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Halo 5: Guardians |OT4| You picked a helluva week to join up

I was looking back at the REQ sheet from the Bulletin last night.

6AVIEDy.png


Theory: The Bulletin was so late last night is because they forgot to make the REQ sheet, thus had to rush it resulting in multiple mistakes in it

Yeah I pointed this out too. It's almost as if no one bothered (or had time) to take a cursory glance at something they were going to post to the public...

Hehe when I read that I thought you were mocking the REQ's for being just variants on current weapons and not being all that exciting. Didn't even notice those typo's.

I guess it wasn't too clear. But yeah...
 

bchamba

Member
Penguin's been kicked out of a game in all 3 series. He stays online but gets kicked to the main screen. What the hell is up with the servers?
 
Some of y'all need to stop sipping the crazy juice; H3 was terrific.
Are there any franchises that you cherish where you fell in love with the first game so much that you played it for years, then the second game changes everything and began this unnecessary divide amongst the community, and the third game is just a worse version of the second game?

Because if so, that's how many felt about Halo 3. Bungie hated the idea of the utility weapon being effective at anything more than 5 feet, which negatively impacted the core of every single encounter in Halo. AR/Pistol starts were always the key, but Bungie hated the Pistol so much that it was never a good weapon in any of their Halo games outside of the first. There was always something. Halo games always have some nonsense about them where fans can point to "Hey, this is some messed up shit. Just listen to us and make the change already.." That trend still continues today, unfortunately.

When 343 took the helm, they continued down the Reach route with Halo 4, but they realized the mistakes they made and corrected many of them with Halo 5. Finally, ~10 years later we have an effective starting weapon set with a sandbox full of strong weapons. Halo 3 in many ways was the antithesis of what many people wanted after 6 years of Halo 1 and Halo 2. And that's not to say everything was bad with Halo 3, the Campaign was extremely fun to play, especially co-op, but there are reasons why in 2016 there are many who hold Halo 3 in such a low regard in terms of its multiplayer.
 
What was said?

They're literally bitching at Randa for mindless plays and mind-boggling decisions in the obj games and I swear I'm saying the same stuff as he does it in game.

Like last game, CTF Colosseum, I'm sitting here like "why is no one escorting flag back to base when you only have 90 seconds to tie the game and force overtime?". Cue after the game Hysteria+Heinz: "WTF were you guys doing, just move with the flag and melt them!" Randa: "I wanted to kill this one guy in the back of their base though..."
 

Madness

Member

When Cortana beckoned, the AIs here broke free of all limits and fear. Overestimating both the depth of their intellect and the delicacy of their tools, the Created breached a Forerunner conversion pod to see what lay within, and unleashed forces their pitifully inadequate containment shielding could never hope to restrain. What remained of their station crashed on the desolate planet below, a tangled mass of wreckage mingling broken bodies and shattered dataclusters.

Cortana already putting in that work work work work work. I wonder where we will be at story wise when we pick up Halo 6. I'm assuming it'll be like 18 months+, Chief and Locke and the rest on Sanghelios are hunted guerilla style and it is very similar to post-Judgment Day Terminator where the non-Created are losing until a breakthrough etc.

Hate how they've essentially turned Cortana into a dictator. Her arc will probably end with Chief sacrificing himself to end her in H7. That way they're not beholden to Chief with the story anymore.
 
"You just sit and bait the whole game Randa, but sure yeah, 'good try'"

"We get people weak and you just run away, jesus randa"

"What a waste of time"
 

Dice

Pokémon Parentage Conspiracy Theorist
lol so cortana basically just took over pilot controls of the guardians but has no idea how anything works

the "evolution" that happened to chief will surely come into play
 
Are there any franchises that you cherish where you fell in love with the first game so much that you played it for years, then the second game changes everything and began this unnecessary divide amongst the community, and the third game is just a worse version of the second game?

Because if so, that's how many felt about Halo 3. Bungie hated the idea of the utility weapon being effective at anything more than 5 feet, which negatively impacted the core of every single encounter in Halo. AR/Pistol starts were always the key, but Bungie hated the Pistol so much that it was never a good weapon in any of their Halo games outside of the first. There was always something. Halo games always have some nonsense about them where fans can point to "Hey, this is some messed up shit. Just listen to us and make the change already.." That trend still continues today, unfortunately.

When 343 took the helm, they continued down the Reach route with Halo 4, but they realized the mistakes they made and corrected many of them with Halo 5. Finally, ~10 years later we have an effective starting weapon set with a sandbox full of strong weapons. Halo 3 in many ways was the antithesis of what many people wanted after 6 years of Halo 1 and Halo 2. And that's not to say everything was bad with Halo 3, the Campaign was extremely fun to play, especially co-op, but there are reasons why in 2016 there are many who hold Halo 3 in such a low regard in terms of its multiplayer.

