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Old 02-12-2012, 11:28 PM   #1
deoxys
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Halo

Lack of a 'Halo general' thread has lead me to create one myself.

Halo, Halo, Halo, all things Halo, even this, especially this.

I'm sure you know the story by now, and if not, let me catch you up (or help you remember) (Story spoilers below):

Halo: CE
Spoiler: show
introduced us to the universe through the eyes of protagonist John-117, the Master Chief, who, after escaping the destruction and loss at humanity's hand in the events of "Halo: Reach" (of which he was not actually in), finds himself along with the rest of the UNSC crew of "The Pillar of Autumn" on a ringworld called Halo. The Covenant, an overzealous alien race bent on killing humanity in the name of their religion, follows, and unleashes a parasitic alien race known as the Flood. John discovers the only way to kill them is to activate the Halo, but before doing so finds out that if he did, it would kill all sentient life in the galaxy. Instead, he blows up the Pillar of Autumn and breaks the Halo ring, escaping back to Earth.


In Halo 2,
Spoiler: show
The Covenant have followed Master Chief to Earth and start an attack. Master Chief and the UNSC fend them off and follow their slipspace portal over African city New Mombasa back to another Halo ring. John heads off to the Covenant home world of High Charity, where he leaves Cortana and hitches a ride back to Earth on a Covenant ship. During this time we meet the Arbiter, a Covenant rebel who leads a small group against their leaders after realizing that what they're doing is wrong. He makes peace with some of the UNSC by finding common ground with them when he and human Miranda Keyes prevent the activation of another Halo. We are left with the knowledge that the Covenant is trying to find the Ark, a place that allows for the remote activation of all Halo rings.


In Halo 3,
Spoiler: show
Master Chief and Arbiter meet and team up, fighting the Covenant off of Earth and following them through a portal to the Ark, a large space structure created to remotely activate Halo rings and also build new ones when they are destroyed. Once on the Ark, they soon discover that the Flood and their leader the Gravemind had taken over High Charity and sent it on a crash course with the Ark. While the Flood, the Humans, and the Covenant all battle it out on the Ark, Chief heads to High Charity's crash site to recover Cortana. After he blows it up, he finds that Forerunner robots on the Ark were building a new Halo to replace the one destroyed in the first game. Chief goes to it before it's finished, and alongside the Arbiter, activates it to kill all remaining Covenant forces and Flood on the Ark. As the ship the Arbiter, Master Chief, the remaining Covenant rebels, and the Humans get on heads back into the portal to Earth, the portal closes as it is halfway through. Everyone but the Chief was on the front end of the ship and made it safely to the other side, while John is left floating in space. He puts himself to sleep in a cryo chamber, telling Cortana to wake him up if he is ever needed. If beaten on Legendary, the remnants of the ship can be seen falling toward a strange planet in the distance.


Reach
Spoiler: show
is more of a backstory to the events in Halo CE, showing the perspective of six Spartans (not Master Chief) who fight off Covenant forces from the Human colony planet "Reach", while they try to figure out why they are even invading. They soon realize that they are trying to destroy the planet by glassing it with fire. The planet inevitably falls to the Covenant, as only a few groups of humans make it out, one being those on The Pillar of Autumn, including Master Chief.



Enter Halo 4. What will happen? No one really knows. We do know that the game is supposed to be completely different from the rest, and will *gasp* actually introduce IN GAME backstory and character development for John! What a shocker, considering he HAD NONE in the first three games! But really, I'm excited, because I hope they do it right. Cortana is deteriorating, she can't hold much more data in her lifespan before she goes rampant (has too much knowledge, becomes corrupt and bent on destruction), which almost happened to her in Halo 3. Because of the feel of loneliness, the developers are reporting this will be much more personal and help us get to know John better, and also develop more backstory. The game is reportedly set to be one of the darkest, with Halo 5 being the darkest, whatever that means (would cite but forgot where I saw that).

Here's a concept art trailer:

BORKED

So here we are.

Let me kick it off: MacFarlane toys released the prototype of their Halo 4 Master Chief toy today...



I'm not digging the helmet or the lack or armor in the shoulders and around the waist. I'm sure it'll be explained somehow by is armor deteriorating in cryo sleep or something, or he comes in contact with humans who give him new armor or something, who knows. Not to mention he's kind of thin, especially for a Spartan, who is supposed to have the strength of ten men. Maybe he's been in cryo sleep for a few hundred years and needs to eat something...?

