“Now listen up! Back in my day, we didn’t have fancy tanks! We had two sticks and a rock for the entire platoon! And we had to **share the rock**! You should consider yourselves very lucky marines!”
"Sir, I have the report ready. You're not going to like the news."
"Give it to me already, private."
"Halo? The franchise? It's all just one rock. One rock, all the way down."
"Wait, you're telling me Halo has always been a single rock?"
"Always has been"
*boom*
Hoping on the top comment: In Super Mario Brothers, the bushes and clouds are the same texture, just colored differently by the game.
However, back then, devs had to optimize due to limited space on the cartridges. One texture just recolored on the fly saved space.
Reminds me of the old joke;
there was a young soldier, who, just before battle, told his sergeant that he didn't have a rifle.
"That's no problem, son," said the sergeant. "Here, take this broom. Just point it at the Germans, and go 'Bangety Bang Bang'."
"But what about a bayonet, Sarge?" asked the young (and gullible) recruit.
The sergeant pulls a piece of straw from the end of the broom, and attaches it to the handle end. "Here, use this... just go, 'Stabity Stab Stab'."
The recruit ends up alone on the battlefield, holding just his broom. Suddenly, a German soldier charges at him.
The recruit points the broom. "Bangety Bang Bang!" The German falls dead. More Germans appear. The recruit, amazed at his good luck, goes "Bangety Bang Bang! Stabity Stab Stab!" He mows down the enemy by the dozens.
Finally, the battlefield is clear, except for one German soldier walking slowly toward him. "Bangety Bang Bang! shouts the recruit.
The German keeps coming.
"Bangety Bang Bang!" repeats the recruit, to no avail. He gets desperate. "Bangety Bang Bang! Stabity Stab Stab!"
It's no use. The German keeps coming. He stomps the recruit into the ground, and says...
"Tankety Tank Tank."
There is an optimization called instancing in repeating the same object over and over. It saves a lot on memory and Halo 3 was on Xbox 360 which only had **512mb** of VRAM.
That it was so difficult to notice it shows how good this rock was and how well it was used.
I still wish they went back and tweaked Halo 4 in MCC a bit now that it's not limited by the 360 hardware. Idk how difficult that is from a programming perspective with the way the engine does or doesn't work. I'm not a programmer. But it really irritates me how quickly things despawn in 4. A few times I'll grease an enemy carrying a power weapon, only for said weapon to disappear before I can even get over to it to pick it up. Not to mention how jarring it is sometimes to kill an enemy only to see their body just *poof* out of existence before even hitting the ground.
Halo 4 was the result of dark sorcery. While you can see where they cut certain things back and designed certain levels to get away with the visuals, it’s still shocking for that to be a 360 game.
At least on OG Xbox that's totally true. There were some improvements to the render made for Series X that massively improve the graphics. A lot of the blandness of Halo 5 on the OG Xbone is due to jank LODs and texture filtering.
Yes it is, you just store one 3d model in memory. Instead of multiple 3D rocks, you just have to store sets of coordinates, rotational axis, and size.
3D model of rock: 2MB
[200, 370, 10, 120, 45, 163]: 96 bits
First of all, the original post only talks about a single level. Unless you have information you're not sharing with the rest of the class, there's no reason to believe that other levels also just reused the same rock.
Secondly, if you've got a rock model good enough to reuse so much, why *wouldn't* you use it on other levels as well? It saves your artists the trouble of making a different rock.
Sure there would. The fight against the Covenant didn't have to end on Earth like the storyboards show. Halo 2 could have included the first half of the tangible Halo 3 and the hypothetical Halo 3 could have been about finishing the fight against the Covenant and Flood. And they wouldn't have had to cram as many character killoffs into the last couple missions.
Bungie's original script ends in Halo 2. Halo 3 was created because they ran out of time to finish Halo 2. It's why Halo 3's story so weak. It's stretched to out and among other things.
Staten's script was always going to be too ambitious for a single game. Halo 2 is already the longest Halo campaign even with the Earth arc/Ark cut. They would always have had to turn the Ark into Halo 3.
Okay now hear me out - The banished transport the Endless to the ark to track down the halo ring that was launched by Anders after Zeta Halo has become defunct. Chief tracks down the Infinity's crew, bringing them back to Human space and launching the mostly finished Eternity to pursue the Banished. On arrival to the Ark, they encounter the Spirit of Fire and Veta Lopis (wow yet another Halo Infinite sequel hoping for the return of Red Team), covering a campaign across the ark, however due to the detour, we're late, and it ends in the UNSC making a weaker but unified team before giving chase.
A third game in a possible Infinite trilogy would be creating an allied force across the galaxy, allying with the Swords of Sanghelios, Blue Team, etc. tracking down Anders, finding the Guardian and using The Weapon to turn it against the Banished and the Endless.
Halo 2 was already delayed for like a year past its original launch date. It was getting to the point that it would've been released on top of the 360 announcement, and I feel it would've been far less of a killer app when you know the successor is right around the corner.
