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Halo 5 Review Thread

Schryver

Member
I normally play Halo on normal first time through but i opted for heroic this time and im glad i did as it seems a lot easier than previous titles, so i highly recommend all the people who normally play normal to select Heroic.

Well this is fail
 

Trup1aya

Member
I don't think the guy got close to a black hole to play the game. Of course they are real life results.

Again, the purpose of giving a range is to cover, well, a range of play styles. A range is utterly meaningless if it doesn't cover the whole sample, or if we are not told at the very least the percentage of outliers that were dropped.



Irrelevant.

Irrelevant in what way? Anyone who's every played halo (or any shooter) before is going to want to know about the Heroic runtime... How quickly one can blow threw enemies who hardly do any damage, and hesitate to shoot back is actually more 'irrelevant'.

People are likely much more interested in how long they'll get to spend with the game when it's actually putting forth a challenge... Anything less than heroic is for people new to shooters or what to look for collectibles without dying.
 
"taking in scenery" is a completely optional part of any game. We can always argue that a playtime could be longer if people stop to analyze textures of explore areas more. This is why ranges exist, to capture the low and high end of the distribution.

Pretty much. I don't take in scenery in shooters nor do I hunt for hidden collectibles. I just go where the objective tells me. The playtime estimate should account for this as I believe that's how the average person plays

Ain't no one panning the landscape like an e3 demo
 
A few questions, is there a specific reason you chose normal? Typically Bungie and or 343 have always stated that Heroic is the way "it's meant to be played". However prententious that may seem.

Also, did you stop and look for collectibles at all or just follow the main path? Just curious because these things can affect playtime.

I played on normal because I was dying to see the story. I'm a huge Halo Lore nut, and I wanted to see what they did with it. The story isn't bad, but it's certainly unfilfilling.

I didn't look for collectibles much at all, but I've started going back and doing that. I got all the ones on the first mission, and that felt pretty good. It reminds me of looking for secrets in the Halo 3 and Reach days, and the movement mechanics make exploring a lot more fun. If you're going into it for that, I think you'll be rewarded (though the audio logs you find are of an absolute shit audio quality).

I will say this against the game, there's a LOT of holes in level geometry where you can see the seams of the skybox. Like, I never had to go very far off the beaten path to do that.

This is a massive disappointment. Hope MP is as stellar as they say, although the Beta left me kinda cold.

The multiplayer is really, really stellar. I didn't touch on that in my campaign review (obvs), but I've had a great time. They've tightened everything up since the first public betas, and it's a really satisfying game to play. Also earning req points and opening req packs is borderline pokemon levels of fun.

In the preview there's no in-game option to buy req points. Not sure if that'll change after release or that's confined to only the XBox Marketplace.


Probably not real life results. You played with the intention of finishing it quickly to review, right ?
Finishing it quickly for the story, but I died plenty when dicking around. I imagine you might find yourself with another hour of gameplay if you're not rushing.

But the game's movement mechanics really encourage you to rush, I think. With boosting and sprinting and climbing up all these walls, I feel like it's a speedrunner's dream (except for the few forced auto scrollers).
 

HTupolev

Member
An expectation is not a range, it's a number.

The proper estimator for the lower bound and higher bound of a range is the minimum and the maximum respectively.
Concepts like "interquartile range" exist. In this case it's not clear how strong the bounds are because they weren't specific about their meaning, but there's nothing incorrect or improper about presenting a range that you expect most typical cases will fall within.
 
"taking in scenery" is a completely optional part of any game. We can always argue that a playtime could be longer if people stop to analyze textures of explore areas more. This is why ranges exist, to capture the low and high end of the distribution.

I wonder if they did some last minute balancing in the normal mode. Could explain the shorter times.
 

hawk2025

Member
Irrelevant in what way? Anyone who's every played halo (or any shooter) before is going to want to know about the Heroic runtime... How quickly one can blow threw enemies who hardly do any damage, is actually more 'irrelevant'.

Hey, I agree that the Heroic playtime is more relevant for my tastes.

But it's irrelevant to the point on how they came to this range of playtimes in the first place, which was the point of the discussion, and was supposedly estimated using real data on the Normal difficulty.
 

TheOddOne

Member
How does one play quickly in a linear story driven shooter?
You could avoid major encounters in both Reach and ODST if you barrel through them, the game just progressed and that freedom was liberating for some and for others not so much. Halo 4's was more linear and you could hardly cheese your way through—especially when waiting for doors to open.
 

Eoin

Member
Every Halo game can be completed in less than 2 hours. Some people being able to finish this in less than 5 doesn't really mean all that much. Playing at a lower difficulty or just bypassing encounters will shorten the time. My first play through of Halo 3 was co-op with my brother, we did it in under 3 1/2 because he wanted to play on normal. It then took me 10 hours to beat it solo on legendary.
 
I don't get how people didn't understand Halo 4s story. I mean what, you never knew that the Halo universe had space magic that allowed alien wizards to "evolve" things at will like pokemon? Oh you thought that the humans in Halo were just a future versions of modern day humanity, and that that was clear by the fact that there were future versions of cities we know like Phoenix and Mombasa? Naw, they were actually super advanced thousands of years ago but got de-evolved by the alien space wizards. You thought the flood were just some super creepy alien parasite from some dark place In the universe? Naw just a bio-weapon made by some even more powerful space wizards than the normal space wizards we see in the game. I mean jeez, what is there to not get? It's so damned simple, just like Prometheus!
 

nib95

Banned
So I cut up my recording of the playthrough for my review, and these were my results:
o4lyMhQ.png

Would you say you rushed through it?
 

VinFTW

Member
It's disappointing that 343i can't deliver a Halo game with 90+ metascore, but still is good enough for fans.
It's their second try at a mainline halo game lol....

How many studios do you know who can pull off a franchise this big at this quality on their second try?
 

Schryver

Member
Frankly those developer-touted playtimes can never be trusted. The Order was the same way - Once all the info about it being so short leaked out the devs tried to say it took longer in playtesting but that didn't seem to be the case once everyone got to play through it
 

Trup1aya

Member
Hey, I agree that the Heroic playtime is more relevant for my tastes.

But it's irrelevant to the point on how they came to this range of playtimes in the first place, which was the point of the discussion, and was supposedly estimated using real data on the Normal difficulty.

Ok, so is this person providing a range? Or is he just providing the runtime of his specific playthrough as a veteran FPS players playing a mode made for people who have less experience of don't want a challenge. We know the range provided by stinkles was based on various play styles. A collector type is going to take much longer. This number by itself is utterly useless...
 
Halo 6 has a much higher chance of being this franchise's GT6 moment.

Not really. The conditions are right for it right now. Low install base for the XB1, which also means sales in Europe and ROTW will likely be comparatively tiny compared to past Halo titles.

GT6 sold so bad partly because active userbase for PS3 was smaller or were thinking about next-gen.
 
It's their second try at a mainline halo game lol....

How many studios do you know who can pull off a franchise this big at this quality on their second try?
I don't know, how about Bungie? Or Epic with GOW?
Also it's crazy weirdly the Halo Franchise ups and downs match those of MGS in my mind. First game is great, second game is trashed by a lot of people for not letting them play as the person they want to for a lot of the game but becomes loved years later, third is loved by a lot and has the most meaningful content of the entire series, 4th is a confusing mess with "modernized" mechanics, 5 has the worst story but the most smooth gameplay.
 
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