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Because I haven't quite yet bitched about enough games...
13 years ago
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls and everything inbetween and beyond...
You are once again witness to one of my game rants, where I essentially rip off Yahtzee in shortly praising a game and then making a list of comparisons to all the things I hate about it.
In this ~semi-annual issue I will be letting go of all my frustrations about the much anticipated and equally as flawed H4LO
[red]SPOILERS AHEAD[/red]
To start things off, I really don't want to be doing this. I love the HALO franchise, even if I was disappointed by REACH at first, I grew to like it for various reasons and even though it violated canon on a few occasions (and some major character creation points), it was still a solid game, both in terms of story and multiplayer gameplay. The addition of armor abilities added a gameplay dynamic that took some getting used to, but quickly settled as a core factor you could account for while still retaining the original feel of the previous HALO games, also because it was essentially an extension of the HALO3 collect and drop abilities.
BUT, I will be pouring negative opinion on this game, in terms of gameplay, design and story tellling, all of which have their own unique flaws and drawbacks.
So without further ado, let's get on with the show.
The good bits
Visuals
As I played through H4LO for the first time I strained my memory back to the first time I played H:CE way back when. I remember the feeling of this new game that changed my feel for gameplay and that had massively cool visuals and enemies. Weapons that shoot little pink shards that you are afraid of... good times. And for all the negative comments I have on the story, I had that feeling again as I progressed through the story.
The bit that stood out for me particularily was the second level (funny how it's always the second level). In H:CE, when you step out of the escape pod, you see HALO for the first time and I had this chill running down my spine, because I had never seen anything quite as awesome or as original (at least in my ignorant eyes, it's not like a 12 y/o has any idea of Larry Niven or anything, at least none I know of. If you did know of him at that age, respect to you).
There is a scene like that in H4LO, which was very obviously set up to be just that, but it works so very, very well to recreate that effect of awe before these alien constructs, namely when you leave the crash site of the F.u.D. and the covenant fleet, and the “cave” opens up on this massive vista of floating forerunner spires over huge areas that dwarf your existence to a tiny speck in the landscape.
Very majestic, very cinematic. Something I can generally praise H4LO for is how it depicts things. Even though they’re essentially backdrops, the game does its best to show you all the beautiful landscaping work the artists have created, like you were dropped directly into the concepted matte-paintings. I have some big issues with other parts of the visual aspects, but we’ll get to that later.
Story
Spartan 117 returns ... and yes, he is a worthy successor to the man we played back on the Arc.
343 announced that they wanted to get into the Chiefs head and depict his psyche a lot more than in any of the previous games, and yes, they’ve done a fairly good job of it. What I liked a lot was him actually responding to Cortana and other characters when he was spoken to, which made him feel more... personal, more like a human being. However, the script was done well enough for him to seem distant and sociophobic, preferring to be on his own, as a Spartan, rather than part of the “other humans” who show up aboard the Infinity, which goes very much hand in hand to how Spartan II’s were depicted in the expanded universe.
The separation of Spartans vs. Humans actually plays a big role in H4LO in that the Spartan IV program is now a separate division of the UNSC military arm rather than being an addition to the ONI Special Warfare Group. Especially Sarah Palmer enforces a strict separation policy of Spartans to Non-Spartans, at least in terms of addressing official issues.
However, while the Master Chief is also a Spartan, he is very much depicted as separate from everything. Almost everyone, including other Spartans, view John as a Legend, but even so, as an aging Legend. He is a memory from a war past, an obsolete piece of equipment even to some, seeing as Spartan II’s were still considered military hardware.
Despite all this, what I really loved was the way the Master Chief handled it, namely exactly how I would expect his character to do ... stay indifferent to all of it. John is exactly the kind of functioning semi-machine I expect a Spartan II to be and he plays the role brilliantly - bravo to 343 for characterizing someone who hardly shows any emotion ever and still making him likable. There are minor issues, but I’ll get to his relationship with Cortana later ... and her character.
Needless to say though, John kicks massive ass still, even with some 46 years of age on his back, so look forward to the Master Chief living up to his name.
The addition of Spartan Ops is an interesting concept, even though it bothers me that 343 is likely to start charging for additional seasons/episodes after this set ends. Another thing that is a little weird is how it doesn’t matter at all how many Spartans die on the mission, so long as you eventually kill the last enemy and while SpartOps has it’s own little side story after the H4LO events, the integration of said story in bits of campaign maps and some of the multiplayer maps is rather cheap and often poorly executed, so unless they really pick up on involving the story with the missions, 343 will get no points from me for that.
Multiplayer
Unfortunately, this section remains empty, as I have nothing positive to say about the Multiplayer mode at all, which also means I’ve run out of good things to say and we are on to...
The bad bits
As much of the original as H4LO has retained in its feel, it has lost very badly to... well, the fuck I know what it’s lost to, too many things at once is what comes to mind.
Visuals
I had some good things to say about the feel of the landscapes, but there’s a lot of bad things in many of the other visual aspects of the game. What I’m mostly addressing is what we used to call over-design in University, where the designers put too much into it when less would have been enough and would have served the purpose better.
The result is that the forerunner constructs no longer look like solid, static objects that stand as monuments that endure over millenia, but like clockwork that’s been left running for... some reason. They still retain some monumental character, but I can’t be the only one who thinks the new forerunner architecture looks very distraught and somewhat agitated compared to previous designs.
Continuing with the forerunner; the Didact looks ridiculous. I’m sorry, but I can’t take him seriously, he looks like a human fish with orc teeth and clowns make up on, same as his wife, the Librarian ( minus the orc teeth, for some reason 9.9 ). I realize that the forerunner were supposed to be very humanoid in shape, but they really could have done a far better job of it, even with the limitations of having two arms and legs... and even that wasn’t technically a given, if you follow any of the games.
Now, I realize that the forerunner were a caste-socitey, so this next complaint of mine might be 343’s idea of depicting the differences between the castes, but why the fuck did they have to rip off TRON with chrome bits?