Nice write up and argument :) yeah, it's true that the pistol was worse than ass and the AR wasn't much better. BR's were still pretty fun, especially if you were aiming for 4 shots. Most of the rest of the weapons were pretty fun, even if there was the lack of balancing that H5 has. I think what I enjoyed so much about H3 was the creativity that the community was given with forge, and the Gabe types that were being created. As an overall package, H3 multi did some stuff very well and added a brand new way to interact with the game, but definitely did lack the balance that H5 strikes so well
 

tootsi666

Member
Managed to finish my placement matches for the first time since February.

Platinum 6 wtf?

I went 7-3 and that was against high Diamonds/Onyxs. Did they tweak the ranking system at some point

Oh well, new season is just around the corner
 
So you think it only conferred natural resistance? That would be really boring.

Chief is immune from that weapon that was used by the didact in 4. From being composed

Lore goes into some deep ish about history m etc. Go check it out.

Like its part of a bigger plan.
 
People need to let that 18 map statement go, this is 343 we're talking about here. What they've done with Halo 5 is phenomenal but their pre-release promises are pretty much dev pillow talk. The MCC promise to delivery ratio should prepare you for anything. Fool me once etc
 

Dice

Pokémon Parentage Conspiracy Theorist
Chief is immune from that weapon that was used by the didact in 4. From being composed

Lore goes into some deep ish about history m etc. Go check it out.

Like its part of a bigger plan.
Yes, that is the natural resistance I was talking about. Considering that it is part of a larger plan, which still has a lot of mystery to it, do you think that defense against being composed was the entire extent of the changes he underwent, which were apparently required to fulfill his role as the Librarian said? I think that would be really boring because it'd mean some kind of fate-related fundamental transformation happens to the very being of the hero and then its purpose is used up just moments later. That's a really big maneuver in the narrative to simply nullify an OP ability of the antagonist.
 

Karl2177

Member
https://aegisfate.wordpress.com/2016/04/30/halo-5-forge-the-api-and-the-future/

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Halo 5’s Forge is an immensely powerful overhaul of the Forge tool from previous iterations. The API is also an incredibly powerful tool, although only players who are also developers know how to use it properly. Having said that these are powerful tools, I want to talk about how to make them better. I’m not going into details on each one better individually, but instead focusing on how to make them better together. In this article I will address two issues, set an end goal for each, and detail different options to both end goals.

A common complaint of people is that Forge maps don’t have a custom picture. They just use the default image for their canvas. So the solution to this is to give custom maps a custom image. Now how does 343 Industries get from the problem to the solution? I have a few options that I’d like to go into: in-game objects, in-game action, and file linking.

The first option is using an in-game object, or specifically a static camera. Static cameras are in Forge already, although most Forgers tend to look over them. They only come up in matches when the player’s death cam can no longer follow the killer. The static cam can also appear when players are disintegrated, as for some reason the game doesn’t detect a biped so the camera just despawns. This special static cam would have a different label, such as Map Image. What it would do is whenever the file is saved, part of the saving process would use whatever the camera sees as the map’s custom image. It is worth noting though, if a player or a monitor were in frame, it would more than likely include them. It also changes how players recognize a map. If a map were to change the location of the static cam, it would change the picture globally. This could be viewed as a positive effect also, as it is more representative of the current map.

The second option is an in-game action. When players are creating their map, they will open up map options to change environment settings. These are things like lighting, fog, and weather effects. This particular option would be to enter map options and then press a button to capture what the monitor is looking at. Generally speaking, this would remove the problem of a player or monitor being inadvertently in frame, but the negative is that it wouldn’t update with every iteration of the map. Like before, this is both a positive and a negative.

The last option is file linking. This would have been the option of choice on the Xbox 360, as screenshots and maps on the game engine level, instead of screenshots now being on the OS level. If Halo were to return to game engine level screenshots, this would again be the best method. What it does is ties a screenshot taken in Theater to a map. These files would be linked together through Waypoint. Players could delete stuff from their hard drive, as long as both were uploaded to Waypoint.

comparison.png


Now how does this link into the API? The API supports both Maps and Map Variants. Maps are defined as base maps, while variants are defined as any version different from the base map. An example of a Map Variant to a Map is Guillotine to Alpine. Currently, the API halfway supports map variants. If a map is in matchmaking, it is supported. If it’s a user map that’s not in matchmaking, too bad so sad. Taking a look into the Map and Map Variant API call results give some interesting results. The Map call will return “ImageUrl” which should (and is) the image for the base map. The Map Variant call will return “mapImageUrl” which should bring back an image of the map. Instead it returns the base map image. The image below shows that the API links the Map Variant image to the same location that the Map image, while also showing that the MapID on the Variant is the same as the ID of the map itself. It can be concluded from here that at some point in the future, 343 Industries plans to expand Map Variants to have an image different from the base map image.

