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Halo 4 |OT| Spartans Never Die

E

erpg

GAF parliamentarian
Anyone still own Halo Reach? I'm curious as to how the population of its playlists are. Specifically Griffball.
 
T

too much eslim

Member
what happened to my specialization? It disappeared. I have the LE and all of my specialization is gone now.

Has this happened to anybody else? I am now worried about my map pack pass.
 
E

Extra Sauce

Member
OverHeat said:
I never thought I would say that.... Put some forge map in the playlist
Click to expand...

My buddy and I have been wondering about that. What is the official reason for no forge maps? Were they unpopular in Reach?

I think forge maps are great because you get a level of variety that wouldn't be possible otherwise (they can whip up new ones more easily and more often). I don't care if the textures are the same, I just want a different layout to mix things up.
 
S

Synth_floyd

Banned
Is there no griffball in Halo 4? I haven't played reach in months but I assume to population is pretty dead.

Edit: Maybe it's not too dead. It's listed as #7 in the top 20 played games.
 
O

op_ivy

Fallen Xbot (cannot continue gaining levels in this class)
xtrasauce said:
My buddy and I have been wondering about that. What is the official reason for no forge maps? Were they unpopular in Reach?

I think forge is great because you get a level of variety that wouldn't be possible otherwise. I don't care if the textures are the same, I just want a different layout to mix things up.
Click to expand...

there out to be a "forge" playlist that features loads of forge maps and gametypes available for voting.
 
C

Continuity

Member
I feel the ordinance meter should only go up for assists and distractions, not kills. It obviously limits the amount of power weapons around the map, but I feel that getting a kill-streak alone is enough of a reward for the player, getting a power weapon is just over-compensating. Instead, reward the players who play a support role or as a distraction and missed out on easy kills, we've all had experiences where you pop the shield of a guy and die, only to have your teammate finish him off with one shot, you did most of the work, so you should be rewarded for that.
 
G

Grisby

Member
too much eslim said:
what happened to my specialization? It disappeared. I have the LE and all of my specialization is gone now.

Has this happened to anybody else? I am now worried about my map pack pass.
Click to expand...
This has happened a number of times to me, including load outs resetting. They come back though, don't worry.
 
E

Extra Sauce

Member
Are any of the maps featured in the current playlists forge maps? I don't think I would recognize them as such because I haven't even touched the Forge mode yet. If not, they really need to add some. I'm already getting tired of the maps we have now.
 
O

op_ivy

Fallen Xbot (cannot continue gaining levels in this class)
xtrasauce said:
Are any of the maps featured in the current playlists forge maps? I don't think I would recognize them as such because I haven't even touched the Forge mode yet.
Click to expand...

no. there are however defualt forge creations from certain affinity you can play in customs. relay seems especially good IMO and should be in matchmaking yesterday.
 
H

Heart Attack

Member
Overdoziz said:
Might as well cross-post this here since we have two threads for god knows what reason:

The biggest issue I have with Halo 4 is that it's not as predictable as previous Halo games, including Reach to a lesser extent. Halo’s multiplayer to me has always been about its simplicity. There are two teams who all being on an even playing field who are placed on a map and whoever plays the best during a match will win. The end result is only influenced by what the players do during a game, nothing else.

Halo Reach changed this slightly. You could influence the match by choosing what you spawn with. At first Bungie acted like this was going to be a big deal in Reach but in the end only Invasion really used to a great extent. Outside of that playlist most loadouts only differed in what AA you would spawn with. Even this, though, caused some annoyances on my part. You couldn’t predict what type of AA chose at spawn which lead to frustrating moments like people suddenly going into Armor Lock, going invisible out of nowhere or getting up to places with the Jetpack which you couldn’t practically predict. Luckily these annoyances were relatively rare as most people chose for sprint most of the time so in most cases you knew what you were up against. Then as time went on more and more AAs were removed from certain playlists making them less and less of an issue. Sure, the AAs themselves were still very obnoxious at times, but that’s another issue entirely. In terms of predictability Reach wasn’t all that bad (lol bloom).

Halo 4, however, takes all of this a step further: it allows you to completely determine what kinds of weapons, AAs and even perks you spawn with. You could be going up against someone with an automatic rifled, precision rifle, a mini-shotgun, a plasma pistol, a headshot capable secondary, most of the time you don’t find out until you’re already in a battle with him. Then take into account the AAs and perks and it turns the game into an inconsistent mess. Just like in Reach people can go invisible, they can dash away, they can be (sort of) invincible, all at the press of a button, without warning. But even there was a clear visual indication of what kind of AA or perk someone has it wouldn’t be enough. By the time you find this out you could be screwed over by it already.

