Machiavellian said:
No I did not miss that statement but does that statement means it actually brought in new users and increase the audience of Halo and expanded its reach. Popular playlist does not mean popular Halo. So until I actually see the game itself become more popular my point still stand. Yes, Forge make old heads happy but each and every year Halo continue to lose audience. If the only thing Halo does is keep the old heads its decline will continue. Forge is a nice tool as I stated but I would not consider it the top priority going into the new engine. If I have only a certain amount of engineers, I would rather them get the absolute most out of Unreal then waste years trying to replicate Forge in Unreal and come out with a so so product. Forge is really a MP component but to get people back into Halo, the Singleplayer must be on point. That would be my biggest focus. Since the MP is a free to play service now, if we really want to be realistic and forge is this critical to its success, then leave the MP in the same engine. For Singleplayer use the Coalition expertise to push the engine for the singleplayer and concentrate on crafting the best SP possible. Keep the MP in the old engine since its a service and when you are able to dedicate enough engineers to replicate it in Unreal do so. The 2 components actually probably just should be developed separately anyway. |
What we do know is the Forge Community Collection playlist has been the most popular Halo Infinite playlist since the game's launch.
That's not a stat that you can just ignore, it tells us that the Forge playlist is more popular than any other Halo Infinite playlist it has ever received. It's safe to say that Forge has not only stemmed the bleeding but also likely brought back some Halo players who dipped out. Over 1m Forge creations as well is because it is user friendly for a map creator and Custom Games Browser (linked to Forge) is very popular on both Master Chief Collection and Halo Infinite, a feature requested by many for years.
Halo's fanbase is large enough on its own, I mean, the title had 20m players when it first launched, likely a huge amount dipped out because of content issues and Forge plays a part in that just as much as stuff like extra developer made maps and based on the stat above, Forge is more popular than anything 343 has ever put out for Infinite.
Forge appeals to a large portion of Halo's traditional and large fanbase. Another extra stat is how healthy Halo content creators videos became again when Forge finally launched. Halo lost its audience because its post launch was dreadful, it's as simple as that, it's not complicated and requires Halo to massively revamp itself. Halo Infinite had a huge launch but they couldn't keep the players satisfied long term because it was missing a ton of features, such as classic game modes, no PvE, no Forge, a lack of post launch maps, etc.
Forge in Halo 3 & Reach was huge. Forge was also great in Halo 5 and helped to contribute to a healthy post launch support. Coincidentally, all of those 3 titles are labelled as having the healthiest Multiplayer user retention and Forge was either at launch (3/Reach) or launched a few months after (5) for all 3. Forge meanwhile was awful in Halo 4 and 343i received a lot of criticism for it...Coincidentally...Halo 4's Multiplayer user retention cratered not long after launch. Coincidentally, Infinite's Most Popular playlist is inherently linked to Forge, hmm.
There is no guarantee that focusing on Campaign will bring in new users either, especially when it's the 7th entry in a long running story, Lol. Infinite by all accounts was the best chance at bringing in a ton of new users, it was a story soft rebooted with a huge changeup to formula (open world) and yet by all accounts it looks like Infinite's Campaign kinda flopped and I say that as someone who prefers Campaign way more to Multiplayer.
At the end of the day as well, the Forge team is separate to the core Multiplayer team and largely developed out of house by Skybox Labs.
Appealing to new users shouldn't come at the expense of pissing off millions of your traditional audience, Forge provides a large part of the "fun" aspect of Halo and has done since Halo 3. Look at Halo 2, it was an incredibly sweaty Halo but Halo 3+ became a perfect blend of competitive & fun and sold a ton, as did Halo Reach. Forge plays a huge part in allowing Halo players to go from competitive to just sheer mindless joy.
As I've said as well, Forge allows the community to get maps out quicker, a lot faster than internally developed maps and due to how good Forge is now, it allows maps that are almost indistinguishable from internally developer made maps. Forge tools nowadays are incredibly good and it would be completely pointless and stupid to throw that all away.
Infinite's MP won't last forever, definitely not that "10 year" plan, it's almost certainly going to be replaced by Certain Affinity's Unreal Engine Halo Multiplayer project when it launches or shortly after, if that happens, I don't see 343i juggling two engines (Slipspace and Unreal Engine). They'll most likely dump Slipspace and move everything over to Unreal Engine because that would be the most efficient way, especially since Slipspace is a major reason why their content feed is so slow.
I could see the next Halo going back to a traditional Campaign/Multiplay paid suite, whilst Certain Affinity's project is likely the F2P project. Similar to how CoD operates, they've still got Campaign/Multiplayer as the paid entry but they also have Warzone sitting alongside it as the F2P entry, I think Certain Affinity's project will be the Warzone and 343 will likely abandon core F2P Multiplayer.
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