YourExWife
Member
How 'bout dat accuracy stat?
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Halo 5: Guardians |OT5| Is HaloGAF irrelevant now?
- Thread starter sir_dany12
- Start date
Samurai G0SU
Member
wtf is going on with the post-support-sustain team?????
Fata1moose
Banned
They're working on the BTB maps.
I assume it has something to do with an edge case for mini games. I'm fairly certain I didn't chuck a grenade in that entire match, so the only kills I was doing were hammer, charge, and sword. I assume the accuracy numbers can't track melee whiffs, so the formula wonks out.
And look upon my mighty Spartan, and despair.
Samurai G0SU
Member
lol that finally got me
YourExWife
Member
Fata1moose
Banned
I find it funny Blizzard made 1 FPS and gets so much right on the first go. Whereas 343 continues to have problems, Halo 5 is mechanically great, but it has so much technical jank.
Not making excuses for 343 but you do realize how old of a company Blizzard is right? And how experienced they are at making games.
Samurai G0SU
Member
im guessing Public Testing Realm
VincentMatts
Member
Still, theyve made 0 actual shooters. 343 hired a bunch of people who used to work on shooters full time, like COD. Theres really no excuse.
To me, this just reaffirms my thought that 343s problem might be in their management. Theres definitely something off. You cannot make this many crucial mistakes with every single game you release. Its not normal.
ZeezbruhTV
Member
It's by extension a Microsoft company, there is going to be mass amounts of bureaucratic bullshit. That what happes when your run/created by a 120k employee company, worth 400 billion, that had its success in the 80's/90's.
Twilight Gap
Member
343 has had two chances to make a good story and they failed twice, they've had four chances to make good multiplayer and they've failed four times, and they've had many more chances to make Halo great again and they've just made it something else entirely.
It's a shame that Forge is their biggest achievement and it'll probably be amazing in Halo 6, but they've given no reason to believe anything else will. It is very clearly a management problem.
It's a shame that Forge is their biggest achievement and it'll probably be amazing in Halo 6, but they've given no reason to believe anything else will. It is very clearly a management problem.
VincentMatts
Member
Well MS isnt the only company that owns developers. I mean Sony owns Naughty dog, you dont see them releasing problematic games at every release.
At one point, the company's "mentality" should be to deliver great products and not simply to deliver them at all costs. If it takes 343 an extra year and a half to make a great game, give them that extra time.
Just look at rockstar, they make a GTA game once a decade and it sells for years on end. Its not a bad model, when you know how do it right.\
Thats just wrong. Halo5 MP "gameplay" is the one thing it does do right. Does it better than Bungie ever did.
Prinz Eugn
Member
Twilight Gap
Member
I completely disagree. Halo 5 feels okay to control compared to the last 10 years of awful Halo, but the actual design of the core gameplay is woefully contradictory.
VincentMatts
Member
Let me guess, dont like to sprint?
Twilight Gap
Member
On the contrary, I like Sprint because it feels natural. But what feels natural or "realistic" isn't a good thing to base gameplay mechanics off of.
I don't think Halo 5 multiplayer does anything well other than feel more responsive than the last few games. I don't mind elaborating but I know 90% of people will disagree with me based solely on the fact that it "feels good to play".
BizzyBum
Member
I would rate Halo 5 as my favorite MP next to 2. Many people consider 5 the pinnacle of Halo gameplay so you're in the minority on that one.
I also gotta give props to 343 for providing free DLC which has added a lot to the game where they could have easily charged or made a season pass instead like every other company does.
Prinz Eugn
Member
Build the Maginot Sphere?
link1201
Member
Lol, they had a head start though.Honeymoon. Now we're in Paris though.
Even the Louvre has Achilles and we don't.
ZeezbruhTV
Member
H5 gameplay is solid (the feel) but the sandbox is trash (maps, balancing, how they interact).
H5 also had the least amount of content at launch since Halo 2. They didn't have a choice lol.
H5 also had the least amount of content at launch since Halo 2. They didn't have a choice lol.
Fata1moose
Banned
Yup, they did multiplayer right, everything around it is messed up.
If you keep on playing riftball your accuracy will be over 100% in a few months time.
Twilight Gap
Member
I'll elaborate because I don't shitpost for the sake of shitposting.
I think Halo works best with AR and Pistol starts. These are all around weapons that are competent in any given scenario, allowing the rest of the pick ups to offer you a different gameplay experience for a tradeoff. Halo 5 does this right, and I am glad that the Halo community has embraced Pistols as opposed to Battle Rifles. What Halo 5 then does wrong is make the Pistol a 5 shot kill. This does not punish the movement in the game. The Pistol also only has an effective range of 128 feet. This becomes a problem when people sit across maps and Thrust behind cover. High escapability + the inability to effectively punish players = this games biggest contradiction.