Then there’s the global ordnance drops. 343 said previously that it’s implemented to prevent people from camping at certain areas on the map waiting for a power weapon to spawn, but I doubt this is their real reasoning. It most likely has more to do with bad and inexperienced players not knowing where and when everything spawns and them getting killed numerous times by players who did put effort into getting to know all this. To prevent this they shrank the gap between the two groups and made it so it’s practically impossible to consistently predict where weapons spawn. I feel like global ordnance ruins the flow of matches. Where in previous Halo games you could set up goals mid-match of getting a certain weapon, or prevent the other team from getting one, that’s gone now. People mostly just run around the map looking for people to kill and every now and then move towards a waypoint that appeared on the map somewhere. There’s much less direction to a match than previously and it makes everything feel a bit sloppy and uncontrolled.

Personal ordnance drops are probably a worse offender than the global system, though. It’s only in a few playlist but I still think it’s worth mentioning because I really don’t want 343 to take it a step further with it. Next thing you know the personal ordnance system has “evolved” its way into all playlist as a basic feature in Halo 5. The problem with the system, again, is that it’s not predictable. Both in terms of predicting when someone else will get it and what kind of weapon that person will get. Numerous times in (Big Team) Infinity Slayer I would get killed by a power weapon which I could not have seen coming in any sort of practical way. Someone could let a Sniper or Binary Rifle drop in and kill you before you even knew that kind of weapon was on the map. It results in many frustrating moments throughout every match. Overall I’ve been doing quite well in Halo 4 but even just dying a few times because of things that I couldn’t possible predict can ruin a match for. I can go 20 in 5 and feel annoyed because a guy pulled a Incineration Cannon out of his ass when I ran around the corner. How can I anticipate something like that?

Every one of these aspects cause the game to be unfairly unpredictable in my eyes and results in me feeling screwed over by the game mechanic and systems, rather than being outplayed by the player that killed me. It’s the same reason why I stopped playing Call of Duty. At a certain point during MW2 I got tired of getting taken down by predator missiles off spawn and sold it.

With Halo 4 I just don’t have the patience anymore. 343 is clearly taking the franchise into a direction that I heavily dislike and I don’t see any patches, title updates or matchmaking updates fixing the biggest issues I have with the game. Even if so it’ll probably only available in a single playlist which simply isn’t enough for me. I want a game that isn’t completely designed around things that I don’t like.

And let’s not forget all the issues that the game has aside from this big issue with predictability.
  • Flinch is a annoying more than anything, especially considering that you have to zoom in more often because of the size of the maps. Sure, descoping was annoying at times but I liked the dynamic of the mechanic, especially during battles at medium range. I also don’t see how flinching gives people a better chance to fight back if you get pinged in BTB. You still get ripped to shreds before you have a proper chance to fight back.
  • Active Camo. It simply doesn’t work in any way as an Armor Ability. 343 had the perfect opportunity to turn it into a power-up again via the personal ordnance system but didn’t for some reason.
  • Jetpack. Aside from it breaking the layout of most maps, it simply isn’t fun fighting against them. The movement of jetpackers simply isn’t predictable enough in my opinion. When you run around a corner you have your reticle at head level because that’s where most people will be. With the jetpack that positions people can be at increases exponentially making it very frustrating to fight against.
  • Promethean Vision. Sure, it doesn’t have such an immediate effect as some of the other AAs, but it can make the game slow down to a crawl, more so than the radar ever did. It also shrinks the awareness skillgap since people can see where people are, what direction they’re facing and heading, and even what kind of weapon they’re wielding.
  • The Boltshot. It’s a shotgun that you can spawn with. I used it all the time and I’ll admit that I enjoyed doing so, but it’s pretty broken.
  • The campaign. I’m not going to do a big write-up about this but I’ll just say that is was pretty underwhelming. The storytelling was particularly poorly done, gameplay was dull and the levels felt restricted compared to Halo 3. Why, after two games, we still haven’t gone back to the scale of that game I will never understand.
  • Forge. In several ways a step back from Reach’s variant. Overall, the objects are less useful than in Reach, precision placement is gone, and Impact, Ravine and Erosion are less flexible than Forge World ever was. Even the better lighting introduces several issues like it making enclosed maps look bland and it sometimes glitching out when the amount of objects on a map gets too high.
  • Spartan Ops. I hoped this mode would give us challenging, more specific types of co-op missions it gave us something entirely different. A mode where you mindlessly kill hordes of Covenant and Prometheans (both of which aren’t that fun to fight), with an infinite amount of lives, reused and seemingly random environments, a lackluster story (during the missions), no customization and no theater is what we got instead.

I could go on and on about the numerous big issues that Halo 4 has (Which I did) but I’ll keep it to this for now.

