Deadly Cyclone
Pride of Iowa State
Kyle hates Halo (4) and likes hyperbole and sarcasm. Who would have thought.
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Halo |OT15| Beta-tested, GAF approved
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MLG is barely Reach.
Shit post.
The BTB maps are so bad. They need to make another squad slayer and keep throwdown, put them up top please, or make menus like in every other Halo UI. People will have a better idea of what each playlist has if it's categorized. This way if I want to play infinity it's all in one place. If I don't, it's in another. Fucking CTF still says 5v5 in the description, but it's really 4v4. WHO UPDATES THIS SHIT?
The problem is that it's not a hyperbole. It's all spot on as to how they messed everything up trying to force change and paid for good ratings.
Not being sarcastic. I'm not sure if you want to admit that the game is a failure because it would make your pre-release stroking look a little weird, but c'mon dude. This is not the Halo game you wanted, and it's not the Halo game I wanted. It excels at nothing.
EagleBurnn
Banned
What do you think about Throwdown and the Majestic maps?
Deadly Cyclone
Pride of Iowa State
Halo 4 is not "an abomination" though, that's just ridiculous. I (and others) actually like Halo 4 (someone find Heckfu). It's taken some time for it to evolve a bit, but with Throwdown and the awesome new maps it really is something that I can say I enjoy playing. Was it what I envisioned when the first Halo 4 info was announced? Not specifically, but no one knew what 343 was going to do. We all knew it would be something a bit different from Bungie though, and it is. They've added back weapon spawns, they've restricted loadouts, they've tweaked gametypes. The game is becoming better and better, and I enjoyed it mostly from the get-go. I posted my massive list of dislikes, so obviously there are things I'd change, but it's a fun game.
Honestly I question if there is a Halo game you like. I'd have to guess back when Halo 2/3 were out you bitched just as much about them. Maybe it's a sliding scale of disapproval, you hate Halo 2/3 but less than Reach, and less than 4. I mean, you said you "enjoyed" Reach, but anyone reading this forum would know you bitched about how bad it was for months.
Not everyone hates Halo 4. Is it 100% what we want? No. But it's not an abomination.
Dongs Macabre
aka Daedalos42
IMO, Reach has the best customs of any Halo, but Halo 4 has a better multiplayer experience.
Campaign is pretty good, tbf.
I actually think 4 has the best rifle duels in the series, unfortunately, due to the Infinity jazz, they rarely happen without some other variable raining on your party.
As with most of his posts, they have some hard truths.
A lot of Halo communities got shafted because of cut features/options.
Halo 4 has less features than its predecessors.
You did have to go to Waypoint to watch the easter egg terminals to get the backstory of Didact which makes him a better character than the random ambiguous super villian he was in the main story.
Pre release information was dry, we had a lot of confusion about the features being added into the game and got no explanation or descriptions of them and surprise surprise a lot of them ended up being bad (some of the perks, boltshot, etc) and BRgif was a very sneaky thing, intentional or not.
Halo 4 even shipped with the features advertised on the box not working.
Yes you can say 343 is new studio and it was building itself as it was making the game. But that doesn't make Halo 4 any less of a bad product.
Good thing its absolute core gameplay is solid though. Too bad it took months to get to it.
I don't disagree the Covenant as a rule acted a bit more intelligently, but they were not as fun to fight in Reach as in previous games. Elites were impossible to take down in CQC so you either noob comboed every time or you say back with crates of DMR ammo and pinged away. Combined with cheating AI, it just suffered. In Halo 4 I felt like a got a lot of those alternate play options back.
And I definitely don't hate Reach, I think it was by far the best Bungie has done with characters, but it didn't succeed enough for me to justify trashing their own canon.
Speedy Blue Dude
Banned
I think Halo 3 has the best custom. Almost half my time on Halo 3 was spent on custom games. Almost no one played Custom Games in Halo:Reach. At least not in my group of friends. Everyone was to busy playing game after game trying to level up and earn credits to buy their precious armor.
I miss the armory in Reach. Some armor was super disgusting and badly designed, but their were plenty of good helmets. Mark V, Mark VI, Commander, Noble 6's recruit helmet, ODST (R.I.P), Hazop, Air Assault.
Halo's armory is just depressing... We have Mark VI... Scout... And... That's it?
FUNKNOWN iXi
Member
Yeah.. they both suck lol
Makes me sad to no end..
