Halo: The Master Chief Collection is a Broken Game

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In what was supposed to be a love letter to fans, Halo: The Master Chief Collection has turned out to be a great disservice to those who have loved and followed the franchise for years. It’s been almost two weeks since its release and, even with one huge patch, the game is broken on a colossal scale. I understand that it must have been hard to compile four games into one and making it so we can relive the Halo CE and Halo 2 games in online multiplayer again and for that I’m truly grateful. But that doesn’t excuse the fact that they pushed this game out the door with so many issues that it truly baffles me that it made it past quality assurance. Here are the issues I’ve personally seen since Halo released last Tuesday and that’s including the recent patch.

     -Insanely long wait times to find a match. Every now and then I can get a match within minutes, but after that game is over I usually have to wait 10-15 to find another suitable game. Hell, even when you find a game there are issues.

     -The match has been found, teams have been set, but the game never starts. It pretends to start and just as I get fed up and ready to leave it takes us to a post game carnage report that states the match was incomplete. No shit. It never even started.

     -Uneven teams. This is probably the most annoying thing to come across. You wait as long as you do to get a game only to wind up on a team of four going against a team of six. Halo CE through Halo 3 are all multiplayer games that rely heavily on teamwork,   weapon control, and map control. You have no idea how easy it is to gain weapon and map control when you out number the other team by even one person. Not all is lost. I’ve been playing team slayer a lot and I have won a decent share of games when we were out numbered, but I’ve lost even more. This is also not to   say that I haven’t been on the team with more people, but even that is less fun because it’s all too easy to dominate the other squad. So you can either take your chances and get walloped or you can be the one doing the walloping, regardless, it makes for a game not as   fun as I remember.

     -Halo CE and Halo 2 seem to have issues with registering shots on other players. I’m not sure if this is because someone in the match is hosting the game, even though we’re supposed to be on dedicated servers, or if it’s an actual issue with the game. In Halo CE I’ve peppered entire clips of a pistol into someone’s head and detonated a grenade right at their feet and they just walked away unharmed while I faced a cold and brutal defeat. The beautiful thing about the Xbox One is that I can now record proof of things like this when they happen, and I have. Halo 2 it’s less noticeable but it’s still there. Same scenario where it takes more than it should to kill someone.

     -Getting friends into your lobby is a freaking pain in the ass. More often than not we’ve had to completely reset Halo in order for this to work. I’ll accept a game invite and wait minutes before being dragged into the game, if it takes me at all, or it tells me that it failed. Once you are in a group I’ve found wait times to be much longer than if I were searching by myself. Hell, any of the issues I stated before this become more annoying when you’re with a group of people. Especially if you can’t find a game and you have to back out to restart the search because…

     -Every time your party leader has to back out of a search or tries to back out after the completion of a game, the whole party is split up and you must then go through the trouble of getting back together. This seems to be a tiny bit better since the patch, but it’s still troublesome enough to mention here.

     -I’ve experienced a one second delay in campaign that makes shooting, melee, and diving for cover simply pointless. I have only played one level and I was connected to a friend of mine who was hosting the game, so I’m not sure if it was a straight up lag issue or not. I’ll have to test out the mission again by myself to see if I experience the same thing.

So there you have it, all those issues are just what I’ve experienced, but if you care enough to read this you’ll know that there are dozens of other issues that people are having. Hell, if you look at 343’s patch notes it was such an ungodly long list of crap that truly has baffled me. How does a game have this much wrong with it and they didn’t catch it before it came out? It feels like a cash grab that was rushed out before it was ready and that is truly disappointing to me. I love Halo and have been a huge fan since the first day I’ve played it. I have the all the Halo related soundtracks, novels, and comics. Hell I even purchased the legendary edition of Halo 3 that came with a statue of Master Chief’s helmet. So when I’m told by other fans to suck it up and wait, it pisses me off. Prepare yourself for a rant on how much I hate apologists.

First off, stop apologizing for 343. You people do not owe this company anything and they most certainly do not owe you anything. Granted, I say kudos to them for fixing their game, or attempting to, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to sit back and take it lying down like Jody Foster in The Accused. They don’t have to fix the multiplayer issues if they don’t want to. Hell we all already forked over our cash to them for a broken game. Luckily they want to sell Halo 5 next year and they most certainly need to save face here. But people on the Internet are so annoying about this. You cannot complain about the game being broken without being called an impatient noob. Seriously? I paid money for a broken game that I have wanted to play since the day it was announced but I can’t because it’s broken and that makes me impatient? How about I’m pissed because I feel duped. More and more these days companies are releasing broken games and the apologists are saying, “hey guys, relax while they fix it, go play something else,” or “it’s only sixty bucks, are you that broke?”

