Halo: The Master Chief Collection

[Tain]

Matchmaking sucks for just about everybody from the sound of it. Runs well once in game but the servers are beefing right now.

[Korly]

Hey guys, the online portion of quite a few video games don't work very well during the first month or so.

The question is, does that make the game lesser?

I don't know much about World of Warcraft but I do know that it's been going strong for ten years. A lot of people like that game. I also heard that it didn't work as intended at first.

I think Steam didn't work at first.

Did Half Life 2 work as intended during the launch week?

[Chux]

Hey guys, the online portion of quite a few video games don't work very well during the first month or so.

The question is, does that make the game lesser?

I don't know much about World of Warcraft but I do know that it's been going strong for ten years. A lot of people like that game. I also heard that it didn't work as intended at first.

I think Steam didn't work at first.

Did Half Life 2 work as intended during the launch week?

You're using examples that are several years old, while games have launched with less problems. Forza Horizon 2 for instance.

This was MS' big gun, for it to misfire like this is pretty telling. Live was the baseline for a long time. We joke about how PSN doesn't always work and how Live is great, but this time they fucked up.

[EvilMog]

I'm numb to it. Big games not working on release is the norm in 2014. Unless you are EA. Then it takes 6 more months.

[mollipen]

Hey guys, the online portion of quite a few video games don't work very well during the first month or so.

The question is, does that make the game lesser?

Yes, it does. Launch is when a lot of games find their place in the world. Not the smaller, more niche stuff, sure, but we've seen plenty of examples of the damage that can be done to a game (or a franchise) if all of its hype is then totally deflated by a terrible launch. That isn't to say that some games can't get past that with work—Diablo III being an example—but you've also got examples like the last SOCOM game on the PS3, where it hit right when the PSN outage happened, and the player base just never recovered.

I was absolutely excited for DriveClub, and now, I don't know if I'll ever play it again—and I'm definitely not alone in that. More games came along that did work, so I spent my time with them instead. I've moved on. Maybe down the road I'll go back, if the game gets free DLC to make up for the problems and enough people also return, but that's not a guarantee. There are way too many game choices these days, so if a big title doesn't capture an audience right from the start, plenty of other choices will be around that'll be glad to have those players.

As for Halo: MCC, though, it'll be fine. It's big enough to weather these problems. A lot of releases aren't, though.

[Diff-chan]

Hey guys, the online portion of quite a few video games don't work very well during the first month or so.

The question is, does that make the game lesser?

I don't know much about World of Warcraft but I do know that it's been going strong for ten years. A lot of people like that game. I also heard that it didn't work as intended at first.

I think Steam didn't work at first.

Did Half Life 2 work as intended during the launch week?

I'm not mad about it or anything.

[Joust Williams]

It didn't even redownload when I was at work. It got stuck at 10%( and auto power-off happened after it got stuck). I retried and it's stuck at 9% now.

Bullshit

[Tain]

The server issues suck and are frustrating but it won't be a noteworthy long-term criticism of the port if it gets resolved quickly enough.

[Korly]

The server issues suck and are frustrating but it won't be a noteworthy long-term criticism of the port if it gets resolved quickly enough.

Exactly.

[Korly]

That's why I used the older examples. If a game is good, I don't think it really matters if the launch is bumpy. No one says "Half Life 2? Fuck that game! It didn't even work for the first few days!".

And that's to say nothing of the fact that a huge amount of content is still accessible right now. The server issues are affecting matchmaking, but there's still a great deal of the package that works just fine.

Weren't there a bunch of recent Ubi Soft games that didn't work at all when the DRM was messed up or something? And there was that madness with Sim City.

Halo is going to be fine. Even if it takes a month to fix (it won't) this is a package that people who like Halo will be going back to for the next five-plus years.