you'll have to readd me, got another tag, "MagicalAnts"
I'm a bit on and off since i need to finish something/will travel for a few days.
Loved the video for spartan ops aswell, a bit .. informal for spartans and i would liked to see them a bit more beefed up, but was awesome non the less, very entertaining and damn pretty.
For people that like the story/universe but have not read the novels, pick them up!
They are fantastic and halo cryptum / halo primordium are a straight run up to the story of halo 4. I can see that missing out on those will confuse some players for sure.
Also "Glasslands and now more "the thursday war" will tangle into halo 4 maybe 5?
Have not finished the last chapters, but man so good. so good.
Cool game - watching a playthrough on youtube made me buy it! It really does look gorgeous.
However it's not without flaws - the biggest of all being the constant cryptic name dropping. Infinity, Forerunner, Cartographer, Forward onto Dawn, Requiem, the Didact, all that crap. It leaves a very odd Starwars prequel/Matrix sequel/fan fiction taste in the mouth ... Even the game types names in the menu are cryptic for no reason.
Now of course I am not very familiar with the series, but still - it's not very well written at all.
Besides that I am having a hard time understanding the tone of the game. Again it might be specific to the IP but I am just not getting why Chef and Dumbtana keep joking around ? It doesn't really gel well the events happening around them. It makes it hard for me to care for what's happening, actually.
Gameplay wise I found the portal structure confusing and pointless really - it is as if the stars line up perfectly each time, so to speak. Also pushing buttons and activating/destroying "cores" is getting old fast.
Anyways! Cool game still, gorgeous visuals (even tho I find it hard to orient myself sometimes as all 4 directions around me often tend to look the same), great audio too and it just feels great to play. About halfway through now, great ride so far!
Haven't had a whole lot of time to put into this but probably a little over halfway through the campaign now.
Like everyone else has said holy hell is this an amazing looking game. Ontop of the visuals the audio is fantastic as well, the halo weapons have never sounded better honestly. The game overall feels like a really solid step forward. Even though there are a few gripes...
MILD SPOILERS:
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Although it is nice there was a strong focus put on the story I don't really feel it coming together that well at all. The master chief's contact with humanity again is so mundane and unimportant that nobody seems all that surprised to see him. Ontop of this the captain of the infinity is a continual prick to the chief and Cortana but why? I mean the captains anger toward both these characters has no real context to anything other than to attempt to make the chief seem like the better man. Captain Keys worked so well in the original Halo because his character came across as a leader and a generally likable stoic sort of character. Here we have characters inserted into the story essentially as attempts at emotional payoff moments but without any of the exposition necessary to make it all really work.
The biggest gripe I am having with the campaign though and is making it difficult for me to really sink into it is the level intro's never really feel that much like halo. What I mean by this is how in the original halo and something they brought back in 3 was that feeling of riding in the back of a pelican with a squad of marines in game and looking out over this vast expanse of strange alien land as you are deployed into a battle zone. The levels in the original also offered alot more room for exploration and randomness but in 4 invisible walls are everywhere along with silly insta-death water.
I sometimes wonder if the rush to assemble the original games campaign (for xbox launch) Bungie stumbled onto some hidden genius in level design by not establishing a ton of restrictive borders along a linear experience that allowed players to essentially screw around in these environments that could sometimes reverse the order of things you did. In halo 4 the set pieces are amazing but from a design standpoint I feel the game slaps my hand every time I even attempt to stray from the established path.
All in all these are just gripes in what is a very solid game and a product the entire team should be damn proud of, the amount of effort put in here is monumental to say the least.
However it's not without flaws - the biggest of all being the constant cryptic name dropping. Infinity, Forerunner, Cartographer, Forward onto Dawn, Requiem, the Didact, all that crap. It leaves a very odd Starwars prequel/Matrix sequel/fan fiction taste in the mouth ... Even the game types names in the menu are cryptic for no reason.
Now of course I am not very familiar with the series, but still - it's not very well written at all.
Besides that I am having a hard time understanding the tone of the game. Again it might be specific to the IP but I am just not getting why Chef and Dumbtana keep joking around ? It doesn't really gel well the events happening around them. It makes it hard for me to care for what's happening, actually.
Bungie was pretty smart about not pushing more lore on the players than they could handle, it was there if you dug deep enough or read the books, but 343 pretty much takes the deep lore and pushes it into a sequel, which was even a bit hard on myself, and much more on someone who has no idea what's going on!
It makes for a brilliant but confusing halo 4, and the part I liked the least, not the story per se, but the fact that it was created from something that should've just stayed a mystery.
I have spent a fair bit of time with the game and I am really enjoying it.
Picked up my copy at Midnight on release and set up a LAN with some mates and didn't sleep until the Campaign was done.
Visually - I can only Echo everyone else. Its stunning.
Audio - This cannot be understated, i think its one of the greatest improvements 343 has made to the series. No longer do the guns sound and feel like toys. They all pack and Audible wollop. The sound track itself is amazing, my only complaint is that I would have liked to have heard Chiefs "theme" at some point. Even if they only used it at choice moments. Whereas it was omitted altogether. Would have made the thing just feel that little bit more "halo".
Story/plot - playing the game first time with a group was interesting because it meant i got to hear others initial reactions, thoughts and comments. a Couple of my mates struggled with the plot. I think there was an over reliance on outside knowledge of the Halo universe. Having to go to waypoint to watch terminals didn't help this. Also for the first half of the game we all felt we were being driven for that moment where Chief is finally re-united with living human beings from the UNSC. It was going to be a big moment, which we could only imagine would go down with epic bombast. When it finally came it was so MEH and shit that we had to laugh because it was gutting. I think there were a few wasted plot moments like this.
Cheers Kolby, you have developed a very distinct style so it was easy to guess
Just noticed I called the
Didact
a protagonist. I was probably a bit sleepy.
I'm still only halfway through the campaign but then I haven't played a console FPS in years. Knights are bitches to fight, especially in the first half of chapter 3 where you mostly get Suppressors and Boltshots... but it makes it all the more satisfying when you can assassinate one.