At any rate, please tell me I'm not the only one here who cares?
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Last edited by deoxys; 02-13-2012 at 02:09 AM.
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Old 02-13-2012, 12:17 AM   #2
Loki
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Sorry to tell you this, I know you're a HALO Fan, but I've never loved HALO in any sense. The first game was fine. A strong shooter. Story was... there... I guess... but I never found it to be amazing in any way.

Recharging shields was a vast difference from set HP/Shields like in Megaman or Half-Life, but it really destroyed any tension you would feel from battle. If you're losing, run away and hide. Then when you're back to full health, go back to shooting them! In Half Life, if you're on the losing end of a gun fight, you had to find yourself some health or else you're dead on the next fight you find yourself in. There's the tension of surviving any fights you end up in before you find any health. All that is taken away.

While I know there are plenty of games which have continued with the recharging shield/health thing since HALO, there has been something which I felt they all did which no HALO game ever did- enemies which chased you. I'm not talking about guys with laser swords or the Flood running up to you to melee you to death. I'm talking about guys with big Rifles thinking "Hey man, I just shot up that cyber dude. Let's find him and finish him off."

Seriously, that's how I beat HALO 3. I ran into a fight, saw I was doing bad and ran as far away as I could until they forgot about me. I mean, on occasion I would hear them shout something dumb like "I will find and kill you!" of "When I kill you, I'll become a hero!", but they never did. Instead, they kept walking in circles until I did my next run of Leroy Jenkins style shooting.

Meanwhile, in games like Gears of War, you were usually forced into a smaller space (usually a room) and the enemies chased you. If you didn't come up to shoot them every so often, they would keep advancing towards you until they killed you dead.

I am surprised you left out Reach and ODST from this thread. ODST was a reasonable game. No Spartan armor and thus, not auto-recovery health, but still some recharging shields. Also, the story was generally better (at least in ODST) than Master Chief's boring silent facelessness. Claiming that the player can impose their own personality on such a character is stupid. Master Chief never makes anything that would give him personality and players can't do anything that would give him a personality (besides shoot things).

In ODST, since you played as like members of the squad, each with actual dialogue and personality, you would develop a connection the same way people connect to characters they read in books, by comparing yourself to them. I mean, if Master Chief became a character in a book, all the pages would be mindless shooting and combat. I don't know about you, but those books tend to be boring as fuck.

Multiplayer... It's all about knowing where the awesome weapons are. Aside from that, it's exactly like any other shooter. I never cared for it beyond the occasional game with friends who came over.

I will give credit where credit is due though. HALO did bring shooters into consoles in a big way. It can easily be considered great just for it's contribution into this alone, but as a game itself, it's nothing special. I didn't get into Reach. I probably won't touch HALO 4.
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Old 02-13-2012, 01:21 AM   #3
Talon87
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Bought Halo, along with a Gen1 XBox and DOA3, in December 2001 with money I'd earned from tutoring. I had never really been one for shooters -- I loved Dark Forces but that was because it was Star Wars -- but I enjoyed Halo. Gorgeous graphics, good music (for a shooter), and a lot of the anxiety Loki mentioned above completely absent. (One man's trash is another man's treasure, see? I get so anxious with regards to that tension Loki had mentioned that I usually wind up (1) not liking the game and (2) obsessive-compulsively creating a new save file every 3 minutes when I'm playing a PC shooter. Which in and of itself is nothing more than my own compensatory measure to make the PC shooter more equivalent to Halo: whereas in Halo you physically run and hide and wait for your shields to recharge, in a PC shooter like HL2 you just reload the save file you'd made not but 30 seconds before and try again, 100 health and 90 shields waiting for you.)

But ... I never understood why some people fell so in love with the game that they wanted to have XBox parties (like some of my IRL friends did in fact host). Or why some people became so fascinated with the lore that they rushed out to buy The Fall of Reach and memorized every word of it. Like Loki, I did not find the Master Chief to be that deep of a character. Like Loki, I felt the opposite: he wasn't so much a one-size-fits-all glove as he was more like a kitchen apron. He was that broadly applicable to players, a.k.a. he was that shallow in the character development department. Mind you, I don't understand why people think Gordon Freeman or the world of Half-Life is any more developed either, so whatever. In my opinion, Master Chief and Gordon in-game are pretty interchangeable, even if they did completely different things in their respective storylines. (Tip to prospective game developers: give me a shooter where I play as a Brisco County Jr.-style character, replete with tens of hours of dialogue of Bruce Campbell saying various things, and I will love you long time.)

