: While what David Ellis states about how this went down with this particular
: weapon, the overall statement and design philosophy speaks volumes for all
: of the other completely whack decisions H4's multiplayer has had to deal
: with. I'm not against them keeping a weapon that's not fun or doesn't work
: from being in the game. Focus groups, non-focus groups. Whatever. He's
: arguing about the means. The fact is, the overall ends of multiplayer have
: been generally terrible. I played a lot more games last night, and there
: are a ton of fixes and things helping to make this game more playable, but
: it still has many problems. Either way, the design philosophy as a whole
: is a joke. Thank god there are some people at 343 who care and who get it,
: and I really enjoyed myself last night thanks to the fixes of some of
: those people.
I don't disagree that there were problems with the design approach that 343i ultimately took. I just don't think that we can be sure that "focus testing" was the problem. The GDC presentation really does just seem to have been a terrible presentation. Heck, it wasn't even really a postmortem like its name implied.
...We're getting mixed signals, and really, this wouldn't be the first time that 343i was vague/misleading/full of crap/whatever in a way which made them look bad.