The game looks utterly wonderful despite 7-year old hardware limiting the image quality a bit. Can't even begin to imagine how you 343 guys did it but it was worth the effort. Really, really nice job!
As for our work on the cinematics, well, it is Halo. We simply had to work as hard as we could and do our best to live up to it. Glad to see you guys liking them!
I just got my Art of Halo 4 book from Amazon yesterday. I pre-ordered it as soon as I saw someone post about it here. It's well worth the money if you're into concept art and I got it for only $23! I'll be drooling over this for awhile... or until my Borderlands 2 book comes
After 3 they ruined the simplicity with all this jetpack and boost shit
Agreed... I played Halo 3 a lot, so it really bothers me how they're making things too complicated with stuff that doesn't really add anything to the game.
I played a few games of Team Snipers the other day... And damn I just kept swearing over how little it felt like Halo. What's with the rifle taking up like half the screen? Also when hit while in scope the aim just flies up instead of taking me out of the scope like in H3. The way it is now just disorientates me. Seriously that's more than half my deaths so far. Yet to try anything else than Sniper but yeah, annoying as hell.
Loving the SP though, that really feels like Halo and the art is amazing. A little excessive use of flares and stuff but overall it's really good.
Just wish they'd make the MP more like H3... I really don't understand why they CoD-ified it with loadouts and unlockable weapons...
Graphics were simply awe-inspiring. Storyline was very 'meh'. Didn't really understand what was going on half the time, and I got fed up of pressing buttons.
Also, it's so easy on Legendary... Me and my mates struggled on the other Halos, but on this we barely even died. Whut?
PS! Where is my team sniper and team doubles playlist
The most bro of bro's gametypes!
I'm excited for new maps, but I really wish we had more small ones, and a little bit more of a variety for the environments. I actually kind of miss the Covenant/UNSC themed maps.
And they removed Team Snipers I guess they're testing out playlists and swapping out ones that don't do so well with new ones. They said SWAT was doing well so it'll stick around a little longer. I'm looking forward to Doubles if it ever comes. I hope Team Snipers comes back though too.
Totaly,
Me and friends miss some of the classic maps, hope they bring some of those back.
I doubt team doubles will do all too well on the large maps that we have now.
halo 2's colossus or halo 3's the pit type maps is what im craving for
So I caved and picked up a copy (and the art book) this weekend. I've only played through the first level so far, and it's been reasonable but not stellar.
Visually speaking, it looks great, but it doesn't look like a Halo game and seems to have lost the distinctive style that I remember from previous titles. It actually looks quite cartoony.
Gameplay wise, the opening was weak. It was fairly heavily scripted with the climbing section and a number of other QTE type events. It did seem to pick up pretty well, although the Zero-G section was pretty annoying since dropped weapons would float off into space, leaving you without ammo (a very poor design decision for the opening session, imho).
Overall though it does look like it's going to improve, so I'll see where it goes.
Story is intriguing, good writing, Episode 5 is revealing alot of hints that its possible someone important in the halo universe may be resurrected at the end of episode 10 or possibly in the next season.
I really dislike Spartan Ops. It feels like a weak addition to the series, and I couldn't give a crap about the story in it.
I played Episode 5, Chapter 1 the other morning, and wtf is up with the voice acting and dialogue? It's like they hired a 5 year old to write the lines.
Bring back Firefight, that was good fun and a proper challenge with friends!
I finally made it to level 50 after 3 weeks of on/off play so I can grab the WetWork specialization. Mainly for the Helmet. Most of playing was spartan ops grinding
Got real pissed after I seen that I needed to go up 4 more levels to get all the damn wetwork armor and another 6 to actually put the class to use
Cant afford mountain dew so I grind All damn day in spartan Ops getting smacked to death and sniped by knights and enduring massive fucking delay/lag just to have a pretty helmet. In order to get a specialization one must devote their life to spartan ops grinding and getting off to Exp cap messages.
Its awesome how Spartan Ops gives you more exp than War-Games does with a lot less work and the same amount of time. All I have to do is get 15 kills and hide in a corner while my team finishes the job and I get 6000exp Not that I do because less contribution = a longer round and I hate being pared with people who do this.
Wheres in matchmaking Me & My friend carries the team, endure bullshit spawn killing, the OP Binary rifle/incineration cannon, Jackasses managing to 1 hit kill with the Scatter shot from a far and non crouched players not appearing on the radar, USELESS REPETITIVE Ordinance drops full of damn grenades or speed boosts. I just love Being put on Team Red on Exile which gives Blue team easy access to the Gauss, scorpion and Ghost forcing me to equip the plasma pistol and take them down before they rape my team EVERY TIME all for a jolly old 2000+exp in the end with MAYBE a bit extra xp for completion of a random commendation.
But best of all. I adore winning a match and within the last 5 kills to win we get lag booted or disconnected from the server with no exp.. Its like playing Dark Souls, having 200,000+ souls and facing Seth for the first time with no ring of scrafice..
Bad ass work on that Didact though, my favorite thing in the game
Its awesome how Spartan Ops gives you more exp than War-Games does with a lot less work and the same amount of time. All I have to do is get 15 kills and hide in a corner while my team finishes the job and I get 6000exp Not that I do because less contribution = a longer round and I hate being pared with people who do this.
Wheres in matchmaking Me & My friend carries the team, endure bullshit spawn killing, the OP Binary rifle/incineration cannon, Jackasses managing to 1 hit kill with the Scatter shot from a far and non crouched players not appearing on the radar, USELESS REPETITIVE Ordinance drops full of damn grenades or speed boosts. I just love Being put on Team Red on Exile which gives Blue team easy access to the Gauss, scorpion and Ghost forcing me to equip the plasma pistol and take them down before they rape my team EVERY TIME all for a jolly old 2000+exp in the end with MAYBE a bit extra xp for completion of a random commendation.
^ This.
getting killed by lag when using the Man cannons on certain maps is loads of fun too.
And Getting betrayed for my ordnancedrop on Levels with vehicles.