"Adbomination" depends on how you view the word, but I mean I think it's fair to call it something like that because of how poorly this game has been handled. I complained day and night when Halo 2 came around because it was a completely different game. However, that does not change the experience I had with the game. The online experience was done right, it was just ahead of its time (see baby Banhammer, not ready for the big leagues).
What experience do we get from Halo 4 that wasn't far better in previous Halo games?
Same here. Halo 3 was all about fun customs with a large group of friends. It was always a blast. But none of my friends ever played any fun customs like Halo 3, either.
Those same people were also turned off by a lot of what Reach had, too.
I think that the best they've done with their characters was either ODST or Halo 2. Sure, nobody really developed (except for the Arbiter), but at least everyone was likeable and we cared enough for when most of them bit the bullet. Reach's exception was Jorge, as opposed to the 1-D Carter.
The drama that stems from people that love and hate the game arguing has never been more entertaining to read. So there's that
Deadly Cyclone
Pride of Iowa State
Sidenote: Is someone (Tashi?) going to do a Halo 4 HaloGaf Montage? I've actually been saving clips this time.
FUNKNOWN iXi
Member
Not sure if on ignore or just has nothing..
The Real Napsta
Member
Kyle its one of the smartest posters on this board.
People don't bitch because they hate, people bitch because they want to see it be as good as it can possibly be. This is the fundamental disconnect between some parts of HaloGAF and others. You could chalk it up to insanity, but the reason people spend ages writing lengthy posts about every aspect of the game for years isn't because people don't give a shit about or hate Halo. The latter have already left Halo 4. They're gone. They were gone the day Blops 2 was released. Juices touches on this a lot: what's frustrating is that those of us who are left, the people who play or played Halo every day for a long, long time, get resolutely ignored and crapped on over and over for no reason whatsoever. There's never an olive branch extended, recognition of problems, or a mea culpa. The closest we get is something like Frankie's letter which basically patted the entire team on the back for working hard and told the community "we'll do better next time!". Bullshit. It's 2013 yet we're still praying that the dice roll lands on a decent matchmaking update once a month in the bulletin. There's still no transparency. There's nothing. Waypoint is perpetually half-finished. The person whose full-time job it is to be Community Manager never leaves 343's message boards. At first I was stunned that 343 would remove a beloved playlist like SS while retaining TU BETA SLAYER, but now I see that was just a sign of the general disdain and incompetence towards the community to come. To people like High Speed Halo, I am sorry that 343 considers elements of the game that are the cornerstone of your community, the life-blood of your group of Halo friends, to be just another boring old unimportant checkbox that they can axe. I say that not because I mean jack shit, but because you certainly won't hear it from 343.
And it's hard for me to see where it all went wrong. David and Frankie clearly care about the series and love traditional Halo. The engineering team at 343 did pretty well with the visuals and netcode. The foundation was there, but the piece of the puzzle that doesn't make sense is how the multiplayer starting going in this shaky direction, and how everything else ended up so half-baked. I can't speculate much on the non-multiplayer portions, I'm sure that was a tangled web of employee departures and missed deadlines and scrapped plans, but for the multiplayer; do I think the team at 343 felt passionately about shoving COD features into Halo? Nah. To me, Halo 4 has all the telltale signs of being designed by executives and focus tested into oblivion, which is something we're feeling more and more as industry sales are generally down with this extended console lifespan and publishers are trying to scrape together a decent ROI. I'm sure some higher-ups looked at COD financials, studied the psychological components of what makes COD a success, looked at what they had (Halo), and issued some large directives - a purely business decision which I can certainly respect - to try to keep up. I guess it worked, it's a shame that once again the true, longtime hardcore Halo fans are the ones who get squeezed.
squidhands
Member
Coincidental pose? hmmm...
Hydranockz
Member
I agree with quite a lot of this. To talk about the bolded, there has to have been something. I'm sure we'll probably never be officially told what that something is but it's clear that development had been rushed in the later stages. Given stuff like the Day 1 patch and the cut features, I really don't think it's too much to suggest that, at some point, they were going to have had more time to do it. The lack of a beta is understandable looking back. If you're struggling enough as it is to meet deadlines, setting aside more time to go through another exhaustive testing cycle would have crucified the game even more so than before.
I'll write up some more of my thoughts later.
See this is the problem. It wasn't Bungie's canon. It was Microsoft. They commissioned the book after the success of Halo:CE, no one knew what Halo would become. I think this was another factor in the growing gulf between the studio and it's parent company. Was Halo Bungie's? Or was it Microsoft's?
