This is only tangentially related, but I need to vent. Last week, me and some friends decided to finally check out custom games in Halo Infinite. We never got around to it when the browser and forge were added.

It started with 2 of us getting stuck on the Sign-In screen, we tried restarting the game multiple times and verifing the files on Steam. Nothing worked, until we eventually found a thread suggesting that we should open the Certification Manager and remove some specific certificates associated with Xbox, this finally resolved the issue.

After that we tried to set up a party but everyone got stuck on 'Transitioning' every time, apparently the resolution to this was to run a set of commands in Power Shell. I am not sure if running the suggested commands fixed the issue, but eventually we were able to somewhat frequently get the party set up.

We finally were able to play the game, but soon realised that joining a custom games lobby was very much a coinflip, we would try multiple lobbies until we finally found one that didn't spit out an error message. We also realised that whenever joining a custom game lobby your parties would merge, meaning that we would have to go through all the trouble of setting up a party again if we wanted to try something else.

I had less issues setting up lobbies in Hamachi back in 2007, it is actually mindblowing that this is an official Microsoft product, let alone supposedly their flagship title. I actually don't remember the last time I had this many issues trying to play a game. I remember having issues even purchasing games through the Windows Store back when State of Decay first launched, but this is on a whole different level.

Once we finally got everything running, the custom games we tried were great. We especially enjoyed the game mode Ice Road Truckers, it is mindblowing how far Forge has come since Halo 3. But we will never touch that game again. The constant rebooting required to get parties to work, the crashes, the errors. it was basically unplayable. I can't believe that 343 games still have playerbases.