For one thing, I did not love Halo enough to purchase Halo 2. That was a rental. For a second thing, I did not love Halo enough to purchase an Xbox 360 or Halo 3. I never even played that one. I did enjoy the first game enough, though, to beat it twice on Normal difficulty and once on Heroic. I enjoyed it enough to attend my fair share of Xbox Halo parties. I enjoyed it enough to entertain hour-long conversations with some of my more Halo-enthusiastic friends in college. It's a fun franchise that takes a lot of unnecessary shit from a lot of different haters. But at the same time, I think it suffers from fanboyitis even worse than FF7 does. And that's saying something.

=======================

So, the topic! Halo 4, huh? I guess this is what was bound to happen when 343 Studios was spun off of Bungie after Bungie told Microsoft "We're done making Halo games. Fuck you. We want to make something else for a change." Well, congrats: Halo 3 may well indeed be the last Bungie Halo game, but if you thought 343 were going to limit themselves to spin off titles like ODST, you were sorely mistaken. Master Chief is back, Cortana is back, the whole gang is back. What do I think of that?

Well, having not played Halo 3 (and avoided spoilers, for the most part), I'm not really sure what to think. If the Flood are going to be brought back, I'll be disappointed. From Day 1, they were ever Bungie's response to gamers' praise for Valve's headcrab zombies in Half-Life and Capcom's actual zombies in Resident Evil. I know a lot of people love zombies in shooters, but I don't. Never have, probably never will. My favorite moments in the original Halo were all ones with the Covenant. My least favorite moments were all ones with the Flood. Big surprise. So ... for me to like Halo 4, they'd need to retire the Flood. And not introduce a Flood-like replacement either. Another question I guess I'd have is, are they going to bring back the fan-loved pistol from Halo 1? They left it out of the sequels because it was "too cheap" or something, but a pistol with a decent zoom-in function on it was one of the fun playtoys that really made the original Halo great. Would be cool if they brought that back. (If they already did in 3 or ODST or whatever, forgive my ignorance. ) Will you be able to fight as the Arbiter again? He was my favorite character in the entire franchise. What will be the enemy we're fighting against? The setting? The time period? Lots of questions. The answers to these questions will probably decide for me whether I consider Halo 4 to be nothing more than Microsoft milking the cow dry or whether I consider Halo 4 to be GOTY material.

Last edited by Talon87; 02-13-2012 at 01:24 AM.
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Old 02-13-2012, 01:35 AM   #4
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Originally Posted by Raptor Jesus View Post
There's the tension of surviving any fights you end up in before you find any health. All that is taken away.
I disagree, it's taken away in that sense perhaps, but the tension, at least for me, was entirely situational. Environment, plot points, being surrounded by the enemy, etc, all of these things bring tension to the game in different ways. Perhaps not in the same sense that many other shooters do, and yes, it is true that a lot of other shooters may handle these better, but Halo has plenty of them in it's own way, especially if you play on Legendary.

Quote:
Seriously, that's how I beat HALO 3. I ran into a fight, saw I was doing bad and ran as far away as I could until they forgot about me. I mean, on occasion I would hear them shout something dumb like "I will find and kill you!" of "When I kill you, I'll become a hero!", but they never did. Instead, they kept walking in circles until I did my next run of Leroy Jenkins style shooting.
Yeah, that's fine, and I'm not arguing that point. Halo 3 was the weakest in the series in terms of gameplay. I went back and recently re-read your Halo 3 thread from over four years ago, and a lot of what you said then appears to still hold up today (myself as well).

Quote:
Meanwhile, in games like Gears of War, you were usually forced into a smaller space (usually a room) and the enemies chased you. If you didn't come up to shoot them every so often, they would keep advancing towards you until they killed you dead.
I can't vouch for GoW, I have it but I've never played it.

Quote:
I am surprised you left out Reach and ODST from this thread. ODST was a reasonable game. No Spartan armor and thus, not auto-recovery health, but still some recharging shields. Also, the story was generally better (at least in ODST) than Master Chief's boring silent facelessness. Claiming that the player can impose their own personality on such a character is stupid. Master Chief never makes anything that would give him personality and players can't do anything that would give him a personality (besides shoot things).
I didn't leave out Reach, I mentioned it right under Halo 3, although it wasn't very in depth. I left out ODST because it was more or less an expansion to Halo 3 and not important to the main story. Certainly the characters were more interesting in ODST than Master Chief, but they didn't feel important and actually felt forced.