Fall of Reach came out in 2001, and while Bungie tried to utilize it's story or established canon, they ultimately wanted to be in control of their own destiny with regards to their final Halo game. In their words, it was the definitive Halo from the people who brought you Halo. It's different now, because studios generally have a say in what can or cannot be written for books, ie Mass Effect series and now 343 overseeing ALL halo related developments.
It's why I bring up Star Wars Episode VII so much. Disney and JJ Abrams are going to take the series in a new direction. The problem is, there is decades of established canon. But that was before Disney or Abrams was involved. What if they don't utilize what is written? The movies are the primary medium and will probably recon what was established. If Episode VII is a damn good film, would you really hate it because it didn't involve Mara Jade Skywalker, Thrawn etc?
FUNKNOWN iXi
Member
I was at the zoo a year ago and watch a gorilla do this. Apparently it's really bad for their legs. They do it because they watch us through the glass and learn to walk like us. This is part of the reason they have them in the big rooms in small shifts so they can break this habit or stop it from forming. It was crazy because this stupid little shitty kid was banging on the glass and the gorilla ran across the room on two feet, then sprint at the glass and started banging on it right where her face was. It was the best karma I have ever witness, and scary as hell.
Deadly Cyclone
Pride of Iowa State
See this is more like it. I enjoy reading these posts from people here because, while I don't 100% agree, it goes into detail and explains the reasoning behind the one-off posts and random comments.
I don't agree with everything you said here, but I do agree with a lot of it. I agree that something feels amiss. That the visuals came along in such an amazing way, that the netcode (albeit a shaky start) has come along, that the systems all seem solid. Yet there is something that feels different overall. I chalk it up to this being a brand new studio, made up of a LOT of people who have never worked on a Halo game, making a Halo game based on what they love about Halo, but also what you mentioned, what Microsoft wants Halo to be. It's a "too many cooks in the kitchen" scenario having two head chefs (the ACTUAL Halo people, from Bungie, and Microsoft). The difference is that I don't think everything in Halo 4 turned out poorly.
I do see some olive branches as well. They hired Bravo. They brought in Walshy. They are trying to sculpt sections of the multiplayer into what fans like yourself want in a Halo game. If that's not an olive branch I don't know what is. True, they shouldn't have had to do that if it was done from the start, but it's happening at least. Some of us do like some of the new things 343 added though. I don't think MP should have been based around Infinity gametypes overall by any means, but I do like that they created Infinity and introduced it to Halo. I like how the weapons feel for the most part (get the Boltshot out of this game forever pls), and I like the core gameplay. This is why I don't see the game as an "abomination." Because, while there are things I'd love to see fixed and changed, there's still a game here I have fun playing. Which speaks to the fact that 343 knows how to build a fun game, they just need more practice at building a Halo game that meets the standards of people like you (and me, believe it or not) that have been playing Halo since the series debuted in 2001.
Overall I'm conflicted on the game. There are a lot of parts I love about it. It's by far the best looking Halo game ever made. It goes into the fiction more (albeit poorly explained), it has multiplayer that I find fun to play, but there are parts that need fixed too. Personal ordinance is great for Infinity, but multiplayer shouldn't be based around it. Global ordinance should not exist. Jetpack and active camo should be power-ups, if anything. Etc. etc.
Basically I get what you're saying, just some of us find many good things about the game, along with the bad. That's where opinions are going to come in though. I don't think this is the game every Halo fan wanted. Some people will feel much more negatively about that than others. It's a mess of opinions and accusations, no one person is going to be right.
Sorry, missed this!
Are you asking what we get from a MP standpoint alone? I get your point too, but could you not ask that same question about Reach? Halo 3? They might have each added something to the game, but was Halo Reach a better experience than Halo 2, 3? Etc. 4 is definitely lacking in the feature department, but it's interesting to pair it up with previous games.
FUNKNOWN iXi
Member
Cool, didn't know that but yeah man, seeing them up close really puts things into perspective.. I used to watch movies like Congo and be like "hmm, maybe I could survive an encounter with a gorilla.."
LOLNOPE
And randomrosso thanks for the heads up. Got the airassassination cheevo in Customs B]
This is the guy. He is really young too, like 2-4 years old. He put that bucket on his head, ran away, then slammed into the glass. It felt so bad for him. Made me want to smack the shit out of the little kid hitting the glass. Her dad didn't do anything and the zookeeper was a bitch about it.