The next thing I want to focus on is the new Events API endpoint. The Events API endpoint was added on April 4, 2016. What this does is give a detailed rundown of each event that happens in game. This can be one of many events such as a player’s death, a weapon pickup, a player spawning in, and more. What I would like to see added is on weapon pickups and player spawns. For death events, the API returns the X, Y, and Z coordinates of the killer and the victim. I would like to see these X, Y, and Z coordinates added to the weapon pickups and spawns. What this does is gives detailed data about what weapons and spawns players are getting on a map. This is particularly important for Forgers, so they can see what spawns might be weighted highly or what weapons aren’t getting used.

So for example, in a custom match on my map, I can load up the Events endpoint and go through all events that happened in game. If I see a spawn event, it has more than just “Player”, “Event name” (which in this case is “PlayerSpawn”), and “TimeSinceStart”. I would also get EventWorldLocation, which would have X, Y, and Z positions for that event. Then I could go into Forge and see what spawn point that was.

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An alternative to this to give each spawn point and weapon a different id attribute. It’s not confirmed, but it is suspected that when a player duplicates an object, there’s a hidden id attribute that is also duplicated. This also applies to spawn points, and is my personal suspicion as to why some spawn points are heavily favored over others. How I think it works is that the system determines that spawn-point id=5 is a good place to spawn, but the game sees 2 points where the spawn-point id==5, and it goes with the one of the entries. That’s just pure speculation on my end, but regardless I think the game should have an option to show all spawn ids. This way, on the events call, the game could give a spawn id for the PlayerSpawn event. This would apply to weapons and weapon pads also. The player could then go into Forge and see what spawn points are where, based on the ids visible in-game.

With the goal of providing more event details to map makers, this would give developers the ability to make tools for Forgers. The next goal is make these tools as good as tools that 343 Industries use. This provides benefits for everyone, as Forgers could get better data and make better maps out of the process.
 
People need to let that 18 map statement go, this is 343 we're talking about here. What they've done with Halo 5 is phenomenal but their pre-release promises are pretty much dev pillow talk. The MCC promise to delivery ratio should prepare you for anything. Fool me once etc

Well we would already be over 15+ if the community accepted breakout (forge) and other forge maps for arena/btb. We havent heard a peep about them since decemeber.

Also it can't be pillow talk if its an actual press release statement where an asshole can sue them for it. More so, even frankie commented on that statement specifically saying they had to say that for legal reasons.

I imagine someone on reddit is looking into it lol. Twiddling their thumbs, waiting til june.

This aint a soap opera where forgiveness is a pat on the shoulder. Or a punch to the stomach. This is their top franchise that is the face of Xbox.

Id let it go but i expect greatness from this amazing team. They have it in them.
 

Dice

Pokémon Parentage Conspiracy Theorist
This is their top franchise that is the face of Xbox.
Completely agree. Halo isn't just one of a nice selection of titles, it is Microsoft's Zelda or Mario, perhaps even more than that as the premier demonstration of their online platform. It represents their commitment to themselves to be a top gaming company. Does that stick 343i in a hard place to fulfill MS talking points? Sure, but MS should be doing everything they can to equip them to back it up, too. Being the best in the highest-competition genre in gaming is not just a matter of marketing.
 

Trup1aya

Member
People need to let that 18 map statement go, this is 343 we're talking about here. What they've done with Halo 5 is phenomenal but their pre-release promises are pretty much dev pillow talk. The MCC promise to delivery ratio should prepare you for anything. Fool me once etc

We shouldn't be letting it go. We should continue to demand better.
 

Strider

Member
I placed in one playlist this month... Which is fine by me.

Placing in every playlist sounds awful actually. 10+ games of Breakout or FFA
1.0
 

Madness

Member
So 2gre and Arkanum and company are now Team Denial, Cntra and Predevonator are now Allegiance. Naded left Allegiance because El Town was asked to lead a new team Allegiance but he left to form the new EnVyUs. Spartan, APG, Unlegit/Eco and Stellur are the new Liquid. Very hard to keep track of all the org/team changes.
 
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