- Halo 4 creative director Ryan Payton leaves 343 studios before a single game was shipped. Payton claims that he was "no longer creatively excited" and formed his own independent company. Payton is the guy responsible for MGS4's overhauled mechanics and is pretty well regarded. That's a pretty big shakeup - what does it say about where Halo 4 is at if the guy jumped ship a year before it was scheduled to release? http://www.gamespot.com/news/6332841/halo-4-creative-director-jumps-ship
- Guardian Heroes re-dated for October 12. I've seen it on torrent sites so it certainly seems to be done, but "oops".
- Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet getting some DLC next week. It's something called "Shadow Hunters" - I can't find any info on it thus far. Tons of stuff out this month on the Xbox Marketplace - http://majornelson.com/2011/09/06/coming-soon-to-the-xbox-live-marketplace-9/ - I'm actually pretty curious to see if Crimson Alliance is good. And Bloodrayne is getting pretty good press, too.
- I thought this was funny: Ubisoft messed up printing Online Pass codes for Driver: San Francisco and had to scrap the whole program. http://t.co/Ue0i03q
- Dead Island had an early version mistakenly posted to Steam. The version had XBOX LIVE SUBMISSION PROJECT VERSION plastered all over it and had dozens of bugs. More funny stuff. http://pc.ign.com/articles/119/1192610p1.html
From: transience | Posted: 9/6/2011 6:01:22 PM | #001 - Halo 4 creative director Ryan Payton leaves 343 studios before a single game was shipped. Payton claims that he was "no longer creatively excited" and formed his own independent company.
I don't think the Ryan Payton thing is that big of a deal. It sounds like he was quite interested in starting his own company and just didn't share the same vision as the rest of 343 in regards to Halo 4's story. He didn't say anything bad about the game and there is still a ton of talent at 343.
Yeah, the Ryan Payton thing isn't that big of a deal. I would imagine it's business as usual at 343, if his ideas for the game were constantly being shot down like he said. There are quite a few Creative Directors at the company, too, so it's not like they've lost an important position.
Also, more than likely his departure was due to the fact that 343 Studios was formed solely to continue the Halo brand, and I think he probably didn't want to work on one type of game for his entire time with the studio.
So long as Frank O'Conner is still involved, I feel confident it will be another high quality Halo game.
-- TheRock ~ Death By Misadventure, Not Suicide "Would've liked to see that." - Ayuyu on my boner
oh Halo 4 will be fine. it just tells me that Halo 4 is more of the same despite a new studio working on it. Payton was probably recruited after being told the franchise was going in a different direction and ultimately it's just another Halo game.
SE's drop was entirely due to the DQX announcement. Sony's was a mixture of the trouble in Europe affecting their HDTV business, and not getting a Dragon Quest announced to be coming to their system in the foreseeable future.
Eh, I don't believe that at all. I mean, Halo 4 could end up being more of the same, but Ryan Payton wasn't brought in to be "that guy" who shakes up the series. It's not like he has the reputation, or credentials, to justify that. They've hired more high profile people since he started working there, even.
transience posted... oh Halo 4 will be fine. it just tells me that Halo 4 is more of the same despite a new studio working on it. Payton was probably recruited after being told the franchise was going in a different direction and ultimately it's just another Halo game.
I could be reading too much into this.
You really can't take Halo in a new direction. It's Halo. It's all about expanding upon previous games, not making an about-face.
If he really joined up thinking they were going to make some huge changes to the core concept, he's pretty naive.
-- TheRock ~ Death By Misadventure, Not Suicide "Would've liked to see that." - Ayuyu on my boner
his last game was one of the more creative projects this gen. to go from that to Halo is probably a bit stunted.
I read somewhere that he saw a friend working on Skulls of the Shogun and missed that kind of creative influence. I just think he felt wasted and left.