I did like the characters in Reach, however, it was clear from the very beginning their only purpose was to basically be Master Chief split into separate personalities and then eventually kick the bucket (not spoiling anything here, this has been known canon since before the game even came out). Ooh look, the spunky chick who doesn't take garbage from anyone, I've never seen that done before. Then, the silent guardian of the group, the 'big teddy bear' type, lovable but dangerous, WOW SO UNIQUE! And yet, I still didn't mind them.

I'm not arguing Master Chief isn't boring, in fact I explicitly called it out in my main post. He's a terrible character with no development EVER, and I hope and pray Halo 4 brings focus to that like 343i promises it will.

Quote:
In ODST, since you played as like members of the squad, each with actual dialogue and personality, you would develop a connection the same way people connect to characters they read in books, by comparing yourself to them. I mean, if Master Chief became a character in a book, all the pages would be mindless shooting and combat. I don't know about you, but those books tend to be boring as fuck.
I don't know if I'd go as far as to compare the characters in ODST to the ones in the books. The ones in the books were pretty well developed and built, ODST had a little of that but...

And Master Chief IS a character in books. A lot of books. And he actually has character. A decent amount of character, too. He isn't at all the same Master Chief the games portray him as.

Quote:
Multiplayer... It's all about knowing where the awesome weapons are. Aside from that, it's exactly like any other shooter. I never cared for it beyond the occasional game with friends who came over.
Sure, but it's fun. I have a lot of fun with Reach... in fact, when I play online, I almost only ever find myself playing Invasion, Infection (Zombies), Action Sack, and Grifball... and occasionally, Objective and Slayer. But mostly the former: things other games don't offer.

Quote:
I will give credit where credit is due though. HALO did bring shooters into consoles in a big way. It can easily be considered great just for it's contribution into this alone, but as a game itself, it's nothing special. I didn't get into Reach. I probably won't touch HALO 4.
When I look at Halo, and say I enjoy the story, a lot of people often ask me why I like it so much, because I am always so anti-bad story and pro-character development. The funny thing with the Halo series is, I adore the universe. The whole Human-Covie war, I love it. The technology, the way the future is perceived, and funnily enough, the story itself. It's incredibly cliched a lot of the time, but I'm still a sucker for it, I find it like a great space opera for the modern day (although Mass Effect is a much better space opera). The characters are boring Marty and Mary Sues, or predictable or void of any development. Master Chief is the most guilty of this crime, at least in the games, and Johnson and Keyes are typical 'War face general' and 'That-one-chick-who-is-strong-and-calls-the-shots'. The most interesting character is The Arbiter, and even that's a long shot.

Here's to hoping they really truly meant it when they said Halo 4 will be more personal and develop John.

Last edited by deoxys; 02-13-2012 at 01:37 AM.
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Old 02-13-2012, 01:43 AM   #5
Talon87
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Originally Posted by deoxys View Post
And Master Chief IS a character in books. A lot of books. And he actually has character. A decent amount of character, too. He isn't at all the same Master Chief the games portray him as.
The problem with this is, imagine if Luke Skywalker had been a bland, 2-dimensional character in the original Star Wars movies and that it wasn't until the expanded universe novels came out that he really came into his own as a deep, relatable, enjoyable 3-dimensional character. You could beg people to read the Star Wars books before passing judgment on Luke Skywalker until you're blue in the face but it wouldn't change the fact that Luke is a sock puppet without a hand inside in the films and that people are criticizing this. It's the same situation with Master Chief and Halo. Asking Loki to accept that Master Chief's development is to be found in the books is, in my opinion, asking too much of him. The onus for character development is (who) on Bungie and (where) on the games.
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Old 02-13-2012, 01:47 AM   #6
Loki
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FYI, Covenant and Flood should all be gone. It's a completely new start for the HALO series. Which is why no one really knows how this one will turn out.

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Originally Posted by Talon87
n my opinion, Master Chief and Gordon in-game are pretty interchangeable, even if they did completely different things in their respective storylines.
This is a good.... 85% true. There is a difference though. Gordon could interact with characters in the first game. Mostly guards and scientists. And your choice of either murdering them or helping them allowed you to impose a small part of yourself on Gordon. At the same time, characters (again, scientists and guards) acknowledge Gordon as "the new lab technician," which is why those retinal scanners don't work when Gordon uses them. Because of this, your feeling lost and unfamiliar with things ends up being something you share with Gordon. You're new to this game. He's new to Black Mesa.