So yeah, I kept playing Reach for a long time (Mainly because zero bloom, Forge map testing, and Team Objective pooping) and you won’t find me saying that it’s a better game than Halo 4, but at its core Halo Reach is more Halo to me than Halo 4 is. Reach was annoying enough at times, but Halo 4 takes this a step further and I simply can’t enjoy it anymore. I’ll admit: Reach was mostly fun because trueskill didn’t work properly as a result of the low population number of the playlists that I played in. I’ve played a shitload of Team Objective and Squad Slayer simply because whenever we went into those playlist as a team, 90% of the time we would go incredibly positive and absolutely destroy the other team. MLG (0% bloom, no sprint) was the only competitively viable playlist in Reach and it was the only playlist that was fun to play in against good players, but sadly not many people on my friendslist played it regularly so I stuck to beating up bad players.

Trueskill in Halo 4 does seems to work better, (I definitely got better opposition towards the end) but ironically enough this actually made the game less fun for me. Both Reach (MLG aside) and Halo 4 are not competitively sound in my eyes so actually playing it against good players isn’t fun at all. This is because I feel like I get killed often not because the other player is that great, but because some aspects of the game are flawed. Bloom in Reach is a good example of this. Sometimes I would get killed because my opponents just spammed his DMR and got a lucky headshot, just like I’ve done to my enemies numerous times. It feels unfair.

I’m tired of hoping for that matchmaking update, that TU, that next game that will make most of what I want in Halo a reality. Halo has lost most of the aspects that appealed to me the most and what made the franchise stand out for me so I bid it farewell, for the time being at least.
Click to expand...


Couldn't had explained it better. Though, i will argue that in Halo Reach there was an abundance of competitive players, until 343 fucked it up. I know since i played Anniversary Classic for over 3,000 games, and pretty much all of the top 100 ranked players in that playlist on Halo Tracker knew each other. They added each other on their friendlist so they could see when they were on a party of four and searching for a match. But yeah, the thing that i hate most about Halo 4, is the abundance of power weapons. I hate dying on Halo 4, and it's not because i'm facing better players (i'm great at Halo Reach, Halo 3, Halo 2), rather it's because how the game was designed. This game encourages camping and now every fucking weapon can kill you with a little bit of luck, or with a better connection. My K/D in this game is 2.0... and i know it could be 3.0 or higher if it wasn't for bullshit instant respwns and shit luck. I sold the game on tuesday, it was fun for a while. I might rebuy it when 343 gets their head out of their ass and realize that they're killing the franchise. It's not good to ignore your loyal fanbase, and appeal to casuals who'd leave the game when the next big thing comes out.
 
G

Gr1mLock

Passing metallic gas
If a game stays the same 'oh the formula is stale. If a game changes 'oh its different than what made it good in the first place'. No wonder developers stopped listening to fans.
 
J

JB1981

Member
ElzarTheBam said:
Definitely, its completely decimated the fun out of the BTB playlist for me, a playlist that is possibly my second most played in each Halo game, behind objective.

It's funny, I've been getting my BTB fix from dominion, that playlist has its fair share of problems, the biggest being the (surprise, surprise) overwhelming amount of power weapons, but when two team go at it, and it's not filled with many PWs, it can be great fun.

I've seen vehicles last whole games in dominion as well!
Click to expand...

BTB really is terrible. Lets see there are at any one time

Scorpions
Wraiths
Warthogs
Global Ordnance
Personal Ordnance
Guns/power weapons of every variety
Armor abilities of every variety

It is just one big mash up without any balance. Exile sucks, it's all tight quarters with low lying valleys in between. Very disappointing. But it's one of the most populated playlists so there are people out there who obviously enjoy it

Personally I will just stick to Infinity Slayer. I have a lot of fun with that
 
D

Diablohead

Member
Finally level 50, chose Stalker as my first class to work on, being shown the last guy who killed you could come in handy.

BTB would be better if sniper rifles and rockets were limited to map spawns, keeping ordinance drops to more simple weapons would be ideal.
 
R

Raide

Member
The Pre-Order Specialisations code, how does that work? Does it unlock them all before 50, or is it a time-limit thing?
 
B

brokenwatch

Member
Man.. I must have played 30 games yesterday and this morning trying to get the CTF daily challenge. I only ended getting 8/9 :(. Apparently the challenges change around 4am central.
 
B

bobs...onGaf

Member
Archpath1 said:
jacked a banshee in Shootout at Valhalla. AWESOME.
Click to expand...