I’m serious, stop me if I’m wrong, but the Prometheans look like the anal child of a drej and a TRON lightcycle. How did they manage to go from this to this?!?!
The weapons and their effects also don’t look at all like Clu designed ranged weapons for his army of invading megabytes, no sire at all >.O
You’re welcome to disagree with me on this, but there’s a perverse resemblance, which might actually be explained with the story [red]SPOILER ALERT 2 - you have been warned [/red]. I’ll get to that in a bit.
One last issue I have with the visual designs is tied to the Multiplayer bit, but I’m putting here to have it out of the way.
The Spartan mods don’t look like military hardware. I don’t care one bit how much more advanced we supposedly are at this point, because we reverse-engineered forerunner technology (with the Hurragok apparently), military hardware should still look like what it is, especially when the weapons do.
Spartan IV armor mods look like the design team was told to “just go fucking nuts” or “just make something cool”, with no regard to what the UNSC “style” is ... or attachments to reality for that matter, or is 343 really going to try and tell me that this did not walk straight out of Neon Genesis Evangelion?
Honestly, I do not understand what some of the designers were thinking when they submitted their ideas. There are some very few ideas that look like something that looks like a logical expansion, but take a look at these “favorite” examples of mine.
The offroad motorbiker link
The Gundam link
The Big Daddy link
The EVA link
The Isaaclink
Just to name a few...
And the rip-offs don’t stop here, but we’ll get on with that later...
Story
I admit to not having read past Ghosts of Onyx. I have not read Contact Harvest, or Cole Protocol, I know I should and I will, because I hear these are still alright.
What I also haven’t read and what I refuse to touch is the HALO Forerunner series of books, because from what I hear the author was channeling a little too much [blue]spice[/blue] when he was thinking up that shit, if you catch my drift. We used to be a highly advanced, millenia old empire that fought the forerunners and the flood once before?Come on, are you being serious? We’re humans! We are literally the scum of the earth and you want to put us up on a pedestal next to a species that held a protective hand over all inteligent life in the galaxy? Go fuck yourself sir, you and the horse you rode in on ... and yes, I pulled that joke, sue me.
However, whoever was writing the script for H4LO clearly walked straight out of TRON:Legacy and put down everything he remembered while playing through bits and pieces of the previous HALO games, because how else do you come up with an evil version of the fucking grid-laser as a central plot and design point for a damn HALO game.
Seriously? Are we that badly out of ideas? We could not have had the forerunners come back... or the precursors? Because from what I hear, a precursor would be a pretty bad-ass antagonist... no?
No, we do not get to have an insanely powerful, immortally ancient being as an adversary, we get the Didact.
The Didact was supposedly the forerunner who activated the Halo array, but he’s gone through quite a change from how he felt as a caring, yet clerically devoted soldier and husband, who was fighting a losing battle against an alien parasite that was destroying, not a lifes work, but the work of millenia and countless generations of his kind to protect natural diversity in the galaxy.
Instead, thanks to the previously unrevealed human/forerunner war, the Didact is a ruthless, embittered tyrant, who lost his entire family, save his wife, in a war that could have been averted if both our species had been more diplomatic to begin with (something I will be addressing later) and who suffers from serious domestic issues, judging by how his own wife locked him up in what easily passes as an entire planet just for himself.
Admittedly, he deserved that one, seeing as how he apparently completely lost sight of what he was doing and instead pointed the grid-laser at everything that wasn’t far, far away by the time he counted to three... as I said, a rather drastic change from the Didact I knew from the H3 terminals, who was begging the Librarian to come home behind their defenses instead of jetting about the galaxy, cataloging species.
And about the Librarian; Seeing as how the forerunners devolved and settled us on earth, there is no way you can convince she didn’t know what planet she was on when she stranded her entire fleet of ships behind enemy lines to keep working on the Arc-Portal and likely eventually be consumed by the Flood... which raises the interesting question of how the fuck did she lock up the Didact... after he fired the Halo array... from earth... with no ship?!?!
Egh, moving on... Cortana.
Cortanas development actually makes sense... to a degree. Yes, A.I. deteriorate after 7 years of operation, she’s 8 years old, technically even older. However, what doesn’t make sense to me is that that would mean she’s 4 years old when she and the MC get stranded in outer space and the explaination for A.I. deterioration is that they accumulate too much data after a certain point in their lifetime and start thinking themselves to death... alright. So if she spent 3 years floating about on the F.u.D. , what data did she accumulate in those 3 years? Did she monitor John’s arrousal patterns in cryo-sleep to find out how to get him off - what? There is literally nothing to do out there, it is fucking dead space.
One last bit on her:
343 pulled massive bullshit with the TRON rip-off at the end where John is apparently in some form of digital world with Cortana before he gets dropped back into... reality? I guess? Which btw saved him from a nuclear explosion you just set off, in your own hand, during a QTE...
IF Cortana is dead ... as in dead - dead (and I really can’t see how she shouldn’t be)... I will be really badly pissed at those so called fans who work at 343.
However, seeing as how H4LO had several ass-pulls on impossible situations concerning the HALO/TRON crossover fanfiction, maybe we’ll see a miraculous return of Cortana as a parallel human being to Catherine Halsey as we all learn we’re really living in the Matrix...
Multiplayer
I will now shortly address what I mentioned earlier about our species being more diplomatic. I don’t know what exactly happens at the end of the Glasslands novel, so I don’t know how far the Covenant have “re-wronged” us for us to become the over-aggressive bullies we are shown to be in the opening video to Spartan-Ops, but considering how the UNSC behaves throughout the entire game, I am not tempted but forced to agree with the Didact when he said we were dangerous.
"Humanity stands as the greatest threat in the galaxy. Refusing to eradicate them is a fool's gambit."
The way we treat the other species we’ve previously encountered just makes me lose all sympathy for humanity as a whole. At the end of H3 the war was over. Admittedly, the Covenant in H4 are never expressively defined as a larger portion of same, but we don’t exactly skimp on our entrance when the Infinity just comes out of slipspace and cuts clean through a Covenant ship because it didn’t get out of the way fast enough... yes, the Covenant in the game are your enemies, but we, as players, have lost the double perspective we had been shown in H2 and H3 with the Arbiter... and I never thought I’d say this, but I miss the bastard!