But yeah, I never developed too great of a connection with Gordon beyond what I mentioned. I don't know what others feel.

Quote:
Originally Posted by deoxys
I don't know if I'd go as far as to compare the characters in ODST to the ones in the books. The ones in the books were pretty well developed and built, ODST had a little of that but...

And Master Chief IS a character in books. A lot of books. And he actually has character. A decent amount of character, too. He isn't at all the same Master Chief the games portray him as.
Er... I meant books in general, not HALO books.

Last edited by Loki; 02-13-2012 at 01:52 AM.
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Old 02-13-2012, 02:08 AM   #7
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Whoa, I'm sorry, I didn't see you've been avoiding spoilers, so I'll spoiler my stuff now for you, including for Reach:


Quote:
Originally Posted by Talon87 View Post
But ... I never understood why some people fell so in love with the game that they wanted to have XBox parties (like some of my IRL friends did in fact host).
I think for some people, it became the new GoldenEye. In fact, it was for a while, ushering an entirely new generation's worth of shooters, and with it, music and graphics that hadn't been seen before. Not to mention, playing game of Capture the Flag on Blood Gulch or Sidewinder was one of the funnest things you could do. Being old enough now and actually drinking and playing Halo multiplayer with friends, I know how fun that can get, so I'd imagine that played in to a lot of people's excuses to LAN party or play with Xbox Connect. But...

Quote:
Or why some people became so fascinated with the lore that they rushed out to buy The Fall of Reach and memorized every word of it.
Yeah I didn't get that either. Don't get me wrong, I quite enjoyed 'The Fall of Reach', but it was the only Halo book I've read so far, and the only one I really planning on reading, although I hear 'Ghosts of Onyx' and another that escapes me right now are two very good stories in the series as well.

Quote:
Like Loki, I did not find the Master Chief to be that deep of a character. Like Loki, I felt the opposite: he wasn't so much a one-size-fits-all glove as he was more like a kitchen apron. He was that broadly applicable to players, a.k.a. he was that shallow in the character development department. Mind you, I don't understand why people think Gordon Freeman or the world of Half-Life is any more developed either, so whatever. In my opinion, Master Chief and Gordon in-game are pretty interchangeable, even if they did completely different things in their respective storylines. (Tip to prospective game developers: give me a shooter where I play as a Brisco County Jr.-style character, replete with tens of hours of dialogue of Bruce Campbell saying various things, and I will love you long time.)
Oh god he is. It's terrible. Master Chief was the self fulfilling prophecy of being the 'faceless' strong guy that was supposed to represent you, the player, much like many other shooters before it: Doom and Wolfenstein immediately come to mind...

That being said, I enjoyed his character in the books. 'John' was much more interesting than 'Master Chief' will ever be... and I hope Halo 4 shows the fusing of the two and scrapping the 'faceless' idea.

Quote:
For one thing, I did not love Halo enough to purchase Halo 2. That was a rental. For a second thing, I did not love Halo enough to purchase an Xbox 360 or Halo 3. I never even played that one.
In my opinion, the story in Halo 3 was the best, but the gameplay was the worst and, of course, redundant. Very redundant. Which I'll get into a bit more in a moment:

Quote:
I did enjoy the first game enough, though, to beat it twice on Normal difficulty and once on Heroic. I enjoyed it enough to attend my fair share of Xbox Halo parties. I enjoyed it enough to entertain hour-long conversations with some of my more Halo-enthusiastic friends in college. It's a fun franchise that takes a lot of unnecessary shit from a lot of different haters. But at the same time, I think it suffers from fanboyitis even worse than FF7 does. And that's saying something.
It definitely does, Halo has a group of rabid fanboys much like many others do, but for whatever reason they're so rabid. So... I don't even know. Just... I love the universe, but I don't see why some of them... oh well.