Soon as i get a binary rifle some dope sees and hits me with the Banshee then snags it
I fear getting booted if I do it back. This new betrayal system is no fun
Then its back to Grenades and speed boosts drops for a while
Re-mentioning that Didact i lurk Kolby's portfolio every day hoping something will appear
So I sat down and finished the campaign this weekend.
Overall it's a technical achievement getting a game that looks that good on the 360; the framerates are almost solid and the streaming works pretty well. The game itself is pretty reasonable but not fantastic.
Cortana's writing and voice acting make the campaign story - the rest of the plot is generally quite weak (the Didact makes for a terrible antagonist, and the Librarian might as well not exist) and some of it is inconsistent or otherwise nonsense. For example: in the opening level, when encountering the Covenant - the Chief remarks that the Covenant shouldn't be hostile because there's been a truce in place. Given that you've literally just stepped out of cryogenic freezing halfway across the galaxy, the Chief would not know this because neither he nor Cortana were there or have any way of knowing this.
I found the AI in the game to be weaker than previous titles. The Covenant still largely behave as you'd expect, but pathfinding appears to be broken or otherwise largely non-existant. Most enemies will sit in their predefined positions and stubbornly refuse to move from them, making them easy targets. Out of the new enemies, I quite enjoyed the crawlers and the drones, but the found the Knights themselves to be pretty weak; essentially just Elites with a tougher shield and an annoying habit of teleporting away from you.
For the large part, the weapons look and feel great, but a lot of them are redundant. For example, the Battle Rifle (who no longer fires a three shot burst, instead the ammo counter just goes down by three), the DMR, the Covenant Carbine and the Light Rifle all fill the exactly same role and are largely no different to one another.
The visual overhaul on the Covenant weapons is exactly what they needed (although they carry so little ammo that I found them to be completely redundant in the face of bullet-sponges like the Knights -what's up with that?).
I was extremely disappointed by the Forerunner weapons. They look great, and I love the way they animate and are generally designed from an aesthetic point of view. From a game-design point of view they are absolutely terrible - they are one-to-one clones of the UNSC weapons in form and function with minor statistical changes. The Suppressor is an Assault Rifle with a larger magazine, the Light Rifle is fundamentally identical to the Battle Rifle, the Boltshot is very similar to the Magnum, the Binary Rifle is fundamentally identical to the Sniper Rifle, and worst of all, the Scattershot is identical to the Shotgun, even in the way you have to reload it like a shotgun. The only weapon that is slightly different is the Incinerator Cannon, and that's still not that different to the Rocket Launcher. 343 had a chance to do some interesting things here, and they failed quite miserably by following the established FPS fodder (Pistol, SMG, AR, Sniper, Shotgun, Rockets - boring) - established fodder that the game already had twice over in a more interesting fashion.
My final irritation is making Spartan Ops require an XBox Live gold account - that was a seriously shitty move. After completing the campaign (notably, I had to do mission 3 twice, as a bug meant that I never got the achievement for it, nor the achievement for finishing the campaign) despite finishing the campaign story), it prompts you to try it out. Notably the description describes it as singleplayer or multiplayer. Attempting to access it instructs you to install it from disk 2. It takes a bit under 20 minutes to install all the content - then if you attempt to access it, it instructs you that you have to have to be logged into an Xbox Live Gold Account.
What the fuck is the point of getting me to install content I cannot access? If I've installed the singleplayer content, why do I have to pay for a subscription to Live in order to access it? Come on now, fuck off that's not right.
So I sat down and finished the campaign this weekend.
Overall it's a technical achievement getting a game that looks that good on the 360; the framerates are almost solid and the streaming works pretty well. The game itself is pretty reasonable but not fantastic.
Cortana's writing and voice acting make the campaign story - the rest of the plot is generally quite weak (the Didact makes for a terrible antagonist, and the Librarian might as well not exist) and some of it is inconsistent or otherwise nonsense. For example: in the opening level, when encountering the Covenant - the Chief remarks that the Covenant shouldn't be hostile because there's been a truce in place. Given that you've literally just stepped out of cryogenic freezing halfway across the galaxy, the Chief would not know this because neither he nor Cortana were there or have any way of knowing this.
I found the AI in the game to be weaker than previous titles. The Covenant still largely behave as you'd expect, but pathfinding appears to be broken or otherwise largely non-existant. Most enemies will sit in their predefined positions and stubbornly refuse to move from them, making them easy targets. Out of the new enemies, I quite enjoyed the crawlers and the drones, but the found the Knights themselves to be pretty weak; essentially just Elites with a tougher shield and an annoying habit of teleporting away from you.
For the large part, the weapons look and feel great, but a lot of them are redundant. For example, the Battle Rifle (who no longer fires a three shot burst, instead the ammo counter just goes down by three), the DMR, the Covenant Carbine and the Light Rifle all fill the exactly same role and are largely no different to one another.
The visual overhaul on the Covenant weapons is exactly what they needed (although they carry so little ammo that I found them to be completely redundant in the face of bullet-sponges like the Knights -what's up with that?).
I was extremely disappointed by the Forerunner weapons. They look great, and I love the way they animate and are generally designed from an aesthetic point of view. From a game-design point of view they are absolutely terrible - they are one-to-one clones of the UNSC weapons in form and function with minor statistical changes. The Suppressor is an Assault Rifle with a larger magazine, the Light Rifle is fundamentally identical to the Battle Rifle, the Boltshot is very similar to the Magnum, the Binary Rifle is fundamentally identical to the Sniper Rifle, and worst of all, the Scattershot is identical to the Shotgun, even in the way you have to reload it like a shotgun. The only weapon that is slightly different is the Incinerator Cannon, and that's still not that different to the Rocket Launcher. 343 had a chance to do some interesting things here, and they failed quite miserably by following the established FPS fodder (Pistol, SMG, AR, Sniper, Shotgun, Rockets - boring) - established fodder that the game already had twice over in a more interesting fashion.