That’s not the point. No I’m not broke and I’m not impatient. When I hand my money over for a product, I expect that product to work. I wouldn’t have minded waiting a few extra months for them to polish this game before releasing it, but the fact that I can load it up and still not play it is very frustrating. What if you purchased a car that promised you an amazing CD player or heated seats or something and they didn’t work? I bet money you’d throw a fit over it and would be back at that dealership to raise hell. You wouldn’t be all content with waiting weeks after your purchase for them to fix what they promised to give you in the first place. The same goes for phones, tablets, and whatever other technological product you bought that didn’t work as advertised. This isn’t like going to McDonalds and not getting the extra fries you asked for.

What these apologists don’t understand is that it’s not about the money we spend on the product; it’s about our relationship with the people who create these things we love so much. If they release a broken product and you’re content with them and patient while they iron it out, then why wouldn’t they just continue to do that for future games? We already see enough day one patches for every game that is released and that tells me they ship games that aren’t finished in the first place. Sure those day one patches usually fix issues we’ll never see, but that is obviously not always the case. So if we stand idly by why developers do this kind of stuff then we’re saying it’s okay for them to continually do it in the future and it’s not. Raise hell like people did with the Mass Effect 3 ending that caused Bioware to release a free extended cut. Raise hell like people did when Microsoft threatened to impose unwanted restrictions on your gaming with the Xbox One that caused them to do away with them. We have a voice people! Use it.

So by now you’re probably wondering why I haven’t returned the game and I’m sure this will make me sound like a hypocrite, but it’s fun. When I can actually get into a game with even teams it’s fun as hell and takes me back to ten years ago when I was in my first year of college. All I would do is go to school, hit up my part time job, and play Halo 2 until I passed out. All those amazing LAN parties I had with family and friends can now be re-lived and I Just want it to work the way it was advertised. I will not buy Halo 5 unless there is a way I can snag it for free. I WILL NOT give 343 any more of my money until they can prove they can make a game that isn’t broken upon release. I know it’s going to be super hard for me to do that when the time comes because I’m sure this whole thing will be resolved and put behind us, but I have to make a statement to them and every other company. I won’t buy games anymore until I know they released and are functionally working. With that being said, I’m going to go enjoy more Sunset Overdrive because at least that game has been working since the moment I downloaded it. I’ll try writing a blog about that game because MY GOD it’s amazing.

The Matter of Choice in The Walking Dead Games

SPOILER ALERT!! THE FOLLOWING CONTAINS MASSIVE SPOILERS FROM THE WALKING DEAD GAME SEASONS ONE AND TWO. BUT I’M GUESSING IF YOU HAVEN’T PLAYED THEM BY NOW THEN YOU REALLY HAVE NO INTENTIONS OF EVER DOING SO AND YOU MAY NOT EVEN CARE WHAT I HAVE TO SAY. REGARDLESS, IF YOU PLAN ON PLAYING THESE GAMES, DON’T READ THE FOLLOWING BECAUSE IT’S GOING TO SPOIL THE CRAP OUT OF EVERYTHING AND YOU ONLY HAVE YOURSELF TO BLAME FOR NOT TAKING FIVE SECONDS TO READ THIS SMALL, ALL CAPS MESSAGE.

The Walking Dead games use story as a game play mechanic and it has truly innovated the way stories can be told in an interactive medium. I wanted to talk about these two stories in particular because I have recently played through both of them a second time and realized that these games, despite their amazing stories, totally fumble the whole, your choice changes the game, thing. Or perhaps it’s us who misunderstood the intentions of the choices given.

The first thing that stands out about The Walking Dead is that the story is decided based on the decisions you make. Haha I’m totally kidding! Your journey is determined by your choice, not the story itself. Regardless of the many choices you’re given throughout the entire franchise, The Walking Dead games tell the exact story they intend to tell. Let’s look at some examples.

Lee is still going to die after his zombie bite. It doesn’t matter if you choose to have his arm cut off or not. You’re still going to sit through that terribly emotional scene where, in my case, I had Clementine shoot him. Rough stuff.

That scene with Lee confronting Clementine’s kidnapper plays out EXACTLY THE SAME WAY, even if you played the game totally different the second time around. Seriously, his primary beef with you and your crew is when everyone stole his supplies, which in turn caused his wife to leave him and wind up dying. Play the game differently and try not to steal his stuff and your group robs his ass blind anyway and he still thinks you’re the world’s biggest asshole despite the fact that you sat on the sidelines.

I saved Carly instead of Doug because I thought maybe being her knight in shining armor would get me laid. I saved Doug the second time around because I knew Carly wasn’t going to put out. Doesn’t matter though because not only did Doug also fail to put out, but he is still shot in the face by Lilly the same way Carly was.