Seriously though, with how the UNSC is portrayed in H4, I would side with the Didact any time to make sure humanity knows its place at the bottom of the Galaxy. Bullies don’t get to be the heroes.
Now then, on with the multiplayer mode, which I still have a lot to say about, but mostly that it’s turned into a sad Modern Warfare rip-off.
A lot of changes have been implemented in gameplay, with the addition of the sprint function for all spartans, not as a replacement for any other armor mods, which makes a lot more sense. However, as I mentioned before, what doesn’t make sense is the visual aspect of the armor modifications, because they just do not look like logical choices, especially considering that a lot of the torso pieces don’t even protect the torso properly.
None of the regular armor mods are true game-breakers, they’re all nicely balanced out, except for Promethean Vision, which is basically seeing through walls and having yourself highlighted as a big red blob in the other guys screen. However, I’ve noticed that several of the systems have been downgraded.
For one thing, the motion tracker has less range, which can be remedied via an upgrade in one of your loadout slots, but in its place you will lose the ability to take advantage of other modifications, like reloading faster or carrying more ammo (which btw means you get to carry as much ammo as you did in previous games), all of which would be fine if everyone else didn’t have those upgrades instead, so you can never have the specs of previous MJOLNIR systems, because if you upgrade one to spec, you lose the opportunity for another.
downgrades for upgrades? If 343 wants to tell me that Spartan IV’s are cheaper and more mass-produced than the original Spartan II’s, which they are, and the UNSC gives them less powerful gear, I can understand that from a story standpoint, but otherwise it just doesn’t make sense to me to outfit your best soldiers with less-capable gear the further technology progresses...
Another downgrade happened to invisibility. I never really used invisibility, it doesn’t suit my playstyle, but just taking into account what I said previously, how do you downgrade a technological device like active camo as tech improves? The camo now flickers at the slightest hint of movement and you no longer have as many decoys floating on the motion tracker, so you’re even easier to track than you already were in REACH.... and HALO:R at least had the excuse of being set earlier in time.
I never really could make sense of the scoring system at the end of matches, but now it makes even less sense to me, especially given that you get neat team-play bonuses like playing the decoy for your team mate to kill an opponent and such things. Your game performance never truly reflects in the amount of XP you get at the end of a match.
Which brings me about to ends and beginnings of matches.
We no longer have fixed matches. You can join and leave a match at any given time, so like in MW or in BF, you are very likely to drop into a game that is somewhere in the last third of its length and you will obviously be spawned on the losing team, because the other guys don’t really need support, do they?
However, this means you don’t really have an influence on whether or not you get to win the matches you play in and players are less devoted. What I really liked about REACH was that you had a chance of winning big credit boosts for routinely finishing matches and you got disqualified from your chance if you quit a running match, because in REACH, player slots that were unfilled stayed that way until the end of the match.
With joining now being possible at any time, so long as there’s a free slot and leaving the match at any time carries no penalty, it gets really hard after a while to keep track of everything that’s going on. I really hope they’re going to fix this in H5, but I doubt they will... yes, I’m beginning to lose faith at this point.
You can’t multi-vote for maps anymore, so if you’ve put down your vote, there’s no more changing your mind... which is made doubly annoying because there is no count-down timer for when the match is gonna start.
Friendly Kill notifications are now absent and the FFA tags are insanely hard to read compared to REACH’s clear color guide.
Spawning is apparently fixed with your team, which means flanking tactics for single opperatives is a moot point, since any team mate who is killed in the firefight will be spawned on you and if that happens for your entire team, the firefights over and new positions have to be found and you can do it alllllll over again.
Maps are now built so there are no shielded one way pathways anymore. Any position on a map that has any significant view of a larger part of it can be seen and accessed from at least two routes, which are just far enough apart that you can’t monitor both of them, even if you do shift your view to between them.
And the absence of Blood Gulch and a properly large forge map is just fucking appalling. Who the hell made that decision.
There are still several smaller issues which I might be able to overlook, but one last big problem I have is THE FUCKING KILLCAM
No, I will not “listen to reason” or “go with the times” or accept this gameplay mechanic in any way whatsoever. The killcam is an unnecessary addition to any shooter and its only purpose is to show the enemy where you are, meaning you cannot hold a stationary position, ever.
Before you start going on about camping and sniper whores, go fuck yourself. Apart from the fact that using a weapon you actually have to aim with is a form of art, I’d like to see you survive 5 minutes in a warzone if you run and jump around like we’re now forced to do in all playable shooters, simply because you cannot stay hidden properly anywhere.
...
...
...
Alright, I think that’ll do for now. One last thing I guess I can address is that the sound department did a really shitty job on the weapons and vehicles. If you’ve played H4 at all, you will know what I mean when I say I’m not afraid of the cricket...
Alas... I really wish H4LO had turned out better, given how long we’ve waited for it and that 343 is supposedly full of people who loved the original games and expanded universe.
I don’t understand why NOW all of a sudden they want to start sticking to the book canon when it’s turned into spice induced diarrohea. I don’t understand why they took out all the wonderfully heavy armor pieces that made your Spartan look like the walking tank he should be... or who the fuck came up with the idea of including a walker of all things...
Ah well... I enjoy what little I can and hope for improvement.
If you’ve actually read this far, you are insane and I thank you for that. You are now welcome to release your own shitstorm on me.
Updates on work as needed, two massive projects in progress.
Peace out
You are once again witness to one of my game rants, where I essentially rip off Yahtzee in shortly praising a game and then making a list of comparisons to all the things I hate about it.
In this ~semi-annual issue I will be letting go of all my frustrations about the much anticipated and equally as flawed H4LO
[red]SPOILERS AHEAD[/red]
To start things off, I really don't want to be doing this. I love the HALO franchise, even if I was disappointed by REACH at first, I grew to like it for various reasons and even though it violated canon on a few occasions (and some major character creation points), it was still a solid game, both in terms of story and multiplayer gameplay. The addition of armor abilities added a gameplay dynamic that took some getting used to, but quickly settled as a core factor you could account for while still retaining the original feel of the previous HALO games, also because it was essentially an extension of the HALO3 collect and drop abilities.
