: I thought the whole postmortem was excellent. Very up-front, honest, and
: self-aware. They didn't shy away from highlighting their mistakes to make
: things look better (I know that's the point of a postmortem, but they
: still could have held back in such a public presentation), and they
: generally seemed to acknowledge nearly all the points that fans have
: brought up against the game.
: It shows that they're aware of the missteps they took. Hopefully this
: awareness indicates an effort on their part to correct those mistakes the
: next time around. Given the nature of game sequels, I think it would be
: impossible for them not to.
: I enjoyed the postmortem, and I thought that Josh did an excellent job
: carrying the whole thing with humility, while at the same time trusting
: and not backing down from the creative choices that they made as a studio.

You and uberfoop both happen to be right, I'd say. Unfortunately, Josh still doesn't get it.

"What I did a poor job of articulating because of the nature of the intended audience is the importance of balancing the needs and desires of a hardcore Halo population that was born, bred and breathes prior Multiplayer philosophies, with an approachable and open-to-all design style."

Uberfoop is right. This wasn't a poor job of articulation, and it had NOTHING to do with their audience at GDC. When you have a literal picture of a handicapped Spartan, implying that they built some form or multiple forms of handicaps into the game as their way of going about making it more accessible (and thus implying said handicaps were to make it less challenging), there was absolutely zero failure in articulation. The picture itself shows it. The intent was pretty damn clear. Gotta go with Uberfoop on that part. Walk it back all you want, but don't insult the intelligence of anyone staring at that slide by pretending like it wasn't meant for them and thus it came out wrong. I'm not a developer. Got it. You still handicapped the game, and it was still an immediate design philsophy in trying to provide greater accessibility on a mass scale.

Greater and easier accessibility to newcomers is fantastic. No sarcasm. Dumbing down your mechanics and gameplay while also not really taking the time to test a lot of features (or testing poorly if you did take the time) isn't a great way to go about doing it, and acting as if it's some public misconception doesn't really work well, either.

Where I agree with postmortem is that, yeah, they clearly know they screwed up, and there are clearly people at 343 who are damn determined to fix things and are going about doing it. We're seeing the fruits of some of that labor, and so far so good.

I'm still not convinced they'll be implementing a lot of fixes for H5. The mighty X's were returning, they claimed. At PAX East, they announced that the X's had returned like a joke, laughing so smugly and just so happy with themselves. Hey, we messed up, we know this is srsbsns, and they're back, so who cares, we did it. Haha April Fool's, the X's are worthless. Did we even test them? Who knows. Who cares! They're back!

If that's the philosophy and humility we can expect to see going forward and into H5, can't say I'm holding my breath.

"CSR, our partnership with top competitive players to build and refine Team Throwdown, adding pro options and arena-style maps to select playlists and our upcoming sandbox balances are a few of the things that we are working on for that particular part of our community on this title."

Top competitive players oh boy. Pretty sure top competitive players have mostly dropped Halo since Reach, and that includes H4 and its most recent changes. CSR is an absolute joke, and I'm not going to bother railing against it and their playlist choices and how rank applies to each (or the fact that you can only access it all on Waypoint, because, you know, CSR is totally something that's now part of gameplay... and totally not in the game!), and Team Throwdown is just filled with lovely problems.

They can work on things all they want, and I've been posting within the past few days talking about how this game is getting a bit better and more playable with a lot of these fixes, but holy cow, defending a handicapped experience and design philosophy that from the outset was all about dumbing down and holding hands just doesn't work.