Orangoutangs are way more dangerous. They can rip you limb from limb so easily.
Digital Limit
Member
Outside of the hardcore communities, I hear nothing but positive responses to Halo 4, and people referring to it as their favorite game in the series. It's a slap to the dick of the fans, but it does have more appeal to the masses. The GAF bubble is so counter to general consensus.
Amazing post.
Sure, Reach was unbalanced (nades, aa's, bloom) but damn it was fun. Halo 4 brought those unbalanced to an extreme exaggerated state, ultimately ruining the formula that reach had tainted. NASCAR zombies, monster trucks, posting videos of funny shit that you could actually see on bungie.net, squad slayer.
Throwdown is good, give bravo a huge promotion, make halo fun again, and fire Kevin franklin.
Yeah but the masses aren't playing halo 4 as much as they are playing CoD. That was kind of the entire point of most of the changes and they failed. It took them so long to realize this mistake and come back to the basics, Throwdown et al. They are appealing to a market that doesn't exist for them. They need to focus on their niche, which is what halo is good at.
ODST's characters had no development, they were archetypes you enjoyed watching (and I did.) I think Halo 2's problem insofar as the Arbiter is he sort of just suddenly switches to being "good"--I wonder if we'd had Halo 3-caliber story in the actual missions if his change of heart would have been conveyed better. As is he ends one mission saying "you lie!" To the Chief, and the end of the next one suddenly being all "he's right, I've got to get inside!"
You know what's hilarious? I kind of wish they followed this way of thinking and actually borrowed the one feature that makes CoD CoD: the kill times.
Go to any CoD player and ask them why they don't like Halo. You'll get something along the lines of "It takes forever to kill someone in Halo."
Halo started off with fast kill times and subsequently increased it by 2.5x with Halo 2. Fast kill times, when paired with low aim assist and fast movement, raise the skill gap tremendously. It's probably my #1 most wanted feature in Halo and has been sorely missed since CE.
Instead, 343 borrows nearly every aspect from CoD EXCEPT fast kill times. And what's worse is they had the BR and DMR at 4 shot kills at one point in the development. It is literally maddening.
I think the arbiter had a pretty good character arc. He starts off being disgraced, tries to work his way back while constantly being shit on by the heirarchs and the brutes, still stays faithful until it all finally amounts to be too much. He is shaped by the experiences and changes his stance from beginning to end in a pretty logical sequence of events. I'd say that's the definition of a character arc.
Deadly Cyclone
Pride of Iowa State
If you make Halo a quick kill game you will kill Halo entirely. Halo is not a CoD-style quick kill twitch shooter. Nor should it be.
Long kill times and hip fire are the only reasons I even play halo 4 mp.
FUNKNOWN iXi
Member
I disagree. This kind of thing can also be said with each previous game, but the online population tells the true story of fans invested in the franchise IMO.
I remember when I labeled you as one of my top 3 Juniors and heckfu loved Madness when he first joined.
Ya. Pwn like a pony.
<3
Guis stahp. He's not saying to make Halo instakill.. He's saying something along the lines of Halo 1 combined with less aim assist/bullet magnetism.
I agree completely with you on ODST. I should've made that clearer in my post.
But with the Arbiter, I assumed he started to realize the truth in Uprising once he comes back from meeting up with MC and Gravemind. In that level there were bodies of dead Elites and they were fighting off the Brutes.
And yes, I really wish he got more screen time in Halo 3.
Long kills times is why I play Halo. Where's the fun in winning an encounter with 3 bullets?
Ask the millions of COD players.
FUNKNOWN iXi
Member
Actually landing those 3 bullets.
I feel like barely anyone remembers Halo 1 sometimes and the flow of MP..
Don't say that! There will be personal agenda bombs all up in this bitch.
neoism
Member
Halo already has instant respawns now. What's going to come next?
Are you kidding me? It will probably bring in more sales if anything. And sticking to tradition makes not a shred of sense since CE had fast kill times.
Why? Long kill times make team shooting the only viable tactic when having a serious game against people that are equal to or better than you. So boring and tedious. It also limits your skill potential.
Great question. If you up the movement speed and lower the aim assist, landing a 3 shot will be 100x more satisfying than any 5-shot BR kill you've ever done due to the fact that involved so much more skill. Do you not find getting a head shot with a sniper satisfying?
And thanks UNKNOWN, lol.
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