My final irritation is making Spartan Ops require an XBox Live gold account - that was a seriously shitty move. After completing the campaign (notably, I had to do mission 3 twice, as a bug meant that I never got the achievement for it, nor the achievement for finishing the campaign) despite finishing the campaign story), it prompts you to try it out. Notably the description describes it as singleplayer or multiplayer. Attempting to access it instructs you to install it from disk 2. It takes a bit under 20 minutes to install all the content - then if you attempt to access it, it instructs you that you have to have to be logged into an Xbox Live Gold Account.
What the fuck is the point of getting me to install content I cannot access? If I've installed the singleplayer content, why do I have to pay for a subscription to Live in order to access it? Come on now, fuck off that's not right.
Edit: A lot of that was overly negative! It's generally a pretty good game, I just took issue to a few things and articulated them somewhat.
(the Didact makes for a terrible antagonist, and the Librarian might as well not exist)
I think it's more about failing to provide a proper background for him in the game itself. The Terminals are a condensed showing of his fall into this monomaniac state, but probably not enough either...
However the game manages to illustrate that the Didact is not that wrong actually. Humanity is getting very powerful very quickly, 5 years after near extinction they can field a battleship that eats Covenant fleets for breakfast and carries hundreds of augmented supersoldiers. But they're doing a lot of questionable things with this power and their clandestine government organizations... Complete eradication might be too much, but to make the Halo universe version of humanity the caretakers of the entire galaxy seems like a not so good idea indeed.
I also think that Halo 4 is a bit like A New Hope - it introduces a greater threat and preserves the villain at the end, but it also provides a more immediate source of danger to defeat within this episode. And Vader was a much better character in Empire, so maybe that's what we'll get with the Didact as well.
The Librarian is almost completely unexplained though. There's like a single throwaway line that it was her who saved life from the Halos 100.000 years ago, and once again the Terminal videos add a little more but that's it. Perhaps some of her content was cut - there are scenes in the making of videos from chief that I don't recall seeing in the game, they're probably not the only ones lost. The cinematics already take more than an hour.
Given that you've literally just stepped out of cryogenic freezing halfway across the galaxy, the Chief would not know this because neither he nor Cortana were there or have any way of knowing this.
Actually the truce has been in place at least since Halo 3 - the Elites came to help against the Flood and attacked the Prophet's fleet together with the humans. Chief was part of that so that's his last info indeed.
Actually the truce has been in place at least since Halo 3 - the Elites came to help against the Flood and attacked the Prophet's fleet together with the humans. Chief was part of that so that's his last info indeed.
Pretty much, the truce was officially recognized at the end of halo 3 (without masterchief) but the actual truce began earlier than that, and is more easily understandable as a truce with the elites, as the conflicts with the brutes never ended even after halo 3 when the covenant civil war was still taking place for some time.
MC's truce reaction was to the fact that it was an elite fleet, the other lesser species have no driving role in the covenenant whatsoever, it was always the prophets driving the elites and the brutes who drove the lesser races.
The weirdest part about halo 4 was the tiny explanation behind the elites fighting you again which was basically "they're religious nuts".
SPOILERS AHOY! (too much text to spoilertext, seriously)
Apparently much of the plot was revealed in Halo Legends, which was never released in this country and I've have no intention of buying or watching anyway. Additionally, Covenant in Halo 4 are not the Covenant, they're 'the Storm' - a splinter group of religious zealots. The Chief made an uneasy alliance with the Elites at the end of Halo 3, but there was no truce with the Covenant until after the event. The Chief doesn't even know whether the civil war within the Covenant has ended with the Prophets and if so, how that has resulted. As player's we don't know the latter either.
The Librarian and Didact are actually introduced in the Halo Anniversary terminal videos; The Didact created the rings in order to purge the universe of the Flood - not by destroying the Flood, but by destroying the organics that the Flood required to thrive. The Knights were intended to survive the rings, but did not retain their original humanity as intended. In Halo 4, The Librarian purportedly set it all up so that humanity would evolve again and produce the Chief. How the Didact himself survived the rings is an entirely unanswered question that doesn't make a lot of sense. The Librarian is long dead and is effectively in a state akin to Cortana as a construct. The flood's last existing spores are stored on the Halo array for study, as so a cure can be found. It's alluded to that the Forerunner's had a cure, but it was lost and can probably never be redeveloped.
The problem is that the plot is just a horrific mashup of Star Wars and Halo (with a little Dune) that makes little to no sense. Whoever is responsible for the plot outline didn't do a particularly good job of it.
Halo 4 is a mirror of A New Hope and also amusingly the start of a "second saga". The Didact is Darth Vader, replete with Forerunner 'force powers', an army of Stormtroopers (the Knights etc) at his disposal and even a Death Star (the Cartographer). The Master Chief is Luke, who gets mixed up in the unfolding events simply by being in the wrong place at the wrong time - then gets to take out the super weapon just before it can be unleashed on the Earth by flying a one man fighter down a trench and hitting it's weak spot! Let's not also forget the rebellious Han Solo style role played by Thomas Lasky who not only helps you escape Requiem, but also reappears at the last minute to allow you to destroy the Cartographer.
The real issue isn't that it's a clone of an established story though, it's that it's not a well written clone. Darth Vader appears in the opening ten minutes of A New Hope as the antagonist, setting the scene with the Empire and the Rebellion. Imagine if Star Wars opened with Luke fighting through Tusken Raiders to get to Mos Eisley, only for these random Storm Troopers to show up and start shooting at everyone for no obvious reason. Then - half way through the film, Vader appears, and now the Tusken and Storm Troopers are now suddenly working together against Luke.
Vader has screen time, is established right from the start, and has clear objectives and motives. The Didact appears once, says some irrelevant stuff and buggers off. We don't see him again until we get a lovely two-button set of QTEs as our showdown with him (seriously 343 - ending your game on a couple of QTEs?).
In Halo 4 the only actual character is Cortana. Every other 'character' is a plot vehicle who exists only to serve the narrative - no personality, no real motives, nada. This is part of the reason why the plot is so terrible.
And funnily enough, Cortana stands for Obi-Wan. Yeah I did that.