BUT, I will be pouring negative opinion on this game, in terms of gameplay, design and story tellling, all of which have their own unique flaws and drawbacks.
So without further ado, let's get on with the show.
The good bits
Visuals
As I played through H4LO for the first time I strained my memory back to the first time I played H:CE way back when. I remember the feeling of this new game that changed my feel for gameplay and that had massively cool visuals and enemies. Weapons that shoot little pink shards that you are afraid of... good times. And for all the negative comments I have on the story, I had that feeling again as I progressed through the story.
The bit that stood out for me particularily was the second level (funny how it's always the second level). In H:CE, when you step out of the escape pod, you see HALO for the first time and I had this chill running down my spine, because I had never seen anything quite as awesome or as original (at least in my ignorant eyes, it's not like a 12 y/o has any idea of Larry Niven or anything, at least none I know of. If you did know of him at that age, respect to you).
There is a scene like that in H4LO, which was very obviously set up to be just that, but it works so very, very well to recreate that effect of awe before these alien constructs, namely when you leave the crash site of the F.u.D. and the covenant fleet, and the “cave” opens up on this massive vista of floating forerunner spires over huge areas that dwarf your existence to a tiny speck in the landscape.
Very majestic, very cinematic. Something I can generally praise H4LO for is how it depicts things. Even though they’re essentially backdrops, the game does its best to show you all the beautiful landscaping work the artists have created, like you were dropped directly into the concepted matte-paintings. I have some big issues with other parts of the visual aspects, but we’ll get to that later.
Story
Spartan 117 returns ... and yes, he is a worthy successor to the man we played back on the Arc.
343 announced that they wanted to get into the Chiefs head and depict his psyche a lot more than in any of the previous games, and yes, they’ve done a fairly good job of it. What I liked a lot was him actually responding to Cortana and other characters when he was spoken to, which made him feel more... personal, more like a human being. However, the script was done well enough for him to seem distant and sociophobic, preferring to be on his own, as a Spartan, rather than part of the “other humans” who show up aboard the Infinity, which goes very much hand in hand to how Spartan II’s were depicted in the expanded universe.
The separation of Spartans vs. Humans actually plays a big role in H4LO in that the Spartan IV program is now a separate division of the UNSC military arm rather than being an addition to the ONI Special Warfare Group. Especially Sarah Palmer enforces a strict separation policy of Spartans to Non-Spartans, at least in terms of addressing official issues.
However, while the Master Chief is also a Spartan, he is very much depicted as separate from everything. Almost everyone, including other Spartans, view John as a Legend, but even so, as an aging Legend. He is a memory from a war past, an obsolete piece of equipment even to some, seeing as Spartan II’s were still considered military hardware.
Despite all this, what I really loved was the way the Master Chief handled it, namely exactly how I would expect his character to do ... stay indifferent to all of it. John is exactly the kind of functioning semi-machine I expect a Spartan II to be and he plays the role brilliantly - bravo to 343 for characterizing someone who hardly shows any emotion ever and still making him likable. There are minor issues, but I’ll get to his relationship with Cortana later ... and her character.
Needless to say though, John kicks massive ass still, even with some 46 years of age on his back, so look forward to the Master Chief living up to his name.
The addition of Spartan Ops is an interesting concept, even though it bothers me that 343 is likely to start charging for additional seasons/episodes after this set ends. Another thing that is a little weird is how it doesn’t matter at all how many Spartans die on the mission, so long as you eventually kill the last enemy and while SpartOps has it’s own little side story after the H4LO events, the integration of said story in bits of campaign maps and some of the multiplayer maps is rather cheap and often poorly executed, so unless they really pick up on involving the story with the missions, 343 will get no points from me for that.
Multiplayer
Unfortunately, this section remains empty, as I have nothing positive to say about the Multiplayer mode at all, which also means I’ve run out of good things to say and we are on to...
The bad bits
As much of the original as H4LO has retained in its feel, it has lost very badly to... well, the fuck I know what it’s lost to, too many things at once is what comes to mind.
Visuals
I had some good things to say about the feel of the landscapes, but there’s a lot of bad things in many of the other visual aspects of the game. What I’m mostly addressing is what we used to call over-design in University, where the designers put too much into it when less would have been enough and would have served the purpose better.
The result is that the forerunner constructs no longer look like solid, static objects that stand as monuments that endure over millenia, but like clockwork that’s been left running for... some reason. They still retain some monumental character, but I can’t be the only one who thinks the new forerunner architecture looks very distraught and somewhat agitated compared to previous designs.
Continuing with the forerunner; the Didact looks ridiculous. I’m sorry, but I can’t take him seriously, he looks like a human fish with orc teeth and clowns make up on, same as his wife, the Librarian ( minus the orc teeth, for some reason 9.9 ). I realize that the forerunner were supposed to be very humanoid in shape, but they really could have done a far better job of it, even with the limitations of having two arms and legs... and even that wasn’t technically a given, if you follow any of the games.
Now, I realize that the forerunner were a caste-socitey, so this next complaint of mine might be 343’s idea of depicting the differences between the castes, but why the fuck did they have to rip off TRON with chrome bits?
I’m serious, stop me if I’m wrong, but the Prometheans look like the anal child of a drej and a TRON lightcycle. How did they manage to go from this to this?!?!
The weapons and their effects also don’t look at all like Clu designed ranged weapons for his army of invading megabytes, no sire at all >.O
You’re welcome to disagree with me on this, but there’s a perverse resemblance, which might actually be explained with the story [red]SPOILER ALERT 2 - you have been warned [/red]. I’ll get to that in a bit.
One last issue I have with the visual designs is tied to the Multiplayer bit, but I’m putting here to have it out of the way.
The Spartan mods don’t look like military hardware. I don’t care one bit how much more advanced we supposedly are at this point, because we reverse-engineered forerunner technology (with the Hurragok apparently), military hardware should still look like what it is, especially when the weapons do.