Quote:
So, the topic! Halo 4, huh? I guess this is what was bound to happen when 343 Studios was spun off of Bungie after Bungie told Microsoft "We're done making Halo games. Fuck you. We want to make something else for a change." Well, congrats: Halo 3 may well indeed be the last Bungie Halo game, but if you thought 343 were going to limit themselves to spin off titles like ODST, you were sorely mistaken. Master Chief is back, Cortana is back, the whole gang is back. What do I think of that?
Well, you forgot Halo Reach, that was actually Bungie's last Halo game, and better than Halo 3. The gameplay was, in my opinion, but a lot of people will disagree, much better than Halo 3, and the story was... well, also reversed from H3: The characters were a lot more interesting (yet still not anything special), although the guy you played as was even more faceless than Master Chief was, as surprising as that is. But the other 5 were fine...! But the story was lacking. It was essentially
Spoiler: show
"Let's hang around Reach and visit different landscapes to kill Covenant in while we prolong our planet's imminent destruction! Oh, and we have a chapter where you fly a ship around in space. That's cool, right?"


Quote:
Well, having not played Halo 3 (and avoided spoilers, for the most part), I'm not really sure what to think. If the Flood are going to be brought back, I'll be disappointed. From Day 1, they were ever Bungie's response to gamers' praise for Valve's headcrab zombies in Half-Life and Capcom's actual zombies in Resident Evil. I know a lot of people love zombies in shooters, but I don't. Never have, probably never will.
I completely agree. I really don't like zombie shooters, it's why I couldn't get into Left 4 Dead. The Flood were... okay, but mostly because there were times in which I was actually frightened by them, although the music played a huge roll in that (Karine: You can tell it's intense by the crescendo! Me: YES, thank you---).

I will reveal your answers in spoiler form, if you wish to read them. I will not reveal anything huge to you, though so.

Spoiler: show
Yes, the Flood is back for a large portion of H3. You really thought the Gravemind would leave you hanging like that in H2? :P They're redundant, but not a main plot point, at least for most of it, so there's that.


Quote:
My favorite moments in the original Halo were all ones with the Covenant. My least favorite moments were all ones with the Flood. Big surprise. So ... for me to like Halo 4, they'd need to retire the Flood. And not introduce a Flood-like replacement either.
I REALLY hope they don't bring the Flood back in H4, and apparently most people agree, but it's hard to say at this point in time, we really don't know much about the enemies, although I've heard 343i saying that it will start off on a clean slate.

Quote:
Another question I guess I'd have is, are they going to bring back the fan-loved pistol from Halo 1? They left it out of the sequels because it was "too cheap" or something, but a pistol with a decent zoom-in function on it was one of the fun playtoys that really made the original Halo great. Would be cool if they brought that back. (If they already did in 3 or ODST or whatever, forgive my ignorance. )
Regarding the pistol:
[spoiler]They brought it back in Reach, it's the same power house you know and love, although just a teensy bit dumbed down. 4 shots to the head or so from halfway across a battlefield and the enemy still goes down. It's fantastic.[/quote]

Quote:
Will you be able to fight as the Arbiter again? He was my favorite character in the entire franchise. What will be the enemy we're fighting against? The setting? The time period? Lots of questions. The answers to these questions will probably decide for me whether I consider Halo 4 to be nothing more than Microsoft milking the cow dry or whether I consider Halo 4 to be GOTY material.
These are all questions I'd love to know the answer to as well, and that last sentence basically summed up my thoughts on the matter. I sincerely hope and I have my fingers crossed that they aren't just trying to milk it... well, obviously they are, but I hope they at least turn it into really damn good ice cream or something instead of just letting it spoil
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Old 02-13-2012, 02:14 AM   #8
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The problem with this is, imagine if Luke Skywalker had been a bland, 2-dimensional character in the original Star Wars movies and that it wasn't until the expanded universe novels came out that he really came into his own as a deep, relatable, enjoyable 3-dimensional character. You could beg people to read the Star Wars books before passing judgment on Luke Skywalker until you're blue in the face but it wouldn't change the fact that Luke is a sock puppet without a hand inside in the films and that people are criticizing this. It's the same situation with Master Chief and Halo. Asking Loki to accept that Master Chief's development is to be found in the books is, in my opinion, asking too much of him. The onus for character development is (who) on Bungie and (where) on the games.
I wasn't asking Loki to accept his development in the books, that's stupid. I can't expect people to take interest in something they probably don't care about. I was just pointing out a fact is all, but I was going to say, I haven't read the expanded universe, but a friend of mine has, almost all of them, and he will go to the grave saying that Luke was a 2-d pile of rubbish until the books. Which, I would assume is true, because he wasn't that interesting in the movies. His only development was in training, and outside of that he was pretty stereotypical. But we can make a Star Wars thread to discuss that :P