By the way, the Didact and the Librarian were actually introduced in the Halo 3 terminals, by Bungie. The separatist Covenant were introduced in the Glasslands novel, not Halo Legends. The Halo rings were created by the Master Builder, the leader of the Forerunners, but he was killed when their main AI defected to the Flood and the Gravemind. That last part is also from Halo 3 but the Master Builder was introduced in the Primordium novel.
Yeah at this point it's a bit convoluted. I've read most of this on various Wikis when we were gathering background info for the Prologue and it was a bit confusing... but hopefully Halo 5 will get back on the right track everywhere.
PS! Where is my team sniper and team doubles playlist
The most bro of bro's gametypes!
Got the go ahead today at work to finally announce that we worked on the crimson map pack over here at Digital Extremes, I mainly worked on shatter/Harvest and the upcoming Spartan Ops mission that will be released this monday
Got the go ahead today at work to finally announce that we worked on the crimson map pack over here at Digital Extremes, I mainly worked on shatter/Harvest and the upcoming Spartan Ops mission that will be released this monday
Looks awesome! I didn't know you guys helped out on the multiplayer that's great! I'll have to play the new spartan ops and take a lookie
Got the go ahead today at work to finally announce that we worked on the crimson map pack over here at Digital Extremes, I mainly worked on shatter/Harvest and the upcoming Spartan Ops mission that will be released this monday
New SO? YAY! Major props to 343 / MS / DE for continuing to release *FREE* content updates with storyline connected to it. :thumbup:
Nice Work. Really enjoyed the latest episode of Spartan Ops and thought the environments looked great. Can't wait to see more of the forthcoming episodes.
I haven't played any of the episodes past the first few weeks worth, but from what I remember it varied. I played most of them solo and it was managable if you took your time and tried to keep encounters to a few enemies at once. The difficulty I had was in finding weapons or ammo as I was constantly running out of them on certain missions.
Even so they were a blast to play and when I can find the time I want to try and play some more episodes.
Replies
It's halo, we're all 12!
I'm a bit on and off since i need to finish something/will travel for a few days.
Loved the video for spartan ops aswell, a bit .. informal for spartans and i would liked to see them a bit more beefed up, but was awesome non the less, very entertaining and damn pretty.
For people that like the story/universe but have not read the novels, pick them up!
They are fantastic and halo cryptum / halo primordium are a straight run up to the story of halo 4. I can see that missing out on those will confuse some players for sure.
Also "Glasslands and now more "the thursday war" will tangle into halo 4 maybe 5?
Have not finished the last chapters, but man so good. so good.
However it's not without flaws - the biggest of all being the constant cryptic name dropping. Infinity, Forerunner, Cartographer, Forward onto Dawn, Requiem, the Didact, all that crap. It leaves a very odd Starwars prequel/Matrix sequel/fan fiction taste in the mouth ... Even the game types names in the menu are cryptic for no reason.
Now of course I am not very familiar with the series, but still - it's not very well written at all.
Besides that I am having a hard time understanding the tone of the game. Again it might be specific to the IP but I am just not getting why Chef and Dumbtana keep joking around ? It doesn't really gel well the events happening around them. It makes it hard for me to care for what's happening, actually.
Gameplay wise I found the portal structure confusing and pointless really - it is as if the stars line up perfectly each time, so to speak. Also pushing buttons and activating/destroying "cores" is getting old fast.
Anyways! Cool game still, gorgeous visuals (even tho I find it hard to orient myself sometimes as all 4 directions around me often tend to look the same), great audio too and it just feels great to play. About halfway through now, great ride so far!
Like everyone else has said holy hell is this an amazing looking game. Ontop of the visuals the audio is fantastic as well, the halo weapons have never sounded better honestly. The game overall feels like a really solid step forward. Even though there are a few gripes...
MILD SPOILERS:
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.
Although it is nice there was a strong focus put on the story I don't really feel it coming together that well at all. The master chief's contact with humanity again is so mundane and unimportant that nobody seems all that surprised to see him. Ontop of this the captain of the infinity is a continual prick to the chief and Cortana but why? I mean the captains anger toward both these characters has no real context to anything other than to attempt to make the chief seem like the better man. Captain Keys worked so well in the original Halo because his character came across as a leader and a generally likable stoic sort of character. Here we have characters inserted into the story essentially as attempts at emotional payoff moments but without any of the exposition necessary to make it all really work.
The biggest gripe I am having with the campaign though and is making it difficult for me to really sink into it is the level intro's never really feel that much like halo. What I mean by this is how in the original halo and something they brought back in 3 was that feeling of riding in the back of a pelican with a squad of marines in game and looking out over this vast expanse of strange alien land as you are deployed into a battle zone. The levels in the original also offered alot more room for exploration and randomness but in 4 invisible walls are everywhere along with silly insta-death water.
I sometimes wonder if the rush to assemble the original games campaign (for xbox launch) Bungie stumbled onto some hidden genius in level design by not establishing a ton of restrictive borders along a linear experience that allowed players to essentially screw around in these environments that could sometimes reverse the order of things you did. In halo 4 the set pieces are amazing but from a design standpoint I feel the game slaps my hand every time I even attempt to stray from the established path.
All in all these are just gripes in what is a very solid game and a product the entire team should be damn proud of, the amount of effort put in here is monumental to say the least.
Bungie was pretty smart about not pushing more lore on the players than they could handle, it was there if you dug deep enough or read the books, but 343 pretty much takes the deep lore and pushes it into a sequel, which was even a bit hard on myself, and much more on someone who has no idea what's going on!
It makes for a brilliant but confusing halo 4, and the part I liked the least, not the story per se, but the fact that it was created from something that should've just stayed a mystery.
Picked up my copy at Midnight on release and set up a LAN with some mates and didn't sleep until the Campaign was done.
Visually - I can only Echo everyone else. Its stunning.
Audio - This cannot be understated, i think its one of the greatest improvements 343 has made to the series. No longer do the guns sound and feel like toys. They all pack and Audible wollop. The sound track itself is amazing, my only complaint is that I would have liked to have heard Chiefs "theme" at some point. Even if they only used it at choice moments. Whereas it was omitted altogether. Would have made the thing just feel that little bit more "halo".