Spartan IV armor mods look like the design team was told to “just go fucking nuts” or “just make something cool”, with no regard to what the UNSC “style” is ... or attachments to reality for that matter, or is 343 really going to try and tell me that this did not walk straight out of Neon Genesis Evangelion?
Honestly, I do not understand what some of the designers were thinking when they submitted their ideas. There are some very few ideas that look like something that looks like a logical expansion, but take a look at these “favorite” examples of mine.
The offroad motorbiker link
The Gundam link
The Big Daddy link
The EVA link
The Isaaclink
Just to name a few...
And the rip-offs don’t stop here, but we’ll get on with that later...
Story
I admit to not having read past Ghosts of Onyx. I have not read Contact Harvest, or Cole Protocol, I know I should and I will, because I hear these are still alright.
What I also haven’t read and what I refuse to touch is the HALO Forerunner series of books, because from what I hear the author was channeling a little too much [blue]spice[/blue] when he was thinking up that shit, if you catch my drift. We used to be a highly advanced, millenia old empire that fought the forerunners and the flood once before?Come on, are you being serious? We’re humans! We are literally the scum of the earth and you want to put us up on a pedestal next to a species that held a protective hand over all inteligent life in the galaxy? Go fuck yourself sir, you and the horse you rode in on ... and yes, I pulled that joke, sue me.
However, whoever was writing the script for H4LO clearly walked straight out of TRON:Legacy and put down everything he remembered while playing through bits and pieces of the previous HALO games, because how else do you come up with an evil version of the fucking grid-laser as a central plot and design point for a damn HALO game.
Seriously? Are we that badly out of ideas? We could not have had the forerunners come back... or the precursors? Because from what I hear, a precursor would be a pretty bad-ass antagonist... no?
No, we do not get to have an insanely powerful, immortally ancient being as an adversary, we get the Didact.
The Didact was supposedly the forerunner who activated the Halo array, but he’s gone through quite a change from how he felt as a caring, yet clerically devoted soldier and husband, who was fighting a losing battle against an alien parasite that was destroying, not a lifes work, but the work of millenia and countless generations of his kind to protect natural diversity in the galaxy.
Instead, thanks to the previously unrevealed human/forerunner war, the Didact is a ruthless, embittered tyrant, who lost his entire family, save his wife, in a war that could have been averted if both our species had been more diplomatic to begin with (something I will be addressing later) and who suffers from serious domestic issues, judging by how his own wife locked him up in what easily passes as an entire planet just for himself.
Admittedly, he deserved that one, seeing as how he apparently completely lost sight of what he was doing and instead pointed the grid-laser at everything that wasn’t far, far away by the time he counted to three... as I said, a rather drastic change from the Didact I knew from the H3 terminals, who was begging the Librarian to come home behind their defenses instead of jetting about the galaxy, cataloging species.
And about the Librarian; Seeing as how the forerunners devolved and settled us on earth, there is no way you can convince she didn’t know what planet she was on when she stranded her entire fleet of ships behind enemy lines to keep working on the Arc-Portal and likely eventually be consumed by the Flood... which raises the interesting question of how the fuck did she lock up the Didact... after he fired the Halo array... from earth... with no ship?!?!
Egh, moving on... Cortana.
Cortanas development actually makes sense... to a degree. Yes, A.I. deteriorate after 7 years of operation, she’s 8 years old, technically even older. However, what doesn’t make sense to me is that that would mean she’s 4 years old when she and the MC get stranded in outer space and the explaination for A.I. deterioration is that they accumulate too much data after a certain point in their lifetime and start thinking themselves to death... alright. So if she spent 3 years floating about on the F.u.D. , what data did she accumulate in those 3 years? Did she monitor John’s arrousal patterns in cryo-sleep to find out how to get him off - what? There is literally nothing to do out there, it is fucking dead space.
One last bit on her:
343 pulled massive bullshit with the TRON rip-off at the end where John is apparently in some form of digital world with Cortana before he gets dropped back into... reality? I guess? Which btw saved him from a nuclear explosion you just set off, in your own hand, during a QTE...
IF Cortana is dead ... as in dead - dead (and I really can’t see how she shouldn’t be)... I will be really badly pissed at those so called fans who work at 343.
However, seeing as how H4LO had several ass-pulls on impossible situations concerning the HALO/TRON crossover fanfiction, maybe we’ll see a miraculous return of Cortana as a parallel human being to Catherine Halsey as we all learn we’re really living in the Matrix...
Multiplayer
I will now shortly address what I mentioned earlier about our species being more diplomatic. I don’t know what exactly happens at the end of the Glasslands novel, so I don’t know how far the Covenant have “re-wronged” us for us to become the over-aggressive bullies we are shown to be in the opening video to Spartan-Ops, but considering how the UNSC behaves throughout the entire game, I am not tempted but forced to agree with the Didact when he said we were dangerous.
"Humanity stands as the greatest threat in the galaxy. Refusing to eradicate them is a fool's gambit."
The way we treat the other species we’ve previously encountered just makes me lose all sympathy for humanity as a whole. At the end of H3 the war was over. Admittedly, the Covenant in H4 are never expressively defined as a larger portion of same, but we don’t exactly skimp on our entrance when the Infinity just comes out of slipspace and cuts clean through a Covenant ship because it didn’t get out of the way fast enough... yes, the Covenant in the game are your enemies, but we, as players, have lost the double perspective we had been shown in H2 and H3 with the Arbiter... and I never thought I’d say this, but I miss the bastard!
Seriously though, with how the UNSC is portrayed in H4, I would side with the Didact any time to make sure humanity knows its place at the bottom of the Galaxy. Bullies don’t get to be the heroes.
Now then, on with the multiplayer mode, which I still have a lot to say about, but mostly that it’s turned into a sad Modern Warfare rip-off.