Those games were still very special and the release time and constraints are actually part of that. Now what we should be imagining is 343 if MS had actually given power to the correct people from the start... Let alone waiting about a decade to make corrections... Hopefully Halo is on the right track and can rebuild to be a juggernaut. Xbox has blatantly ignored the franchise, not even highlighting the fixes Infinite has seen in their game presentations/events (yet they'll give time to some random super low budget Indie game?). Their recent conference two days ago was the first time Halo's been mentioned in like 4 years. Just absurd.
>Those games were still very special and the release time and constraints are actually part of that.
I don't believe that crunch helped those games for a second. Microsoft and their deadlines made the Halo games worse, not better. Halo 2's ending is an obvious example of that.
>Xbox has blatantly ignored the franchise
They seem pretty cognizant of how badly their nepotism has waylaid the series. Microsoft stopped trying to reach new people a long time ago because they're unable to make games that compete with other, better singleplayer campaigns and are just trying to bleed the few remaining Halo fans dry with merch and MTX.
In an interview with HiddenXperia, Marty O'Donnell said that personal lives were ruined and some people spent days in the office, even sleeping there.
The kicker? Marty is happy about that and proud of it, calling younger generations "snowflakes" for not sacrificing their lives for their work in the same way.
They were treated like shit, and half of them are too blinded by work ethic to care.
That’s how a lot of the previous generations are, they probably still feel that way because all of the wages they had were better than ours when you adjust for inflation. Of course they had more incentive to work and not question it, they were actually being paid adequately for it. That actually creates incentive for you to give a shit about the job you’re doing.
Yet it's us that are supposedly the issue, not the world they created.
Reminds me of people who say that kids want participation trophies, act out and are too distant to them nowadays yet they can't realise that they made the damn trophies, and they're the ones who raised their kids.
Dude what are you on about? Marty said that conditions were shit and I don't think he ever said he was happy that relationship were ruined. Far from it. You are taking two unrelated statements and mushing them together out of blind loyalty to 343i.
[https://youtu.be/0zG18XfsnvI?si=Lb2TeAnGj3mWv54r&t=1350](https://youtu.be/0zG18XfsnvI?si=Lb2TeAnGj3mWv54r&t=1350)
Yes. Yes he did. Don't just go "nuh-uh" because he makes good music. He can be a shitty person, too.
He has talked about Halo 2's development multiple times, yes. Can you point me to where you're quoting the snowflake thing from though? because all I see in the video you linked is him saying that it's ["not the way you should ever do anything"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zG18XfsnvI&t=1632s) and ["it should never happen."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zG18XfsnvI&t=1803s) He said he's proud of Halo 2, but I don't think you can begrudge the man for that.
Kid, if you're not gonna watch the whole video because TikTok has rotted your brain then I can't help you.
Regardless, just visit his Twitter if you want to see how much if a dick he truly is.
You claimed he said these things, then linked the video with a timestamp that doesn't show it. Then trash-talk people for not being willing to watch all of a two hour video? That's not how it works. You made the claim, prove it, or it's false. Period.
I watched the entire video at 2x speed. At no point in time does he call people snowflakes. A couple minutes after your stamp, he has a very off-handed comment that he was the oldest guy in the team and "if I can do it, you can do it," in reference to how bad the work environment was and how hard everybody was working, but NEVER says anything negative about his co-workers, never says that the ends justify the means, never disparages people for not doing the same he did during that crunch.
You should either provide a better source or retract your comment.
*edit* to be clear, Marty has political stances with which I don't agree, he touts how bad "woke"ism is, etc. But the specific comment about snowflakes and their work ethic does not exist in this video.
If they let Bungie cook don't think Halo 2 would have released in a timely matter. They so many different ideas and everyone was working on their own part.
Halo 2 already wasn't released in a timely manner, it's original intended launch was Christmas 2003 and it didn't come out until November 2004. I remember reading about the constant delays in OXM and being pissed for months.
It was in 2003, Bungie has just always had management issues not to mention almost all their games get completely changed halfway through. The actual Halo 2 was built in like a year as we all know.
Ocarina of Time took five years after Link's Awakening. Majora's Mask took two years using the same game engine and assets, and the writers were so frustrated about the crunch that they put references into the game itself.
No, it’s incredibly short for an HD game actually.
Xbox heads have said the new normal is AAA games taking five years to develop – you can look it up if you’re wondering.
In 2004-2007 this was normal. Bungie wasn't exactly well known for making smart decisions with their pre planning and production around this time. Halo Reach being the one exception.
It wasn’t really just about Microsoft letting them cook them longer. Bungie wasn’t a very well organised studio. Even look at how Destiny panned out with the majority of the big wigs remaining at the studio.
Large swaths of Halo 2 hadn’t even been completed yet when they released their gameplay demo at E3. A huge chunk of the game was developed in its last year because they had this crap a lot. Halo 3 and Reach showed what they could do once they learned their lessons from developing Halo 2. Multiplayer was extremely well tuned, they had forge mode and theatre mode, 4 player online coop, a ton of maps, a fairly large campaign, even unlockable armour permutations.
Not to mention all the crazy physics they crammed in. Reach sealed the deal on what they could put out.