I hope its something different. Reach bored the hell out of me ultimately, it was too much of the same. Same badguys, same-sounding music, same weapons, level structure, etc. I played that entire Campaign waiting for an awesome level to knock me on my ass like Halo 3 and Halo CE did, and it never happen. The story got hyped to hell and back and it was f***ing terrible. I can't even remember half the cast's names, much less why I should give a damn about them. They added just enough minor adjustments and threw in a Horde mode, and sold it to us.
At the end of the day, Halo 4 is gonna be more Halo, but I'm ready for something, ANYTHING, to get me excited about the series again.
I don't think it's that Halo is a less creative project than Metal Gear, his opinion just probably wasn't taken into consideration and heard working at 343 as it was at Kojima Productions. KojiPro has a huge fanbase in the West, and they had a goal in mind of appealing to Westerners specifically with MGS4, and he was the American guy who could give them constant feedback on that. With Halo, there's no need for that kind of thing, and if his ideas don't mesh with what his peers and higher up people think, he'll be overruled pretty quickly. You could probably just sum it up with "Halo is much bigger than him."
There's not a single level in Reach I thought was as good as Tsavo Highway, The Storm, The Ark, or The Covenant. From the second level onward, it just keeps this pace of "passable Halo action". Even the flying sections, the biggest addition to the campaign, are a shallow bore. Activate this, get to that checkpoint, shoot these guys, try to remember which NPC you're following, use the Rockets on the Hunters, wham bam thank you ma'am, same s*** I did ten years ago, with diminished results. I returned to Halo 3's campaign many times over(well, I skipped Cortana, but alas nothing's perfect). After I beat Reach, I regretted promising a friend I would do co-op with him at a later date.
Online was kinda blah, too. Inferior maps, bloom sucks, armor lock sucks, crappy Forge variants in matchmaking, so f***ing boring.
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It will launch for $350 with some Wii Sports s***. I bet my life on it. Damn, that KoolAid guy is awesome - NGamer64
TheKoolAidShoto posted... There's not a single level in Reach I thought was as good as Tsavo Highway, The Storm, The Ark, or The Covenant. From the second level onward, it just keeps this pace of "passable Halo action". Even the flying sections, the biggest addition to the campaign, are a shallow bore. Activate this, get to that checkpoint, shoot these guys, try to remember which NPC you're following, use the Rockets on the Hunters, wham bam thank you ma'am, same s*** I did ten years ago, with diminished results. I returned to Halo 3's campaign many times over(well, I skipped Cortana, but alas nothing's perfect). After I beat Reach, I regretted promising a friend I would do co-op with him at a later date.
Online was kinda blah, too. Inferior maps, bloom sucks, armor lock sucks, crappy Forge variants in matchmaking, so f***ing boring.
See, I barely remember any of those levels you mentioned. In the meantime, levels like Tip of the Spear, Long Night of Solace, New Alexandria, and Lone Wolf will stick with my forever. And it's not a "it's more recent" thing because I remember a lot of Halo and Halo 2 levels.
I will agree that the maps kinda sucked initially for Reach but since then there's been a lot of new maps introduced that are very good, plus new gamestyles that fit said maps. And there was enough good initially that tolerating the bad ones was possible.
Reach > 1 > 2 > 3 IMO.
-- TheRock ~ Death By Misadventure, Not Suicide "Would've liked to see that." - Ayuyu on my boner
I never really thought the Halo campaigns were anything more than medicore until Reach. I play Halo for the multiplayer, but I actually enjoyed the single player in Reach quite a bit. The other ones were just painfully average in my opinion, from a gameplay standpoint, and I never understood the hype behind them.
"I had a great run at Microsoft," Payton told Kotaku. "I don't regret one day of it. But after a few years, there came a point where I wasn't creatively excited about the project anymore."
Continuing, Payton added, "The Halo I wanted to build was fundamentally different and I don't think I had built enough credibility to see such a crazy endeavor through."
Payton was diagnosed with depression earlier this year as well.