A lot of changes have been implemented in gameplay, with the addition of the sprint function for all spartans, not as a replacement for any other armor mods, which makes a lot more sense. However, as I mentioned before, what doesn’t make sense is the visual aspect of the armor modifications, because they just do not look like logical choices, especially considering that a lot of the torso pieces don’t even protect the torso properly.
None of the regular armor mods are true game-breakers, they’re all nicely balanced out, except for Promethean Vision, which is basically seeing through walls and having yourself highlighted as a big red blob in the other guys screen. However, I’ve noticed that several of the systems have been downgraded.
For one thing, the motion tracker has less range, which can be remedied via an upgrade in one of your loadout slots, but in its place you will lose the ability to take advantage of other modifications, like reloading faster or carrying more ammo (which btw means you get to carry as much ammo as you did in previous games), all of which would be fine if everyone else didn’t have those upgrades instead, so you can never have the specs of previous MJOLNIR systems, because if you upgrade one to spec, you lose the opportunity for another.
downgrades for upgrades? If 343 wants to tell me that Spartan IV’s are cheaper and more mass-produced than the original Spartan II’s, which they are, and the UNSC gives them less powerful gear, I can understand that from a story standpoint, but otherwise it just doesn’t make sense to me to outfit your best soldiers with less-capable gear the further technology progresses...
Another downgrade happened to invisibility. I never really used invisibility, it doesn’t suit my playstyle, but just taking into account what I said previously, how do you downgrade a technological device like active camo as tech improves? The camo now flickers at the slightest hint of movement and you no longer have as many decoys floating on the motion tracker, so you’re even easier to track than you already were in REACH.... and HALO:R at least had the excuse of being set earlier in time.
I never really could make sense of the scoring system at the end of matches, but now it makes even less sense to me, especially given that you get neat team-play bonuses like playing the decoy for your team mate to kill an opponent and such things. Your game performance never truly reflects in the amount of XP you get at the end of a match.
Which brings me about to ends and beginnings of matches.
We no longer have fixed matches. You can join and leave a match at any given time, so like in MW or in BF, you are very likely to drop into a game that is somewhere in the last third of its length and you will obviously be spawned on the losing team, because the other guys don’t really need support, do they?
However, this means you don’t really have an influence on whether or not you get to win the matches you play in and players are less devoted. What I really liked about REACH was that you had a chance of winning big credit boosts for routinely finishing matches and you got disqualified from your chance if you quit a running match, because in REACH, player slots that were unfilled stayed that way until the end of the match.
With joining now being possible at any time, so long as there’s a free slot and leaving the match at any time carries no penalty, it gets really hard after a while to keep track of everything that’s going on. I really hope they’re going to fix this in H5, but I doubt they will... yes, I’m beginning to lose faith at this point.
You can’t multi-vote for maps anymore, so if you’ve put down your vote, there’s no more changing your mind... which is made doubly annoying because there is no count-down timer for when the match is gonna start.
Friendly Kill notifications are now absent and the FFA tags are insanely hard to read compared to REACH’s clear color guide.
Spawning is apparently fixed with your team, which means flanking tactics for single opperatives is a moot point, since any team mate who is killed in the firefight will be spawned on you and if that happens for your entire team, the firefights over and new positions have to be found and you can do it alllllll over again.
Maps are now built so there are no shielded one way pathways anymore. Any position on a map that has any significant view of a larger part of it can be seen and accessed from at least two routes, which are just far enough apart that you can’t monitor both of them, even if you do shift your view to between them.
And the absence of Blood Gulch and a properly large forge map is just fucking appalling. Who the hell made that decision.
There are still several smaller issues which I might be able to overlook, but one last big problem I have is THE FUCKING KILLCAM
No, I will not “listen to reason” or “go with the times” or accept this gameplay mechanic in any way whatsoever. The killcam is an unnecessary addition to any shooter and its only purpose is to show the enemy where you are, meaning you cannot hold a stationary position, ever.
Before you start going on about camping and sniper whores, go fuck yourself. Apart from the fact that using a weapon you actually have to aim with is a form of art, I’d like to see you survive 5 minutes in a warzone if you run and jump around like we’re now forced to do in all playable shooters, simply because you cannot stay hidden properly anywhere.
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...
...
Alright, I think that’ll do for now. One last thing I guess I can address is that the sound department did a really shitty job on the weapons and vehicles. If you’ve played H4 at all, you will know what I mean when I say I’m not afraid of the cricket...
Alas... I really wish H4LO had turned out better, given how long we’ve waited for it and that 343 is supposedly full of people who loved the original games and expanded universe.
I don’t understand why NOW all of a sudden they want to start sticking to the book canon when it’s turned into spice induced diarrohea. I don’t understand why they took out all the wonderfully heavy armor pieces that made your Spartan look like the walking tank he should be... or who the fuck came up with the idea of including a walker of all things...
Ah well... I enjoy what little I can and hope for improvement.
If you’ve actually read this far, you are insane and I thank you for that. You are now welcome to release your own shitstorm on me.
Updates on work as needed, two massive projects in progress.
Peace out
I suppose my biggest issue with H4 is the Covenant. Ugh. Still. Fighting. The. Damn. Covenant. We've thrown a few new critters into the mix now but damn. Hell, I half expect the Flood to pop up at some point :|
I guess at this point the series is starting to show its age as many of the design elements and ideas are so similar now. I personally think the series would have ended better had they killed off MC in the third installment and let it go. But, not the case when there is money to be made apparently :D
Your comment about the Covenant is true to some degree, what I am annoyed about is that they expect players to read the books to know what is happening, unlike in the previous Halo games when playing the games was just enough to get what was going on and the books were just some EU eye candy for hardcore Lore fans.
Hopefully with the next installments we can get a better story and characterization.
Also about the arbiter? He is due to return to the spartan ops story.
And that is gonna end up horrid because Commander Palmer can't shut up with her air force officer mentality mouth calling out people eggheads and morons because the developers have a horrible idea on what makes a good commander (which is Lasky who is a total bro)
I am calling it out that Palmer is gonna insult Arbiter in some way, Which is it so hard to get a competent female commander that doesn't feel like she has to insult people just to prove a point? Hell look at Commander Keye's daughter during the games Halo 2-3. THATS HOW YOU DO FEMALE COMMANDER! and no one mentions her anymore....