Story/plot - playing the game first time with a group was interesting because it meant i got to hear others initial reactions, thoughts and comments. a Couple of my mates struggled with the plot. I think there was an over reliance on outside knowledge of the Halo universe. Having to go to waypoint to watch terminals didn't help this. Also for the first half of the game we all felt we were being driven for that moment where Chief is finally re-united with living human beings from the UNSC. It was going to be a big moment, which we could only imagine would go down with epic bombast. When it finally came it was so MEH and shit that we had to laugh because it was gutting. I think there were a few wasted plot moments like this.
Gameplay - some of the tightest halo gunplay yet.
Just noticed I called the
I'm still only halfway through the campaign but then I haven't played a console FPS in years. Knights are bitches to fight, especially in the first half of chapter 3 where you mostly get Suppressors and Boltshots... but it makes it all the more satisfying when you can assassinate one.
The game looks utterly wonderful despite 7-year old hardware limiting the image quality a bit. Can't even begin to imagine how you 343 guys did it but it was worth the effort. Really, really nice job!
As for our work on the cinematics, well, it is Halo. We simply had to work as hard as we could and do our best to live up to it. Glad to see you guys liking them!
I played a few games of Team Snipers the other day... And damn I just kept swearing over how little it felt like Halo. What's with the rifle taking up like half the screen? Also when hit while in scope the aim just flies up instead of taking me out of the scope like in H3. The way it is now just disorientates me. Seriously that's more than half my deaths so far. Yet to try anything else than Sniper but yeah, annoying as hell.
Loving the SP though, that really feels like Halo and the art is amazing. A little excessive use of flares and stuff but overall it's really good.
Just wish they'd make the MP more like H3... I really don't understand why they CoD-ified it with loadouts and unlockable weapons...
Also, it's so easy on Legendary... Me and my mates struggled on the other Halos, but on this we barely even died. Whut?
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PS! Where is my team sniper and team doubles playlist
The most bro of bro's gametypes!
I'm excited for new maps, but I really wish we had more small ones, and a little bit more of a variety for the environments. I actually kind of miss the Covenant/UNSC themed maps.
And they removed Team Snipers
Me and friends miss some of the classic maps, hope they bring some of those back.
I doubt team doubles will do all too well on the large maps that we have now.
halo 2's colossus or halo 3's the pit type maps is what im craving for
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Visually speaking, it looks great, but it doesn't look like a Halo game and seems to have lost the distinctive style that I remember from previous titles. It actually looks quite cartoony.
Gameplay wise, the opening was weak. It was fairly heavily scripted with the climbing section and a number of other QTE type events. It did seem to pick up pretty well, although the Zero-G section was pretty annoying since dropped weapons would float off into space, leaving you without ammo (a very poor design decision for the opening session, imho).
Overall though it does look like it's going to improve, so I'll see where it goes.
I played Episode 5, Chapter 1 the other morning, and wtf is up with the voice acting and dialogue? It's like they hired a 5 year old to write the lines.
Bring back Firefight, that was good fun and a proper challenge with friends!
Got real pissed after I seen that I needed to go up 4 more levels to get all the damn wetwork armor and another 6 to actually put the class to use
Cant afford mountain dew so I grind All damn day in spartan Ops getting smacked to death and sniped by knights and enduring massive fucking delay/lag just to have a pretty helmet. In order to get a specialization one must devote their life to spartan ops grinding and getting off to Exp cap messages.
Its awesome how Spartan Ops gives you more exp than War-Games does with a lot less work and the same amount of time. All I have to do is get 15 kills and hide in a corner while my team finishes the job and I get 6000exp Not that I do because less contribution = a longer round and I hate being pared with people who do this.
Wheres in matchmaking Me & My friend carries the team, endure bullshit spawn killing, the OP Binary rifle/incineration cannon, Jackasses managing to 1 hit kill with the Scatter shot from a far and non crouched players not appearing on the radar, USELESS REPETITIVE Ordinance drops full of damn grenades or speed boosts. I just love Being put on Team Red on Exile which gives Blue team easy access to the Gauss, scorpion and Ghost forcing me to equip the plasma pistol and take them down before they rape my team EVERY TIME all for a jolly old 2000+exp in the end with MAYBE a bit extra xp for completion of a random commendation.
But best of all. I adore winning a match and within the last 5 kills to win we get lag booted or disconnected from the server with no exp.. Its like playing Dark Souls, having 200,000+ souls and facing Seth for the first time with no ring of scrafice..
Bad ass work on that Didact though, my favorite thing in the game
^ This.
getting killed by lag when using the Man cannons on certain maps is loads of fun too.
And Getting betrayed for my ordnancedrop on Levels with vehicles.
Soon as i get a binary rifle some dope sees and hits me with the Banshee then snags it
I fear getting booted if I do it back. This new betrayal system is no fun
Then its back to Grenades and speed boosts drops for a while
Re-mentioning that Didact i lurk Kolby's portfolio every day hoping something will appear
Overall it's a technical achievement getting a game that looks that good on the 360; the framerates are almost solid and the streaming works pretty well. The game itself is pretty reasonable but not fantastic.
Cortana's writing and voice acting make the campaign story - the rest of the plot is generally quite weak (the Didact makes for a terrible antagonist, and the Librarian might as well not exist) and some of it is inconsistent or otherwise nonsense. For example: in the opening level, when encountering the Covenant - the Chief remarks that the Covenant shouldn't be hostile because there's been a truce in place. Given that you've literally just stepped out of cryogenic freezing halfway across the galaxy, the Chief would not know this because neither he nor Cortana were there or have any way of knowing this.
I found the AI in the game to be weaker than previous titles. The Covenant still largely behave as you'd expect, but pathfinding appears to be broken or otherwise largely non-existant. Most enemies will sit in their predefined positions and stubbornly refuse to move from them, making them easy targets. Out of the new enemies, I quite enjoyed the crawlers and the drones, but the found the Knights themselves to be pretty weak; essentially just Elites with a tougher shield and an annoying habit of teleporting away from you.