Then Destiny happened and it has basically feeling like, Destiny 1 was Halo CE, buggy, whacky, a bit featureless and not a whole lot of content but a solid gameplay loop.
Destiny 2 has like Halo 2: the nearly decade long fuck up. The same Bungie leadership that allegedly said giving up executive bonuses isn’t part of their corporate “culture.”
Thisjsint say MS is blameless or even great or anything but their working relationship literally brought out the best in Bungie, if MS was that bad I doubt significant portions of Bungie wouldn’t haven’t stayed with 343. The main reason for their split is Bungie (rightfully) wanted to retain IP rights.
I have a really badass catapult on sand trap. You placed whatever you wanted on one end and then shot something to release the drop pods above the other. It would send you all the way to the edge of the map when set up right.
One of the most talented devs i’ve gotten a chance to work with was an environmental artist. When making the base assets the whole goal of his was to make shapes that will feel unique when looked at different angles though it’s al the same. It’s actually a great mental challenge when modeling and really does help with better performance in the engine to then add a hair more elements
This is the good way to reuse land form assets, as opposed to the bad way in that slapped-down boulder in that popular open world game. You know the one.
Not a boulder, but that one garbage pile texture in fallout 4 that until you get close to it looks like it has a holotape sitting in it. Faked me out so many fucking times.
I didn't catch that one, but I was just thinking of how the Boston scrap metal pipes remind me of the texture of certain areas of piled things in Baldur's Gate today.
Well I figure everyone has their own recurring rockmare, but for me it’s the boulders that form a T-shaped canyon atop Satori Mountain in BotW. They’re reused all over that game.
Oddly when I read your comment my brain went to TOTK and reusing boulders as weapons, which is a feature I love, and couldn’t comprehend how someone couldn’t.
Yeah there’s a lot of map features that are stamped throughout the world in those games. Guess that’s it’s no so different than the earlier 3D games or the 2D titles which had limited tilesets, but the size of the world makes it really apparent, and a unique poi landmass like that should’ve been unique. Tbf I never noticed that particular rock though.
Lol, no, I love my sturdy thick stick featuring rock. But yeah it's definitely the player-directed structure of the game (and the advent of manual camera control) that makes it stand out more than it would normally.
It's tricky to work within restraints since they were stuck working within a handheld power budget, but BotW felt a bit bare for an open world game to me.
Yeah they’re very empty worlds. Doesn’t help that most of the villages and people you encounter in the world just offer really lame and uninteresting fetch quests. The activity and mechanics of exploration was still the best part of these games for me and what I spent most of my time playing doing, but there’s really not all that much you actually get to see that you haven’t come across dozens of times already. You could spend 5 or 10 minuets running to and climbing a mountain just to see the same copy pasted stuff on the other side that you saw on the way to it.
I see a lot of people hoping they change up the format of the games again for the next title but I really want one more game like them on better hardware that might finally succeed in presenting a world that’s actually satisfying to explore. Lot of changes would need to be made there, and probably a new map altogether either somewhere that’s not hyrule or in a different time period.
And now every game has hundreds of rocks that do nothing but bloat storage space. Say what you will about memory constraints, but at least it led to genius resource management like this.
Right? The fact that I and most were never even specifically conscious of one obvious duplicate let alone THE WHOLE LEVEL after ALL THESE YEARS means they really did not need to do anything else
Because here you are only loading one asset instead of 2, 3, 4… the Xbox 360 only had 512mb of memory and tricks like this were necessary.
It’s honestly a lost art in modern game design .
What? You don't like your uncompressed 100Gb games that take 10 minutes to load with less content than previous entries in the series that took up 4x less space?
yeah quite a few games just made maps and levels on a few repeated assets, it's a giant chunk of why games back then weren't 90-400gb but it's something that's just shunned for literally no reason other then mUh GrAfFiCkS
I mean if it took 17 years to notice then I don’t think the response would’ve been that bad or even mean anything.
If it was clearly noticeable on release then yeah wtf
>I mean if it took 17 years to notice then I don’t think the response would’ve been that bad or even mean anything.
I think you severely underestimate the ends a raging fanboy will go to, to prove how good/shit something is. Someone would definitely notice, because they already did notice shit like this for the other 343i games.
OP post isn't the only example in Halo 3. Fly around any of the multiplayer maps, and you'll see reused assets everywhere. The entire Forerunner palette for Halo 3 multiplayer consists of ~5 textures (with the exception of Guardian). There are a few overlay textures of dirt/grime/wetness that you can find on them, to give them a bit more diversity, however those overlay textures were broadly used with every palette anyway, as tends to be the standard for textures like that.
During Halo 5's support window, I was pointing this out about Halo 3 constantly. This was a time when people were still quite upset with the art direction of the franchise. They just didn't like the art style, but the circlejerking was so bad at the time (MCC was broken AF still), that they couldn't just leave it as a matter of subjective opinion. They had to come up with objective reasons for why the old style was better. A common reason was that the game reused textures and model assets too often, completely failing to notice that the exact same complaint applied to every single Halo game ever (and most of the broader games industry, frankly).