Slowly though its starting to pop up. If people want a hard line trash talking Military commander get Lee Majors or whatever his name is. The guy from Mail Call. That man WAS military and DID do that stuff. Sure we'll get some stereotypes liket hat in games but generally their the idiots who CAUSE the crisis.
I hope the Arbiter comes back, but more so they expand on things WITHOUT forcing people to read their damn books. WoW has been doing that exact same crap and I for one can't stand it. I want my lore stuff in my game FIRST and foremost and then let an author have that for a guide line and build OFF it. Otherwise w end up with someone else dictating and potentially trapping your game writers onto a bad course of action.
Every gaming franchise needs to have their staff and writers looking at their game content and story first and the books and other things considered only AFTER the games script is set in stone. When its a game based on the book? Follow the book, when its a book based on the game? Expand onw hats in the games lore without putting someones own creative "touch" on it. Lest we get saddled with some "The Spice is life!" dune/Tron/Whatever movie Writer watched and then used as inspiration for his/her GAME novel.
We gamers have gotten smarter and sharper. Its a pity they pull this stuff. We love that property too, treat it with the same respect we do and be surprised how our pocket books open. Pull stunts like forcing us to buy a book too understand whats going on in our game and watch us move onto the next franchise. That's not being entitled, that's just customers deciding wha they want and when they aren't happy moving onto what WILL.
Just my Two cents though, admist a bunch of cold meds. XD
To expand on games in general, how do you feel about the sudden interest in mechwarrior again? Specifically www.mwomercs.com ? If not a fan of the genre then I apologize!
I love books. What I don't love is having to make your game include them to try and tie everything together in a bow. Doing that confines a writer and story to this narrow margin where different authors might end up with conflicts or ideas that don't mesh together. For me whats important is NOT sticking too books or whatever. Look at your previous games use EVERYTHING lore wise there and if you want to include a twist sure have some information be false but explain WHY it was false. In a space saga with aliens already established and older than terra firma why bother saying "Oh humanity is older than we think" When instead you could have a yet another species. Why didn't people hear of them? Well maybe the victors of old eradicated any mention of them, or maybe those records got lost.
The rampant AI issues are... interesting and an idea that somewhat works but I think it would be less AGE and more so the factor of how much space and POWER in whatever system they where in. You get tons of space to expand your programming sure you'll go rampant and all that. Ad the death? Well that's just like filling up a hard drive. Sectors get corrupted or something. The... space light bubble things and surviving a nuke... (Maybe Master Chief hid in a lead fridge, yeah he Lucased it!) Some sci fi thing could be used but... TRy and at least set up hints on how it could be done, casual conversations a mention on safety fields and how much they can withstand ect. Use some BS techno babble to explain away. The Tron-Halo thing is just... eh. I know why its done. Someone saw that and went "Oh that was popular in this so we'll use something like it and folks will think its cool, we're catering to their likes!" Myself I like my games sticking to THEIR styles and not borrowing other peoples ideas. I want that spark of originality.
Too be frank its seemed that of late game companies have at times gotten too big and slacked in their productions. Cut corners, instead of coming up with something essentially from scratch for a face, borrow from some things online and tweak them! (Looking at You again ME3) lessen the sound effects, focus more on multiplayer and people won't notice the poor job on this or that aspect of the game.
I want game makers to treat the story as the main component. Don't do something because some author you hired did this one idea for his book on your series. if it doesn't mesh with whats established in your games, toss it out. Gamers have grown up, grown smarter and have more refined tastes. Sure some people won't give a squat about story and want their explosions and multiplayer. But treat each piece of the game like art, craft it beautifully and when you're finished don't leave hits for DLC. Make it feel complete. Then sure do some DLC that can expand a part here, enrich the experience there. But not feel as if you've been cheated for not having it. it sounds like Halo 4 suffered from getting too big and they drifted into some B-sci-fi grade ideas. Hopefully they'll try and work their way back from this. As for the death of Cortana, I can see that beloved character dying if it would make an appropriate moment in the story. IE she stays in a ships system to pilot it and make sure the bad guys plot fails and master chief survives. A few kind parting words their connections established the emotions passed and then the bittersweet ending as the sacrifice is made.
That said being that its AI, it makes little to no sense that such an advanced program couldn't you know... Back itself up, choosing what to dump memory forgetting parts of ones past but still remaining who they are. Like we forget chunks of our past but we're still molded by that past experience even if we can't recall it. Would it have been that hard to simply make a copy? You'd figure an AI going Rampent would have the smarts to figure that one out. Just look up Shodan from System Shock. That rampant little psycho had back ups of her back ups practically. She planed on always keeping her digital arse alive.
Your rant just confirms games these days are trying to borrow whats popular too much instead of treading their own ground and SETTING the course instead of following someone elses ideas and lead. (And mentioning Tron I still hope somehow we'd get Flynn back.) I'm sure even with its flaws the game will be fun to play if and when I ever get the chance. But more and more as I age to me its the plot that takes the importance, the nuances. Little by little my games become more like movies and I want to be apart of that and feel engrossed and feel what they feel and feel FOR them. Thats good story telling. It seems though rather games are becoming a bit more Hollywood. All flash little substance, and always save room for DLC. Multiplayer is king and so the game can suffer a bit as long as we've got achievements and more multiplayer content.
Hah I answer your rant with my own but agree. Still they made something interesting and the Halo saga continues on. Lets just hope they keep the same writing team but now see what DIDN'T work and instead find ways to fix, retcon, and other wise patch up the plot holes and return us to a masterfully crafted game.
Have yet to play the game myself to form any opinion yet, though. Played Halos 1-3 so far and they were cool.
But... Cortana dies??? WHAT THE HELL?!
So now I only watch the cute animated segments at the start of Spartan Ops episodes, because all the chapters can be boiled down to: "Go into this area full of enemies, push 3 buttons whilst killing them all." repeat. Yawn.