The fact that this is possible is awesome, I need to take a plasma pistol class into spops and try that out from now on

I hope they just keep getting bigger and better with the missions - I just hope that the stories intergrate a little better going forward. So far the disconnect between the cutscenes and missions is a little jarring. I think actually getting in the pelican rather than just the weird fade to black would help with this too.
 
A

Archpath1

Member
bobs99 ... said:
The fact that this is possible is awesome, I need to take a plasma pistol class into spops and try that out from now on

I hope they just keep getting bigger and better with the missions - I just hope that the stories intergrate a little better going forward. So far the disconnect between the cutscenes and missions is a little jarring. I think actually getting in the pelican rather than just the weird fade to black would help with this too.
Click to expand...

yea i said what the hell, tried it, worked

works with wraith too, but randoms blow it up before i get it
 
P

plantedunicorn

Member
What's up HaloGaf.

Just wanted to post my thoughts. Well I recently finished the campaign on Normal and it made it too short and sort of easy but it was fun. Not as good as Reach but looking forward to what 343 does in the future with the series. The storytelling is still kinda shitty but oh well.

Started a legendary playthrough and whenever I'm facing the covenant, its fun and I know what to do. When it comes to the Prometheans, its like an exercise in frustration. You can't really tell what weapons the knights are holding so you walk forward and just like that you're dead in one shot cos he had a binary rifle. Another thing that's frustrating is the stupid ass teleportation that the knights do.

You break their damn shields and are about to finish them and they just teleport right in front of you and BAM, the one hit kill you. So stupid and unfair. Some of the encounters on legendary are just downright annoying. The mammoth level with all the ghosts and wraiths was pretty fun on normal but on legendary is just aggravating. The final part of shutdown with you indoors with banshees and turrets is just as annoying. The game is still fun on legendary though but it just made me realize that the covenant are way more fun to fight than the prometheans.

Spartan Ops is such a freaking waste of potential but its still cool. Palmer needs to just shut the hell up.

Multiplayer is pretty sweet. This is the second Halo game I'll be playing online, first being Reach and I feel I've gotten better. I like it a lot. I would like it a lot more if people just stopped voting for Ragnarok all the damn time. Pretty fun map but it gets tiring playing it all the time.
 
I

Izayoi

Banned
Today's challenges are pretty mediocre. At least it's only win 7 instead of win 9+. Is there ever going to be any kind of thought put into the challenges or are we pretty much SoL in that regard?

Continuity said:
I feel the ordinance meter should only go up for assists and distractions, not kills. It obviously limits the amount of power weapons around the map, but I feel that getting a kill-streak alone is enough of a reward for the player, getting a power weapon is just over-compensating. Instead, reward the players who play a support role or as a distraction and missed out on easy kills, we've all had experiences where you pop the shield of a guy and die, only to have your teammate finish him off with one shot, you did most of the work, so you should be rewarded for that.
Click to expand...
I was thinking exactly this last night. I think that's the only real way to fix Ordnance. Reward people for helping their team, not helping themselves.

Nils said:
It's the best.
Click to expand...
Hopefully it gets patched soon. Cheaters are scum.

Gr1mLock said:
If a game stays the same 'oh the formula is stale. If a game changes 'oh its different than what made it good in the first place'. No wonder developers stopped listening to fans.
Click to expand...
The problem with Halo 4 is that they changed the formula where it didn't need to be changed (adding Ordnance, removing objective gametypes), and didn't change other things that should've been fixed/removed (Jet Pack, Active Camo).

Alucrid said:
I'm watching my brother try to melee hunters to death in easy :(
Click to expand...
Sword to the back is the fastest way to kill a Hunter!
 
D

Deleted member 13876

Unconfirmed Member
Izayoi said:
Just Saiyan. If you like to cheat, that's great, but I'm not sure why you're posting about it here.
Click to expand...

I think it's a fun technique and don't view it as a cheat because everyone can do it and it actually makes sense to input momentum into the throws. It's easy input wise, but the only thing that does classify it as cheating a bit is that not everyone (the host) can do it. If the host thing didn't apply I'd consider it more like wavedashing or something in SSBM, a fun unintended thing that adds to the gameplay.
 
D

Dreaver

Member
Oh my god, the lag in this game is fucking terrible sometimes. I am getting LOADS of games with yellow bar connection / lag. Not to mention the insane amounts of blackscreens (more than any Halo game before).

Dear 343i, as I posted earlier in this thread, please make a search filter so I don't have to play with American crap hosts. Thank you.
 
E

enzo_gt

tagged by Blackace
Lima said:
Overall

Next time don't be lazy and check the waypoint website.
Click to expand...
They're on the Waypoint website?

Wouldn't know because it's a piece of shit to navigate and load, and marred by errors everywhere. Maybe when it's half as good as Bungie.net.

Thanks though.
 
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