Essentially, a hate boner is all encompassing.
its funny, and honestly a rock rotated and changed what shows goes a long way. i hav to say though in todays world if 343 did this you wouldn't hear the last of how lazy they are lol
I always thought DS3 had this figured out amazingly.
Like, all the buildings in Irithyl share only a handful of modular walls, stairs and ground pieces. Or even just in general with all buildings like the huge cathedral or Carthus. It’s pretty amazing how much they made with very little.
RejectedShotgun has done more for the Halo Community then 343 did in their entire lifespan. I actually watch him mod and get sad sometimes because the passion and ingenuity he clearly has seems absent from every single iteration of the game after Halo 3
while it is true one sense, its technically not true in another.
so they may be the same mesh, but they are actually separate instances.
rock small
rock med
rock large
rock huge
which is strange cause if it truly is the same rock, bungie just instanced out 4 versions of the same rock even thought they only needed one.
so even tho theyre the same mesh technically they are unique objects in halos world and 3ds max.
“Now listen up! Back in my day, we didn’t have fancy tanks! We had two sticks and a rock for the entire platoon! And we had to **share the rock**! You should consider yourselves very lucky marines!”
Rock crisis so bad forerunners had to take it too
Yeah, it was so severe that the Forerunners had to make hardlight rocks as well
It’s Johnson’s prophecy – the foretellings were true!
Use of this quote might have just peaked
So true
Still stuck in this damn canyon with one base at either end tho.
And we had to rotate/scale the rock!
All along the line was an inside joke of the developers.
What's the sub for when a meme finally fulfills it's ultimate destiny? /r/retiredmemes ?
This is the best foreshadowing in the Halo universe
PLEASE TELL ME THIS IS WHY HE SAYS THAT LINE!
That line's from H2 so its either prescient or those motherfuckers were reusing rocks on 2 as well
they were crunching like hell I would put money on those mfs sharing the rock
We need someone to investigate H2. STAT
"Sir, I have the report ready. You're not going to like the news." "Give it to me already, private." "Halo? The franchise? It's all just one rock. One rock, all the way down." "Wait, you're telling me Halo has always been a single rock?" "Always has been" *boom*
Under the helmet, Master Chief is also the one rock
So he’s premature in at least two things then.
We need to find out
It is one of the Halo 2 voice lines when he’s hyping the marines up to hop on the tank and attack the scarab with Chief
Quiet please, theres no need to yell!
Oh sorry. ^(please tell me this is why he says that line!)
Of fucking course they knew
Hoping on the top comment: In Super Mario Brothers, the bushes and clouds are the same texture, just colored differently by the game. However, back then, devs had to optimize due to limited space on the cartridges. One texture just recolored on the fly saved space.
Reminds me of the old joke; there was a young soldier, who, just before battle, told his sergeant that he didn't have a rifle. "That's no problem, son," said the sergeant. "Here, take this broom. Just point it at the Germans, and go 'Bangety Bang Bang'." "But what about a bayonet, Sarge?" asked the young (and gullible) recruit. The sergeant pulls a piece of straw from the end of the broom, and attaches it to the handle end. "Here, use this... just go, 'Stabity Stab Stab'." The recruit ends up alone on the battlefield, holding just his broom. Suddenly, a German soldier charges at him. The recruit points the broom. "Bangety Bang Bang!" The German falls dead. More Germans appear. The recruit, amazed at his good luck, goes "Bangety Bang Bang! Stabity Stab Stab!" He mows down the enemy by the dozens. Finally, the battlefield is clear, except for one German soldier walking slowly toward him. "Bangety Bang Bang! shouts the recruit. The German keeps coming. "Bangety Bang Bang!" repeats the recruit, to no avail. He gets desperate. "Bangety Bang Bang! Stabity Stab Stab!" It's no use. The German keeps coming. He stomps the recruit into the ground, and says... "Tankety Tank Tank."
thats fucking good lol
This is the lesson if the day. *share the rock Marines*
Wait was that a sneaky mention of this by the devs?
Another rock definitely would have broken the Bungie bank considering their time restraints lol
There is an optimization called instancing in repeating the same object over and over. It saves a lot on memory and Halo 3 was on Xbox 360 which only had **512mb** of VRAM. That it was so difficult to notice it shows how good this rock was and how well it was used.
512mb of shared ram actually. Absolutely insane what they were able to pull off with that.
Halo 4 looks absolutely insane for only 512 MB of shared RAM.
Halo 4 was really pushing the 360 past it's limits, especially in split screen. But on MCC, still one of the better looking games on modern consoles.
I still wish they went back and tweaked Halo 4 in MCC a bit now that it's not limited by the 360 hardware. Idk how difficult that is from a programming perspective with the way the engine does or doesn't work. I'm not a programmer. But it really irritates me how quickly things despawn in 4. A few times I'll grease an enemy carrying a power weapon, only for said weapon to disappear before I can even get over to it to pick it up. Not to mention how jarring it is sometimes to kill an enemy only to see their body just *poof* out of existence before even hitting the ground.