Personally I think Armor Abilities and Armor mods suck major balls, and should be removed entirely. Some of the weapons make me laugh, and the BR feels like a joke to how it used to be. DMR still rules the entire game, the SAW is just....loooooooooooool. Don't even get me started on the Binary rifle.
Being a sniper, I have a love/hate relationship with the binary rifle because aiming it gives your position away, but the SAW? Heh it's about time they added an LMG to the Halo games
The only things that upset me in multiplayer is that sometimes the weapon drops get very annoying. Its an amazing thing 99% of the time to me, but when you're against a very organized team who will camp and just set for ordinance priority, explosions, hardlight and promethian vision, it gets alittle annoying being forced to take a location because they have superior cover and firing positions that you just can't take them from a range. Another thing is weapons despawn in moments. I've lost good guns from silly things only to come back moments later for the damn gun to be gone
I will agree with you about the cloak thing. Instead of it working also as a radar jammer, its main use for masking group movement or your own when going in for an assassination, is replaced with stupid blue dots which do nothing but tell everyone that someone is cloaked over here and needs to eithr be avoided or spammed with every grenade known to man.
What I DON'T like about the customization is the lack of separate animations for male and female Spartans. The females' arms are roughly half the size of their male counterparts and yet they go through the same animation. The result is that the females' motions look awkward and visually unappealing. I think they should have redone the animations for the females to match their smaller limbs, it just looks so strange and unnatural as it is now.
I haven't played enough of the multiplayer yet (haven't gone into PvP yet, but I have dabbled in Spartan Ops) to make any judgements on it, but if they encourage a more active combat style with the map design then I may end up enjoying it more. I like running and jumping around, that's why I looked forward to Brink (as disappointing as it ended up being) and am still looking forward to Hawken. It's why I have 250+ hours in Team Fortress 2. If I want a more methodical and stationary shooter, there are other games that do it far better than anything in the Halo franchise, like Red Orchestra, for example.
As for the story, I agree with you and think that the Didact was poorly conceived. Concerning the Covenant, I thought they were some lost branch that was separated from the main army somehow when I saw them because Cortana said that they weren't outfitted like normal Covenant, but then... it was never expanded upon and they were basically there for no reason. Disappointing.
Also the thing with Cortana saving Chief from the nuke, I didn't even understand what happened there until I read this journal. I thought Chief was having some kind of near-death hallucination when I saw that and next thing I knew he was ll fine and dandy after detonating a fucking nuke with his bare hands. All of the logic went out the fucking window with that one.
My thought at this moment: Halo 4 is a good game with a number of flaws, but not enough to label it as a bad title.
1. You can't criticize the forerunner back story if you never read the books. People who think they know what they're talking about and people who don't know what they're talking about are one and the same.
2. Death threats and talking about going on a shooting rampage ain't cool. Saying shit like that will land you in hot fucking water dude.
3.Cortana absorbed MASSIVE amounts of Covenant and Forerunner data and was nearly driven rampant when she was in the clutches of the Gravemind in Halo 3. And she was completely alone on the FuD for those three years without any interaction or data input (sensory deprivation for an AI) and a mind can go some scary places if left to its own devices. If you haven't seen the live action Forward Unto Dawn movie I suggest you do so. There are some bits in there where you might get an idea of what she's been dealing with.
Oh and the Chief isn't digitized at the end. Cortana made a shield out of the hardlight bridge he was on and that's also why she could touch the chief.
4. On forerunner structures, 343 has stated that the ones in previous games were "dead" as in mostly inactive and only serving basic functions. Personally I find the alive and moving ones more interesting than just a static world.
5. Covenant: http://www.halopedia.org/Storm
If you feel like dropping the series you can go ahead and do that, it's your choice. Personally I like the majority of Halo 4 but I also dropped Mass Effect because I felt 3 was an utter betrayal to what I wanted from the series.
The games are nice, and fun to play, but the creative talent behind the games seemed like hacks to me for hijacking Nivens ideas. Twisting them into something 'cool' but which made absolutely no logcial/engineering/conceptual sense at all.
Which also answers your questions about weapons, if you think about it. The UNSC is a rather evil government, and evil governments are paranoid about creating a faction that might be able to take over. Using inferior weapons as a method of control is perfectly in keepig with their modus operandi. (Google Amtrack Federation) This is probably he (in game) reason why you have never, and will never, see a selective fire switch on any Halo rifle. Outgame, this is a problem created by only having two slots, which means weapons cannot be multi-function. Even the M4 is a perfectly good sniper rifle at the ranges Halo games play at, if it is on single shot. And it can be a perfectly good grenade launcher. What's the point of having only two weapon slots, if a single weapon can do three things?
Halo has always been focused on infantry battle; with almost everything that might overshadow it completely removed, placed in the far background, or nerfed. That being the case, any enemy introduce in a Halo game must be killable by a single human soldier/spartan. Sending in any kind of efective weapon system (even a modern tank) and the player wouldn't stand a chance. THAT is why we don't see any genuine promethians, or promethian weapons.
This also explains why every rifle we find lacks a selective fire button.
I've no particular objection to the TRON laser. It's no more silly than a glactic super weapon that can kills all sapients, but presumably leaves cats and dogs untouched. (Other great apes? Dolphins? Hmm...) It's quite reasonable for a stagnant galactic culture to build something like it. Digitising corrupted hosts might be the best way of recovering victims of the flood, or subverting flood life forms. It also gives the writers a lovely get out clause for Master Chief (Super smart Cortana saves him in the last microsecond before the ship is lost) and an opertunity for Cortana to physically touch him. (Though surely robotics can't be that hard...) And presumably give her a get out clause as well.
Kill Cam? <shrug> Haven't played Halo since CE days, and that was on my PC. Since then I played MW2 into the ground. Never bothered me there. And though my memmory may be playing tricks on me, I don't remember too many places (or any places) where you could snipe with impunity. ^.^
Yeah, I was confused by this too, but I think the canon explanation is that she surrounds him with hard-light from the projectors that are driving the bridge the Didact is standing on, and it just breaks up after a little while.
Halo 4 is literally fan art.