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Originally Posted by Raptor Jesus
Er... I meant books in general, not HALO books.
Oh, well. There's that
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Old 02-13-2012, 02:26 AM   #9
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Originally Posted by Talon87
a lot of the anxiety Loki mentioned above completely absent. (One man's trash is another man's treasure, see? I get so anxious with regards to that tension Loki had mentioned that I usually wind up (1) not liking the game and (2) obsessive-compulsively creating a new save file every 3 minutes when I'm playing a PC shooter. Which in and of itself is nothing more than my own compensatory measure to make the PC shooter more equivalent to Halo: whereas in Halo you physically run and hide and wait for your shields to recharge, in a PC shooter like HL2 you just reload the save file you'd made not but 30 seconds before and try again, 100 health and 90 shields waiting for you.)
Imagine you were facing your friend in a game of chess. He's pretty damn good. Not like, win millions at a tournament good, but good.

Now imagine every time he put you into check, you could just walk away for 5 minutes, then come back and the game reset, but your friend still lost all the pieces he lost in your last game. Now imagine you finally won a game after a half dozen or so resets.

Did you really earn that win? Could you cheer in the crowds and claim absolute victory? That your skill was truly greater than his?

That's my view on that.
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Old 03-05-2012, 02:03 PM   #10
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First Halo 4 gameplay footage released

http://www.gamesradar.com/halo-4-new...behind-scenes/
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Old 03-05-2012, 04:16 PM   #11
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It's a very sexy infomercial. That's unfortunately all it is. The best intentions, the best graphics, the best soundtrack, the best sound effects, ... none of that will matter if the gameplay is lacking. For players like me, the story can make up for that deficit, but it will still be a deficit that prevents the game from achieving 10/10 status. The single biggest obstacles lying in Halo 4's way are:
  • will this game be fun to play?
  • will this game be different enough from, or superior enough to, Halos 1-3 that I feel the need to buy it and play it?
If the game is just as fun to play as Halo 1 was but it's also little different from Halos 1-3, then I'll pass. If the game is quite different from Halos 1-3 but it fails to be a fun game -- whether because they take the gameplay somewhere new and it fails or whether because they leave the gameplay alone but you feel that Halos 1-3 had shitty gameplay to begin with -- then again I'm not going to buy this. The game needs to be both fun and different enough to warrant a purchase. And nothing in this infomercial prepared me to solidly answer either of those two questions.
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Old 04-07-2012, 07:22 PM   #12
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Well I read the leaked GameInformer article, and it's caused the Halo fanbase to go full retard, screaming "OMG they're mixing Halo Reach and Call of Duty!!!11!"

Here's the TL;DR of it so you don't have to read it.

People need to get a grip. Don't knock it until you try it. The multiplayer changes they're integrating are simply;

1. Sprinting is permanent now.
2. Jet Pack, Camo, and Overshields are returning.
3. "Forerunner Vision" lets players see through walls
4. The worst part: Instant respawning

The gameplay? We still don't know much except

Spoiler: show
The game takes place 4 years after Halo 3. The Covenant return as enemies, at least in the beginning. Why? Are they a faction group, or pirates or something? This is disappointing somewhat, and John thinks so, too, although we were promised an entire new race of enemies with different classes. The place they crash land is a Shield World, as predicted, around a planet called Requiem. The devs are still swearing that the game takes MC and turns him from a dull, boring every man and into a real character with emotions and development.

Cortana is at risk of going Rampant, so that's probably a thing that will wind up happening.


Oh, and Multiplayer is storybased. Red vs Blue are two army teams of Spartan IVs (yes, IV) that are training for combat. This will apparently have story elements that aren't very detailed yet.


Here are the scans.
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Old 10-13-2012, 11:58 PM   #13
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Well;

Halo 4 is Halo 2 part 2 in that it leaked onto the internet three weeks before it's out.

I've already come dangerously close a few times now to being spoiled by some fuckasses. So, be on your guard. I may actually need to go semi-dark and actively avoid most of the internet :/ Really blows that it's come to this...

Also, the new Halo live action series is out, at least the first two parts. I'll be waiting for them all to be out to watch them all in a row, but if you're curious...