For the large part, the weapons look and feel great, but a lot of them are redundant. For example, the Battle Rifle (who no longer fires a three shot burst, instead the ammo counter just goes down by three), the DMR, the Covenant Carbine and the Light Rifle all fill the exactly same role and are largely no different to one another.
The visual overhaul on the Covenant weapons is exactly what they needed (although they carry so little ammo that I found them to be completely redundant in the face of bullet-sponges like the Knights -what's up with that?).
I was extremely disappointed by the Forerunner weapons. They look great, and I love the way they animate and are generally designed from an aesthetic point of view. From a game-design point of view they are absolutely terrible - they are one-to-one clones of the UNSC weapons in form and function with minor statistical changes. The Suppressor is an Assault Rifle with a larger magazine, the Light Rifle is fundamentally identical to the Battle Rifle, the Boltshot is very similar to the Magnum, the Binary Rifle is fundamentally identical to the Sniper Rifle, and worst of all, the Scattershot is identical to the Shotgun, even in the way you have to reload it like a shotgun. The only weapon that is slightly different is the Incinerator Cannon, and that's still not that different to the Rocket Launcher. 343 had a chance to do some interesting things here, and they failed quite miserably by following the established FPS fodder (Pistol, SMG, AR, Sniper, Shotgun, Rockets - boring) - established fodder that the game already had twice over in a more interesting fashion.
My final irritation is making Spartan Ops require an XBox Live gold account - that was a seriously shitty move. After completing the campaign (notably, I had to do mission 3 twice, as a bug meant that I never got the achievement for it, nor the achievement for finishing the campaign) despite finishing the campaign story), it prompts you to try it out. Notably the description describes it as singleplayer or multiplayer. Attempting to access it instructs you to install it from disk 2. It takes a bit under 20 minutes to install all the content - then if you attempt to access it, it instructs you that you have to have to be logged into an Xbox Live Gold Account.
What the fuck is the point of getting me to install content I cannot access? If I've installed the singleplayer content, why do I have to pay for a subscription to Live in order to access it? Come on now, fuck off that's not right.
Overall it's a technical achievement getting a game that looks that good on the 360; the framerates are almost solid and the streaming works pretty well. The game itself is pretty reasonable but not fantastic.
Cortana's writing and voice acting make the campaign story - the rest of the plot is generally quite weak (the Didact makes for a terrible antagonist, and the Librarian might as well not exist) and some of it is inconsistent or otherwise nonsense. For example: in the opening level, when encountering the Covenant - the Chief remarks that the Covenant shouldn't be hostile because there's been a truce in place. Given that you've literally just stepped out of cryogenic freezing halfway across the galaxy, the Chief would not know this because neither he nor Cortana were there or have any way of knowing this.
I found the AI in the game to be weaker than previous titles. The Covenant still largely behave as you'd expect, but pathfinding appears to be broken or otherwise largely non-existant. Most enemies will sit in their predefined positions and stubbornly refuse to move from them, making them easy targets. Out of the new enemies, I quite enjoyed the crawlers and the drones, but the found the Knights themselves to be pretty weak; essentially just Elites with a tougher shield and an annoying habit of teleporting away from you.
For the large part, the weapons look and feel great, but a lot of them are redundant. For example, the Battle Rifle (who no longer fires a three shot burst, instead the ammo counter just goes down by three), the DMR, the Covenant Carbine and the Light Rifle all fill the exactly same role and are largely no different to one another.
The visual overhaul on the Covenant weapons is exactly what they needed (although they carry so little ammo that I found them to be completely redundant in the face of bullet-sponges like the Knights -what's up with that?).
I was extremely disappointed by the Forerunner weapons. They look great, and I love the way they animate and are generally designed from an aesthetic point of view. From a game-design point of view they are absolutely terrible - they are one-to-one clones of the UNSC weapons in form and function with minor statistical changes. The Suppressor is an Assault Rifle with a larger magazine, the Light Rifle is fundamentally identical to the Battle Rifle, the Boltshot is very similar to the Magnum, the Binary Rifle is fundamentally identical to the Sniper Rifle, and worst of all, the Scattershot is identical to the Shotgun, even in the way you have to reload it like a shotgun. The only weapon that is slightly different is the Incinerator Cannon, and that's still not that different to the Rocket Launcher. 343 had a chance to do some interesting things here, and they failed quite miserably by following the established FPS fodder (Pistol, SMG, AR, Sniper, Shotgun, Rockets - boring) - established fodder that the game already had twice over in a more interesting fashion.
My final irritation is making Spartan Ops require an XBox Live gold account - that was a seriously shitty move. After completing the campaign (notably, I had to do mission 3 twice, as a bug meant that I never got the achievement for it, nor the achievement for finishing the campaign) despite finishing the campaign story), it prompts you to try it out. Notably the description describes it as singleplayer or multiplayer. Attempting to access it instructs you to install it from disk 2. It takes a bit under 20 minutes to install all the content - then if you attempt to access it, it instructs you that you have to have to be logged into an Xbox Live Gold Account.
What the fuck is the point of getting me to install content I cannot access? If I've installed the singleplayer content, why do I have to pay for a subscription to Live in order to access it? Come on now, fuck off that's not right.
Edit: A lot of that was overly negative! It's generally a pretty good game, I just took issue to a few things and articulated them somewhat.
I think it's more about failing to provide a proper background for him in the game itself. The Terminals are a condensed showing of his fall into this monomaniac state, but probably not enough either...
However the game manages to illustrate that the Didact is not that wrong actually. Humanity is getting very powerful very quickly, 5 years after near extinction they can field a battleship that eats Covenant fleets for breakfast and carries hundreds of augmented supersoldiers. But they're doing a lot of questionable things with this power and their clandestine government organizations... Complete eradication might be too much, but to make the Halo universe version of humanity the caretakers of the entire galaxy seems like a not so good idea indeed.