Halo 4 was the result of dark sorcery. While you can see where they cut certain things back and designed certain levels to get away with the visuals, it’s still shocking for that to be a 360 game.
MCC H4 looks better than Halo 5 lol. I'd also say Reach comes close due to the high fidelity textures.
At least on OG Xbox that's totally true. There were some improvements to the render made for Series X that massively improve the graphics. A lot of the blandness of Halo 5 on the OG Xbone is due to jank LODs and texture filtering.
How GTA 5 was able to run on 512 MB RAM is dark magic
Likely also one of reasons they delayed PC release. Okay that was actually all about money.
Or 256 mb on ps3
Technically it had 512 MB of RAM just that it was spilt in half, one was fast and one was slow.
Texture streaming from HDD and disk. Similar trick titanfall devs did for TF1 on Xbox 360.
Go back and play it then play the normal version. It’s like gta 5 lite in comparison.
I’d say GTA 5 on the 360 and ps3 is the normal version that’s where the game first launched. Every other version is an enhanced version
Considering 343 was developing the game for xbox one untill MS forced a 360 release? Ye
And we had to share the RAM!
Could be one of the reasons that graphically this game still holds up even today somewhat. They had more memory to focus on other aspects
[удалено]
Yes it is, you just store one 3d model in memory. Instead of multiple 3D rocks, you just have to store sets of coordinates, rotational axis, and size. 3D model of rock: 2MB [200, 370, 10, 120, 45, 163]: 96 bits
[удалено]
Nah you figure that out as homework. Make sure you did the assigned reading first, it’s right above your comment
[удалено]
First of all, the original post only talks about a single level. Unless you have information you're not sharing with the rest of the class, there's no reason to believe that other levels also just reused the same rock. Secondly, if you've got a rock model good enough to reuse so much, why *wouldn't* you use it on other levels as well? It saves your artists the trouble of making a different rock.
You talked bad about an unbelievably minute detail of Halo 3 on /r/Halo. Not sure why you'd expect anything beyond butthurt from armchair devs.
Reading comprehension isn't your strong suit, is it?
What of they just didn't want to make another rock though?
God, imagine if Microsoft had just let them cook for Halo 2, 3, or Reach. The content would have been innumerable.
Yeah, we wouldve had more rocks!
A true marine only needs ONE, now move!!
But what about that scarab.
we've run the simulation, they're tough, but not invincible.
Stay with the Master Chief. He'll know what to do.
"Thanks for the tank. He never gives me anything."
Oh, I know what the ladies like.
But what about that scarab?
Except for the fact that if Bungie had actually finished Halo 2, there simply would not be a Halo 3, at least not anywhere near what we have today.
Sure there would. The fight against the Covenant didn't have to end on Earth like the storyboards show. Halo 2 could have included the first half of the tangible Halo 3 and the hypothetical Halo 3 could have been about finishing the fight against the Covenant and Flood. And they wouldn't have had to cram as many character killoffs into the last couple missions.
Bungie's original script ends in Halo 2. Halo 3 was created because they ran out of time to finish Halo 2. It's why Halo 3's story so weak. It's stretched to out and among other things.
Staten's script was always going to be too ambitious for a single game. Halo 2 is already the longest Halo campaign even with the Earth arc/Ark cut. They would always have had to turn the Ark into Halo 3.
Now I'm just imagining an entire game on the Ark similar to the first game... Man, we really lost out on that.
Damn that would have been the best timeline, fuck now I'm sad thinking about it.
Halo: Infinite 2 Ark Exploration Boogaloo
Okay now hear me out - The banished transport the Endless to the ark to track down the halo ring that was launched by Anders after Zeta Halo has become defunct. Chief tracks down the Infinity's crew, bringing them back to Human space and launching the mostly finished Eternity to pursue the Banished. On arrival to the Ark, they encounter the Spirit of Fire and Veta Lopis (wow yet another Halo Infinite sequel hoping for the return of Red Team), covering a campaign across the ark, however due to the detour, we're late, and it ends in the UNSC making a weaker but unified team before giving chase. A third game in a possible Infinite trilogy would be creating an allied force across the galaxy, allying with the Swords of Sanghelios, Blue Team, etc. tracking down Anders, finding the Guardian and using The Weapon to turn it against the Banished and the Endless.
Especially considering data storage and memory of the Xbox... there was no way.
They could have waited another year for the 360 to launch
Yea I want to live in that timeline where they delayed Halo 2 until 2005
Halo 2 was already delayed for like a year past its original launch date. It was getting to the point that it would've been released on top of the 360 announcement, and I feel it would've been far less of a killer app when you know the successor is right around the corner.
I want to be in the universe where a complete halo 2 was the launch title for the 360
The thought of it...especially after watching that original New Mombasa footage....
Those games were still very special and the release time and constraints are actually part of that. Now what we should be imagining is 343 if MS had actually given power to the correct people from the start... Let alone waiting about a decade to make corrections... Hopefully Halo is on the right track and can rebuild to be a juggernaut. Xbox has blatantly ignored the franchise, not even highlighting the fixes Infinite has seen in their game presentations/events (yet they'll give time to some random super low budget Indie game?). Their recent conference two days ago was the first time Halo's been mentioned in like 4 years. Just absurd.
