How can you say no to this man.

Summoning @DroidKnight to lighten this thread up with a bit of shit-posting.

Literally just wrote out like 8 paragraphs for a post, only to realize that;
1) I'm not a writer for VGC
2) Nobody would bother to actually read all that, and
3) Everyone here has pretty much got their mind made up on how they feel about all this

So...whatever. Cheers to being a statistical minority.

Admittedly this opinion is based on an unverified leak, but if the leak is true, she absolutely deserves a large chunk of the blame. Yes, Chris Lee was in charge of the game, but she was his boss as 343 studio head. She watched Chris implementing these bad decisions described in the leak, like Chris implementing an open world design that forced players to complete a certain number of open world objectives before the next story mission would unlock, Chris not working out how co-op respawns and checkpoints would work within an open world before going forward with the open world idea, Chris not getting a team working on Forge early in development, Chris not pushing the graphics team to try and achieve the level of graphics from the Slipspace Engine reveal trailer ahead of showing off the game to the public the first time, etc. 

And then you have the failings that went on within her studio before Halo Infinite, particularly the disastrous launch of Halo MCC, and the shite storyline and poorly thought out lootbox system in Halo 5. How much of the blame for those mistakes lies on 343 and how much lies on the development partners on MCC, as well as how much of blame relies on Microsoft in regards to launching MCC in a clearly unfinished state and pushing for lootbox microtransactions, I don't know, but clearly some of the blame lies on Bonnie as studio head of 343. 

Let me put it this way, no other Xbox first party studio has as many issues as 343 has, only Rare comes close. How many 2nd chances does Bonnie deserve before we admit that alot of the fault lies on her decisions? She has at her disposal the 2nd largest Xbox first party team and her studio has had 5 and a half years to work on Halo Infinite, and still the game has issues with delayed content. 

I'm not sure why we should call for Bonnie's head based on a Reddit post that didn't even say she was the problem, heck, it doesn't mention her at all but he straight up suggests that Chris Lee was the problem, Lol. Imo, it would be a massive undertaking for anyone to run a studio like 343i on their own, Halo is a massive IP and it has so much expectations set on it, the pressure is enormous and there's a lot more expected of Halo compared to other games of its type, such as Battlefield or CoD.

Imo, I think Bonnie should co-run the studio with Joseph Staten, this ain't 2006 anymore and things are a lot harder nowadays, I don't think the solution should be to replace one person with another but rather to split responsibilities and share the burden (I mean, Joe did quit Bungie once only over an argument he had with Marcus Letho which gave us Halo 3's mess of a story).

This ain't about woke points for Microsoft either, y'all need to take a look at Bonnie's career as to why Microsoft put her there, she's a Microsoft employee first and foremost so likely someone they think they could have trusted more, she has 20+ years inside of Microsoft with roles ranging from Lead Producer, General Manager overseeing Production for all titles within Microsoft Game Studios, which included titles like Zoo Tycoon, Counter Strike, Gears of War, Jade Empire, Psychonauts, Mass Effect, Halo 3, Halo 3: ODST, Halo Reach.

Tim Schaffer even mentioned he only sold after talking to Bonnie Ross. Like her or not, she seems to be widely respected both inside and outside of Microsoft.

There should be questions asked of her leadership but I don't envy the position she is in, I also don't think it has all been bad, there has been positives aspects of 343's Halo, Infinite was definitely a big screw-up and that is Bonnie's responsibility but I struggle to fully pin the blame on Bonnie for Halo 5 content issues and MCC broken mess when for all we know, it could have been Microsoft forcing a date, we simply don't know the issues but we do know Microsoft has in the past been very unfair with release dates.

Also fact is, Microsoft is a business, if Bonnie wasn't making them big money, they'd dump her ass, Lol. (Not saying that's a good thing but Microsoft isn't keeping her around cause 'woke')

There is a massive amount of assumptions being thrown around and Armchair deving which is something that personally annoys me, it's easy for us to sit here with absolutely no experience in the industry, throwing around accusations from the comfort of our chairs, when the fact is we don't have a clue what is going on or who is to blame for what.

Unless there's a leak which says that Bonnie is to blame for absolutely everything, I for one will just wait for Jason's investigatory piece on the matter but I stand by my comment that two people should be leading 343 due to the enormity of the task, y'all can suggest Joe to lead it solo but that dude straight up left his team once due to an argument, an argument! Lol. There is A LOT of pressure that comes with running a franchise like Halo.

While the percentages for co-op campaign completion are decent, especially that 10% one, they are definitely still a minority compared to the overall playerbase, if only 10% got it then 90% didn't.

More concerning to me is the fact that the Reddit 343 leaker said that the dev team wants to delay the campaign and do a multiplayer only launch in 2021, not only because of co-op, but because they will have to cut other features to make release this year, and because the dev team feels like they need more time to stomp out the many bugs they created when Staten ordered drastic, but needed changes to Christopher Lee's campaign. If the dev team wants a campaign delay, I say give it to them. A multiplayer only launch is good enough for 2021, it's what the majority of the playerbase wants to play anyway, and the MP will still move a substantial amount of Xbox Series hardware this Holiday alongside Forza Horizon 5, if they even have enough stock ready for Halo and Forza to make any difference. 

Funny how we blame Don Matttrick for doing a bad job at handling the launch of the Xbox One because that’s his job but people don’t want to blame Bonnie Ross for the major mistakes from Halo 4-Infinite when it’s her job. 

Whens the reviews for Psychonauts start?

There is a massive amount of assumptions being thrown around and Armchair deving which is something that personally annoys me, it's easy for us to sit here with absolutely no experience in the industry, throwing around accusations from the comfort of our chairs, when the fact is we don't have a clue what is going on or who is to blame for what.