of Duty'. But it's really... like even the UI [user interface] looks like the loadout system from Gradius III from the 1989 coin-op.
"And so it's strange that people already have a kind of imprint in their mind about where ideas come from or where they're going, and that's a good example of one where we know it's fun and we tested it and we know that it's balanced but we just have to stick to our guns and make sure that when we execute on it, it's as perfect as it can be.
"And they might be resistant to the idea but so far we've discovered even on the E3 show floor they're embracing the feel and they're embracing the experience and that our call was correct. We're not always going to be right, but often we know better than they do how these things settle out."
http://www.oxm.co.uk/42756/343-on-completely-contradictory-hilarious-fan-reactions-to-halo-4/