BORKED

BORKED
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Old 10-14-2012, 12:34 AM   #14
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I guess I'd say just tune out of the following for the next few weeks?
  • Reddit
  • 4chan or other chans
  • any other webforums you may go to with population greater than 250 active users
  • game news sites
  • Facebook and other social networking sites, depending on how you have yours set up
You do that and I think you'll be pretty safe. No one here is going to spoil you. But Facebook could easily spoil you if a friend puts in his status (I'm making this up so don't freak) "OMG MASTER CHIEF AND THE ARBITER TEAM UP AGAIN!" Reddit will almost certainly spoil you because it's Reddit. Same thing for any of 4chan's general activity or specifically video game nerd culture boards. So on and so forth.

Basically, do with this what you would do with Harry Potter if you got the book on launch day and knew "SNAPE KILLS DUMBLEDORE!" assholes abounded. You'd avoid the Internet then for three weeks too, right? So just do the same thing here but three weeks ahead of purchase instead of three weeks into purchase.
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Old 10-14-2012, 04:04 PM   #15
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Microsoft really needs better internal security.
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Old 11-01-2012, 08:51 PM   #16
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First reviews of Halo 4 are out: http://www.metacritic.com/game/xbox-...critic-reviews

Right now it's average is 9/10 and has 7 10/10's, the lowest score being from Electronic Gaming Monthly with a 7/10. I'd post a few quotes instead of just scores but they're all right there in the link, and there seems to be a lot of different opinions.
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Old 11-01-2012, 09:02 PM   #17
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I was reading Penny-Arcade's news outlet's high praise for it earlier today. They were pretty much singing both the single player campaign's and the multiplayer's praises. The impression I got was "Best Halo game ever and by a fair margin too." Hopefully such praise matches your own experiences come game day. I'm wishing you the best, big guy. Best of luck that the game is GOTY for you.
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Old 11-02-2012, 02:56 AM   #18
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Thanks.

I just found out American Express and Microsoft have a deal that if you have an AmEx card and sync it with you Live account... *and* are one of the first 25 people in the US to beat Halo 4 on Legendary... you will automatically win a trip to E3 next year. I was already planning on beating it on Legendary from the start so I'd like to give this a shot but...

Doing so would almost have to mean doing a speedrun through the campaign as quickly as possible and probably skipping the cutscenes to save time - for a potentially bunk deal. Sure I can go back later and experience in it's fullest but I'm not sure if this is something I would want to do or not ._.
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Old 11-02-2012, 03:43 AM   #19
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Just go to PAX. It's more fun and less industry-oriented.
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Old 11-02-2012, 07:07 AM   #20
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I would say just enjoy the experience, Deo. If you accidentally end up winning in the process, that's just an added bonus.
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Old 11-02-2012, 08:49 AM   #21
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Agreeing with Amras: take your time and enjoy an accidental win should it happen.
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Old 11-02-2012, 04:35 PM   #22
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STOP EATING. STOP PEEING. STOP POOPING. STOP WORKING. STOP LIVING YOUR LIFE. PLAY HALO4.
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Old 11-03-2012, 01:25 PM   #23
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wat
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Old 11-03-2012, 09:03 PM   #24
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Did you win yet? If you didn't win yet, why haven't you won?! Stop wasting time with human life processes and beat the game.
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Old 11-04-2012, 12:49 AM   #25
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I'm not going to do it. Also, sorry for being excited for a game?

Anyway - I wanted to share this lovely little paragraph from the EGM review of Halo 4 -

Quote:
These low points are openly exacerbated by the series’ staunch refusal to get with the times when it comes to game mechanics and level design, ignoring obvious enhancements like big-ticket sequences and proper iron-sights mechanics in favor of their age-old addiction to slow, methodical combat in unnecessarily large environments. And while I get that 343i was deathly afraid to come in and mess with the elements most consider Halo canon, it’s a lot to ask of us who play other games in the genre to continue to stomach a core most left behind half a decade ago. Mind you, some folks might find the videogame equivalent of being forced to eat your vegetables a comforting alternative to Microsoft putting a dash of modern in their combat, but when stacked up to Dishonored, Far Cry 3, and Black Ops II, Halo 4’s campaign feels as empty and uninspired as its strong, silent protagonist.
So in other words, no iron-sights or big epic movie like sequences? Get with the times.

Jesus, no wonder the gaming industry is going in the shitter. Why does CoD and Battlefield have to have it's touch in everything? The irony here is he complains Halo's style hasn't changed, and yet I'll bet you he gives Black Ops 2 a 9/10.

Now don't mistake this rant for being upset about his review - I couldn't care less. What bothers me is that he's a fucking retard.
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