I also think that Halo 4 is a bit like A New Hope - it introduces a greater threat and preserves the villain at the end, but it also provides a more immediate source of danger to defeat within this episode. And Vader was a much better character in Empire, so maybe that's what we'll get with the Didact as well.
The Librarian is almost completely unexplained though. There's like a single throwaway line that it was her who saved life from the Halos 100.000 years ago, and once again the Terminal videos add a little more but that's it. Perhaps some of her content was cut - there are scenes in the making of videos from chief that I don't recall seeing in the game, they're probably not the only ones lost. The cinematics already take more than an hour.
Actually the truce has been in place at least since Halo 3 - the Elites came to help against the Flood and attacked the Prophet's fleet together with the humans. Chief was part of that so that's his last info indeed.
look at cghub, at least efgenis didact ship is there, we're not allowed to post on public forums, just on portfoliosites
Pretty much, the truce was officially recognized at the end of halo 3 (without masterchief) but the actual truce began earlier than that, and is more easily understandable as a truce with the elites, as the conflicts with the brutes never ended even after halo 3 when the covenant civil war was still taking place for some time.
MC's truce reaction was to the fact that it was an elite fleet, the other lesser species have no driving role in the covenenant whatsoever, it was always the prophets driving the elites and the brutes who drove the lesser races.
The weirdest part about halo 4 was the tiny explanation behind the elites fighting you again which was basically "they're religious nuts".
Apparently much of the plot was revealed in Halo Legends, which was never released in this country and I've have no intention of buying or watching anyway. Additionally, Covenant in Halo 4 are not the Covenant, they're 'the Storm' - a splinter group of religious zealots. The Chief made an uneasy alliance with the Elites at the end of Halo 3, but there was no truce with the Covenant until after the event. The Chief doesn't even know whether the civil war within the Covenant has ended with the Prophets and if so, how that has resulted. As player's we don't know the latter either.
The Librarian and Didact are actually introduced in the Halo Anniversary terminal videos; The Didact created the rings in order to purge the universe of the Flood - not by destroying the Flood, but by destroying the organics that the Flood required to thrive. The Knights were intended to survive the rings, but did not retain their original humanity as intended. In Halo 4, The Librarian purportedly set it all up so that humanity would evolve again and produce the Chief. How the Didact himself survived the rings is an entirely unanswered question that doesn't make a lot of sense. The Librarian is long dead and is effectively in a state akin to Cortana as a construct. The flood's last existing spores are stored on the Halo array for study, as so a cure can be found. It's alluded to that the Forerunner's had a cure, but it was lost and can probably never be redeveloped.
The problem is that the plot is just a horrific mashup of Star Wars and Halo (with a little Dune) that makes little to no sense. Whoever is responsible for the plot outline didn't do a particularly good job of it.
Halo 4 is a mirror of A New Hope and also amusingly the start of a "second saga". The Didact is Darth Vader, replete with Forerunner 'force powers', an army of Stormtroopers (the Knights etc) at his disposal and even a Death Star (the Cartographer). The Master Chief is Luke, who gets mixed up in the unfolding events simply by being in the wrong place at the wrong time - then gets to take out the super weapon just before it can be unleashed on the Earth by flying a one man fighter down a trench and hitting it's weak spot! Let's not also forget the rebellious Han Solo style role played by Thomas Lasky who not only helps you escape Requiem, but also reappears at the last minute to allow you to destroy the Cartographer.
The real issue isn't that it's a clone of an established story though, it's that it's not a well written clone. Darth Vader appears in the opening ten minutes of A New Hope as the antagonist, setting the scene with the Empire and the Rebellion. Imagine if Star Wars opened with Luke fighting through Tusken Raiders to get to Mos Eisley, only for these random Storm Troopers to show up and start shooting at everyone for no obvious reason. Then - half way through the film, Vader appears, and now the Tusken and Storm Troopers are now suddenly working together against Luke.
Vader has screen time, is established right from the start, and has clear objectives and motives. The Didact appears once, says some irrelevant stuff and buggers off. We don't see him again until we get a lovely two-button set of QTEs as our showdown with him (seriously 343 - ending your game on a couple of QTEs?).
In Halo 4 the only actual character is Cortana. Every other 'character' is a plot vehicle who exists only to serve the narrative - no personality, no real motives, nada. This is part of the reason why the plot is so terrible.
By the way, the Didact and the Librarian were actually introduced in the Halo 3 terminals, by Bungie. The separatist Covenant were introduced in the Glasslands novel, not Halo Legends. The Halo rings were created by the Master Builder, the leader of the Forerunners, but he was killed when their main AI defected to the Flood and the Gravemind. That last part is also from Halo 3 but the Master Builder was introduced in the Primordium novel.
Yeah at this point it's a bit convoluted. I've read most of this on various Wikis when we were gathering background info for the Prologue and it was a bit confusing... but hopefully Halo 5 will get back on the right track everywhere.
http://polymdlr.com/
I'm quite sure he's a really nice guy and just fatally misunderstood, by the way.
The long wait is over
Those shots were worth waiting for
Gonna post up some renders of the sculpt, techsuit, and some assembly stuff tomorrow (time permitting).
Got the go ahead today at work to finally announce that we worked on the crimson map pack over here at Digital Extremes, I mainly worked on shatter/Harvest and the upcoming Spartan Ops mission that will be released this monday
Looks awesome! I didn't know you guys helped out on the multiplayer that's great! I'll have to play the new spartan ops and take a lookie
New SO? YAY! Major props to 343 / MS / DE for continuing to release *FREE* content updates with storyline connected to it. :thumbup:
Dont forget Certain Affinity :thumbup: a lot of talented artists and designers working on the series both in spartan ops and multiplayer maps
I haven't played any of the episodes past the first few weeks worth, but from what I remember it varied. I played most of them solo and it was managable if you took your time and tried to keep encounters to a few enemies at once. The difficulty I had was in finding weapons or ammo as I was constantly running out of them on certain missions.
Even so they were a blast to play and when I can find the time I want to try and play some more episodes.