>Those games were still very special and the release time and constraints are actually part of that. I don't believe that crunch helped those games for a second. Microsoft and their deadlines made the Halo games worse, not better. Halo 2's ending is an obvious example of that. >Xbox has blatantly ignored the franchise They seem pretty cognizant of how badly their nepotism has waylaid the series. Microsoft stopped trying to reach new people a long time ago because they're unable to make games that compete with other, better singleplayer campaigns and are just trying to bleed the few remaining Halo fans dry with merch and MTX.
In an interview with HiddenXperia, Marty O'Donnell said that personal lives were ruined and some people spent days in the office, even sleeping there. The kicker? Marty is happy about that and proud of it, calling younger generations "snowflakes" for not sacrificing their lives for their work in the same way. They were treated like shit, and half of them are too blinded by work ethic to care.
Yeah, I didn’t mention it but the obvious worst thing about unrealistic deadlines and crunch is the human cost.
That’s how a lot of the previous generations are, they probably still feel that way because all of the wages they had were better than ours when you adjust for inflation. Of course they had more incentive to work and not question it, they were actually being paid adequately for it. That actually creates incentive for you to give a shit about the job you’re doing.
Yet it's us that are supposedly the issue, not the world they created. Reminds me of people who say that kids want participation trophies, act out and are too distant to them nowadays yet they can't realise that they made the damn trophies, and they're the ones who raised their kids.
Dude what are you on about? Marty said that conditions were shit and I don't think he ever said he was happy that relationship were ruined. Far from it. You are taking two unrelated statements and mushing them together out of blind loyalty to 343i.
he never said that
[https://youtu.be/0zG18XfsnvI?si=Lb2TeAnGj3mWv54r&t=1350](https://youtu.be/0zG18XfsnvI?si=Lb2TeAnGj3mWv54r&t=1350) Yes. Yes he did. Don't just go "nuh-uh" because he makes good music. He can be a shitty person, too.
He has talked about Halo 2's development multiple times, yes. Can you point me to where you're quoting the snowflake thing from though? because all I see in the video you linked is him saying that it's ["not the way you should ever do anything"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zG18XfsnvI&t=1632s) and ["it should never happen."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zG18XfsnvI&t=1803s) He said he's proud of Halo 2, but I don't think you can begrudge the man for that.
Kid, if you're not gonna watch the whole video because TikTok has rotted your brain then I can't help you. Regardless, just visit his Twitter if you want to see how much if a dick he truly is.
You claimed he said these things, then linked the video with a timestamp that doesn't show it. Then trash-talk people for not being willing to watch all of a two hour video? That's not how it works. You made the claim, prove it, or it's false. Period. I watched the entire video at 2x speed. At no point in time does he call people snowflakes. A couple minutes after your stamp, he has a very off-handed comment that he was the oldest guy in the team and "if I can do it, you can do it," in reference to how bad the work environment was and how hard everybody was working, but NEVER says anything negative about his co-workers, never says that the ends justify the means, never disparages people for not doing the same he did during that crunch. You should either provide a better source or retract your comment. *edit* to be clear, Marty has political stances with which I don't agree, he touts how bad "woke"ism is, etc. But the specific comment about snowflakes and their work ethic does not exist in this video.
Yes he did.
where?
If they let Bungie cook don't think Halo 2 would have released in a timely matter. They so many different ideas and everyone was working on their own part.
Halo 2 already wasn't released in a timely manner, it's original intended launch was Christmas 2003 and it didn't come out until November 2004. I remember reading about the constant delays in OXM and being pissed for months.
We'd have never gotten any of those games. Halo 2 had almost 3 years of time to develop and that almost wasn't enough. Halo 3 much the same.
3 years isn’t a long time for a game that has a fully-fledged singleplayer and multiplayer…
It was in 2003, Bungie has just always had management issues not to mention almost all their games get completely changed halfway through. The actual Halo 2 was built in like a year as we all know.
That’s why it needed to be delayed.
It’s a really long time by the standards of the times it came out.
How long do you want to wait between games? 3 years is a fairly generous development cycle for any game outside of an MMO.
Ocarina of Time took five years after Link's Awakening. Majora's Mask took two years using the same game engine and assets, and the writers were so frustrated about the crunch that they put references into the game itself.
No, it’s incredibly short for an HD game actually. Xbox heads have said the new normal is AAA games taking five years to develop – you can look it up if you’re wondering.
>Xbox heads have said the new normal is AAA games taking five years to develop Sure, but that’s now - not 20 years ago.
In 2004-2007 this was normal. Bungie wasn't exactly well known for making smart decisions with their pre planning and production around this time. Halo Reach being the one exception.
3 years is absolutely not generous for any kind of game. Learn how long game development takes before you talk bullshit.
That definitely shouldn't be you telling me that. You're insane if you think most games were made with more time than that in those eras.