I saved Duck instead of Shawn because he was the helpless little boy. The second time around I saved Shawn instead. What happened? Duck still gets saved and Shawn still winds up being a human happy meal. The only difference is that you piss Kenny off and have to spend the rest of the game with him reminding you of what a dick move that was.

I helped Kenny drop a salt lick on Larry’s head when he died. What happens if you play it differently? Well, instead of helping Kenny drop a salt lick on Larry’s head, I helped Lilly try to revive him. Guess what happened? Kenny dropped it on his freaking head anyway, only this time Lilly wasn’t mad at me. Still, that didn’t stop her from becoming a psychotic team killing fuck tard.

So the game doesn’t really adapt to your choices in a way that determines the ending. Think of each decision as a fork in a road. Each side of that fork will be different, but in the end the roads are connected again.

Season Two plays out the same way. No matter what you do you can’t save Pete or Alvin, Arvo still brings his gang after you and winds up shooting you, and Kenny will definitely get his face smashed in by Carver. Probably the most annoying thing in Season Two, for me any way, was Luke’s death. You can either not help him and watch him drown, or you can try to help him, fall in the lake, get saved by Luke, and watch a zombie drag him down where he’ll drown anyway as he’s being simultaneously eaten. That scene just feels like a slap in the face. Like who cares? Why bother saving him if there is no chance he makes it off of this frozen lake either way?

People boast about Season 2 having like five different endings and they’re wrong. There’s five different ways to reach the end, but the end is the same regardless. It’s just a matter of who will be standing next to you when you get to that point. Clementine and the baby will be there every time. But did you let Kenny kill Jane (you’re an ass if you did)? Or did you shoot Kenny? From there you can either forgive the victor and they’ll join you or you can choose to go your own way. So in reality there is one ending, just multiple different choices you can make as to who will be with you.

One other thing I’ve learned from playing these games twice is there are no good choices, ever. You’re always a douche bag to someone. Even if you try to play neutral, you’re decisions always seem to have a negative consequence. The entirety of Season One is like that. Quite literally everything you did for Clementine as Lee (our hero) is used against you at the end when the kidnapper tells you how terrible you’ve done raising a little girl in the apocalypse. Like there’s a right way? Of course he says this to you moments before he opens a bowling bag with his dead wife’s zombie head inside and starts talking to it. I’m sure that’s less emotionally jarring to a little girl than teaching her how to defend herself against the dead people trying to eat her.   

Regardless of that crazy bastard, other characters judge the living piss out of you. Did you try save Omid or his pregnant girlfriend, Christa, as they tried jumping onto the train? Doesn’t matter, the person you saved first will verbally attack you for not saving the other person before them, even though you wind up saving them both. Um, you’re fucking welcome! At one point you’re tasked with passing out five food items to people when there are eleven in your group. Yet instead of people being understanding adults and letting the kids eat first, they gripe at you like the selfish babies they are.

How about the cannibal farm? Oh it wasn’t really just my idea to come out to this farm and trade gas for some of their food during a time where only some of us got to eat today, right? I mean, we were all kind of like, starving and wanting food. Yet when we realized we were eating our wounded pal, who we thought was being taken care of by these awfully nice farm folk, it’s all of a sudden my fault that we were there. Piss off people. Kenny got pissed off because I put a girl out of her misery while she was being eaten alive. So selfish was he to use her as a distraction while we got away. Imagine dying a painful death where human teeth are ripping your flesh right off of you. Yeah, shoot me if that’s ever happening to me. Regardless, if you let her live the zombies still find and chase you. Some good that did.

Don’t let any of this deter you. If you’ve read this far and still want to play these games, despite me having ruined everything, I implore you to do so! You have to understand that your choices will not put a dent in how the story is played out, but that story is just so amazing. The relationship between Lee and Clementine is so strong that when its foundation is shook, you cannot help but feel the real human pain these fictional characters can’t. I won’t lie. I cried a couple of times during the first game. Watching as the young Duck dies from his zombie bite was tragic to me and not just because I’m a dad. Watching his parents walk him out into the woods all I could hear is his harsh shallow breathing and it just crushed me. That entire scene was tragic. If you have played this game and didn’t shed a tear as Lee had to say goodbye to Clementine then you’re a sociopath who probably murders people for fun.

So with all of this said it’s hard to harp on The Walking Dead games because they are truly amazing experience to have as a gamer. I just feel there is a misconception on what your choices are intended to do. I’m not sure if that stems from the developer telling us that the choices effect the game or if it’s us gamers assuming that a game that includes choice must provide us different conclusions. Regardless, this is a fantastic franchise and I look forward to Season Three.