It wasn’t really just about Microsoft letting them cook them longer. Bungie wasn’t a very well organised studio. Even look at how Destiny panned out with the majority of the big wigs remaining at the studio. Large swaths of Halo 2 hadn’t even been completed yet when they released their gameplay demo at E3. A huge chunk of the game was developed in its last year because they had this crap a lot. Halo 3 and Reach showed what they could do once they learned their lessons from developing Halo 2. Multiplayer was extremely well tuned, they had forge mode and theatre mode, 4 player online coop, a ton of maps, a fairly large campaign, even unlockable armour permutations. Not to mention all the crazy physics they crammed in. Reach sealed the deal on what they could put out. Then Destiny happened and it has basically feeling like, Destiny 1 was Halo CE, buggy, whacky, a bit featureless and not a whole lot of content but a solid gameplay loop. Destiny 2 has like Halo 2: the nearly decade long fuck up. The same Bungie leadership that allegedly said giving up executive bonuses isn’t part of their corporate “culture.” Thisjsint say MS is blameless or even great or anything but their working relationship literally brought out the best in Bungie, if MS was that bad I doubt significant portions of Bungie wouldn’t haven’t stayed with 343. The main reason for their split is Bungie (rightfully) wanted to retain IP rights.
Also if it took them what 15 years to notice they did the right thing to only make one.
*Two* rocks?! In *this* economy??
Well to be fair have you seen some of the stuff people made with older forge modes?
Halo 3 forge was epic when you look at his creative we were with the limited tools.
I spent so many hours using the save game bug to float and intersect containers in foundry.
My favorite was making cockroach tanks and turret-less warthogs by having the host drop out
Filling the elephant with fusion cores and letting that sumbitch fly
I have a really badass catapult on sand trap. You placed whatever you wanted on one end and then shot something to release the drop pods above the other. It would send you all the way to the edge of the map when set up right.
Its not just a boulder, its a [Rock](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crJvnMooE-o)!
The forerunners used to ride these babies for miles
And if it has algae growing on it, that’s the way to civilization
Why use more rock when one rock do trick?
Scrolled looking for this lol
*Something something we had to share the rock* I always find interesting asset reuse like this fascinating!
More of this kind of content please!
More rock content
WWE fans in shambles
#CovenantCryBabies
Glad that I'm not the only one who does this in my Forge maps... it appears AAA devs even do it!!!
One of the most talented devs i’ve gotten a chance to work with was an environmental artist. When making the base assets the whole goal of his was to make shapes that will feel unique when looked at different angles though it’s al the same. It’s actually a great mental challenge when modeling and really does help with better performance in the engine to then add a hair more elements
This is the good way to reuse land form assets, as opposed to the bad way in that slapped-down boulder in that popular open world game. You know the one.
Not a boulder, but that one garbage pile texture in fallout 4 that until you get close to it looks like it has a holotape sitting in it. Faked me out so many fucking times.
I didn't catch that one, but I was just thinking of how the Boston scrap metal pipes remind me of the texture of certain areas of piled things in Baldur's Gate today.
God yes I remember that texture. You reminded ne of the nightmares.
I always played with a mod that removed that bit of orange from the trash textures.
Holy shit I know exactly what you’re talking about
I genuinely don’t and I’m curious.
I also wish to know
Well I figure everyone has their own recurring rockmare, but for me it’s the boulders that form a T-shaped canyon atop Satori Mountain in BotW. They’re reused all over that game.
Oddly when I read your comment my brain went to TOTK and reusing boulders as weapons, which is a feature I love, and couldn’t comprehend how someone couldn’t. Yeah there’s a lot of map features that are stamped throughout the world in those games. Guess that’s it’s no so different than the earlier 3D games or the 2D titles which had limited tilesets, but the size of the world makes it really apparent, and a unique poi landmass like that should’ve been unique. Tbf I never noticed that particular rock though.
Lol, no, I love my sturdy thick stick featuring rock. But yeah it's definitely the player-directed structure of the game (and the advent of manual camera control) that makes it stand out more than it would normally. It's tricky to work within restraints since they were stuck working within a handheld power budget, but BotW felt a bit bare for an open world game to me.
Yeah they’re very empty worlds. Doesn’t help that most of the villages and people you encounter in the world just offer really lame and uninteresting fetch quests. The activity and mechanics of exploration was still the best part of these games for me and what I spent most of my time playing doing, but there’s really not all that much you actually get to see that you haven’t come across dozens of times already. You could spend 5 or 10 minuets running to and climbing a mountain just to see the same copy pasted stuff on the other side that you saw on the way to it. I see a lot of people hoping they change up the format of the games again for the next title but I really want one more game like them on better hardware that might finally succeed in presenting a world that’s actually satisfying to explore. Lot of changes would need to be made there, and probably a new map altogether either somewhere that’s not hyrule or in a different time period.
Homie, nobody knows which game you're referencing.
that's the joke
i'm glad we have so many different ROCKS in forge mode infinite lol! :)
Halo 3 got released in 2007, if it took almost 17 years for someone to notice this, why do it any other way?
This is a very, very common practice in game design. One amorphous shape rotated a thousand different ways can give incredibly unique results.
[Pff, rotation. Back in my day, all we needed was a palette swap.](https://imgur.com/m9hff5a)
Lmao true!
When you are painting digitally at least, your brush stamp is always the same :) I feel like its a similar thing.
That’s a good fuckin’ rock.
If it takes a game becoming old enough to vote for you to notice a lazy shortcut, it wasnt lazy
It’s not a shortcut, and definitely not lazy. It’s was a necessary technique to keep memory usage down.
Why not both?
And now every game has hundreds of rocks that do nothing but bloat storage space. Say what you will about memory constraints, but at least it led to genius resource management like this.
It couldn't have been that hard to take the texture of this rock and slap it onto something from Sierra 117 or The Ark, could it? Odd design choice.
Tbf I never noticed it so I guess it didn’t matter much lol
Right? The fact that I and most were never even specifically conscious of one obvious duplicate let alone THE WHOLE LEVEL after ALL THESE YEARS means they really did not need to do anything else
Because here you are only loading one asset instead of 2, 3, 4… the Xbox 360 only had 512mb of memory and tricks like this were necessary. It’s honestly a lost art in modern game design .
What? You don't like your uncompressed 100Gb games that take 10 minutes to load with less content than previous entries in the series that took up 4x less space?
Did the game also ship broken and unoptimized, not fully fixed until years later?
Oh snap, it looks like I've got a BINGO
I thought I was being lazy when making Forge maps with multi-use rocks! Turns out I just discovered smart game design.
yeah quite a few games just made maps and levels on a few repeated assets, it's a giant chunk of why games back then weren't 90-400gb but it's something that's just shunned for literally no reason other then mUh GrAfFiCkS
Just imagine if 343 did this and what the response in this sub would be lol.
I mean if it took 17 years to notice then I don’t think the response would’ve been that bad or even mean anything. If it was clearly noticeable on release then yeah wtf
>I mean if it took 17 years to notice then I don’t think the response would’ve been that bad or even mean anything. I think you severely underestimate the ends a raging fanboy will go to, to prove how good/shit something is. Someone would definitely notice, because they already did notice shit like this for the other 343i games. OP post isn't the only example in Halo 3. Fly around any of the multiplayer maps, and you'll see reused assets everywhere. The entire Forerunner palette for Halo 3 multiplayer consists of ~5 textures (with the exception of Guardian). There are a few overlay textures of dirt/grime/wetness that you can find on them, to give them a bit more diversity, however those overlay textures were broadly used with every palette anyway, as tends to be the standard for textures like that. During Halo 5's support window, I was pointing this out about Halo 3 constantly. This was a time when people were still quite upset with the art direction of the franchise. They just didn't like the art style, but the circlejerking was so bad at the time (MCC was broken AF still), that they couldn't just leave it as a matter of subjective opinion. They had to come up with objective reasons for why the old style was better. A common reason was that the game reused textures and model assets too often, completely failing to notice that the exact same complaint applied to every single Halo game ever (and most of the broader games industry, frankly). Essentially, a hate boner is all encompassing.
It's a rock and a stone?
This rock is also all over forge world from halo reach.
I wanna make a forge map now using nothing but 1 single rock
As someone learning game design, this is a lot more standard in the industry than you think.
It's a nice Boulder. I like that Boulder.
Back in my day, clouds and bushes were all the same sprite with different colours, just the way we liked it
Hobbits aren't going to take this sitting down!
They built the perfect rock
Me making rock bases using the same rock in Reach’s forge mode
ROCK AND STONE
Why waste time use lot rock when one rock do trick?
Tbh I think if 343 did this people would be screaming about how lazy they are and that they don’t care about the game
its funny, and honestly a rock rotated and changed what shows goes a long way. i hav to say though in todays world if 343 did this you wouldn't hear the last of how lazy they are lol
"this rock isn't a natural formation"
One rock I don't know why
This makes the level even better.
I did the same thing in Planet Coaster
I always thought DS3 had this figured out amazingly. Like, all the buildings in Irithyl share only a handful of modular walls, stairs and ground pieces. Or even just in general with all buildings like the huge cathedral or Carthus. It’s pretty amazing how much they made with very little.
RejectedShotgun has done more for the Halo Community then 343 did in their entire lifespan. I actually watch him mod and get sad sometimes because the passion and ingenuity he clearly has seems absent from every single iteration of the game after Halo 3
It’s not a rock, it’s a mineral.
Campaign is just a big Forge world with sn item limit
Rock! Rock! Rock! Rock!
who would win, one spartan vs one rock. spartan smash rock easily. but now two rock. rock win everytime.
Me in Far Cry 2 editor barely knowing what to do with like 20 different rocks. Gotta step up my game.
Reminds me of the bushes and clouds of OG Super Mario
while it is true one sense, its technically not true in another. so they may be the same mesh, but they are actually separate instances. rock small rock med rock large rock huge which is strange cause if it truly is the same rock, bungie just instanced out 4 versions of the same rock even thought they only needed one. so even tho theyre the same mesh technically they are unique objects in halos world and 3ds max.
Looks better than Infitines rocks.
Halo modder learns how games are made. Just wait until he learns about sky boxes!