Let's look at the Assault Rifle. It is widely regarded that Halo is based around skill-based gameplay, and therefore precision weapons are said to "take more skill" than automatics. Therefore, the Assault rifle should not be as good as it is for how easy to use, yet it absolutely shreds players, and has an advantage over a player with a Pistol after performing a Spartan Charge. In every other Halo game, the player with the precision weapon (and host, lol) had the upper hand after a melee battle. This is obviously done to give lesser skilled players a fighting chance, but I think it does way too much body damage for how easy it is to use. That's the second contradiction. I do not think the AR should be useless like it has been in previous games, but I was able to nerf its effectiveness in custom settings by increasing damage resistance.
Going back to Thrust, I think this mechanic singlehandedly breaks Halo. First of all, I think one of Halo's strongest and most unique assets as a shooter were its strafe battles. You knew the other player was better than you depending on how good their strafe was. Thrust contextualizes that in a mechanic but doesn't truly add anything to the game that faster lateral movement wouldn't do. You can thrust way faster in Quake by jumping sideways, and I was able to replicate this with custom settings by increasing strafe movement. This is better for Halo because you can shoot while you do it, which makes it inherently offensive. But Thrust is inherently defensive because you cannot shoot while you do it. That breaks room-based maps by allowing people to move into doorway cover quickly; it breaks all the explosions in the game by forcing them to be overpowered to compensate for player escapability; and more importantly, it breaks level design because you are forced to scale maps at least 8 feet higher than normal to prevent players from making vertical jumps. There are two types of interaction in Halo: gun up and gun down. Obviously, your gun is up when you're not using any of the abilities, and it is down or unusable when you are. This means there are two different player states being accounted for in the level design.
Each block in this image represents 8 feet, or about the height of a Sprtan
This is how high the platform has to be in Halo 5 to be inaccessible to the player. It's three times as high. If I lower that 1 foot, I can make it by Thrust Jumping.
Halo 5 is forced to be vertical not by principle of design, but by lack of any alternative, because otherwise players could just go wherever they wanted.
For example, look at how the Thrust affects the man cannon. While it is cool to change direction off of a man cannon at certain points, consider how broken Narrows CTF would be if you could simply launch the flag across the top of the map. Now consider what a designer has to do if they don't want people choosing wherever they want to go off of a man cannon.
Thrust doesn't operate within a vacuum. When combined with Sprint, Slide and Clamber, the player can scale ridiculous distances.
This is 3 times as far as you can move in every other Halo game.
Clamber on its own is fine, but in conjunction with the rest of the abilities it also fundamentally breaks level design, not just by allowing players to circumvent pathways, but suggesting that they can go wherever they want. Thus, Halo 5 has bred a new age of Halo players who expect to fly around the map. Clamber could be fixed on its own by shrinking the window that you can perform it, but then people will have to relearn the mechanic and there will be complaints from those who expect to use it vertically instead of "making a jump that you feel like you should have made", which is what 343 said it would be in their first ViDoc.
343 has encouraged this "go everywhere from anywhere" mentality in their level design by delivering free flowing maps, making player movement unpredictable and combat unpunishable, for the aforementioned reasons. This doesn't mean anything in Warzone where it's just a big sandbox of Halo fuckery, but Halo's smaller player counts play best with strict and linear pathing that forces the player to move around the map in a controlled fashion (like most competitive games: CSGO, League of Legends, Overwatch, etc.) which then allows them to use their abilities situationally and not generously. The most ironic contradiction is that they're forcing the game to be competitive through branding and hosting their own pro league. Gaming is inherently competitive, but Halo is not really looking at successful competitive games and learning from them.
Instead of designing strict maps for Halo 5, 343 designed a strict spawn system that is ridiculously predictable. Simply by positioning yourself at the furthest possible point within the respawn window, you can force an enemy player to spawn wherever you want them to every single time. Halo has unfortunately never had a good spawning system (outside of Halo CE's 2v2 spawns), but the current iteration is problematic because of how fast players can traverse a map to collapse on these spawns.
These are just some of the inherent fundamental issues with the game beneath the surface. I dislike other things like the incredibly cluttered sandbox (the DMR and the SAW have absolutely no reason for existing) and continued prominence of double melees in Halo when Halo's melee combat is incredibly shallow due to auto lunge (there was no lunge in Halo CE and you could duck under melees in Halo 2).
Most of these issues are fixable without throwing everything in the game out, but I don't think 343 is willing to do any of it considering that most of these issues are not well understood.
I think Halo works best with AR and Pistol starts. These are all around weapons that are competent in any given scenario, allowing the rest of the pick ups to offer you a different gameplay experience for a tradeoff. Halo 5 does this right, and I am glad that the Halo community has embraced Pistols as opposed to Battle Rifles. What Halo 5 then does wrong is make the Pistol a 5 shot kill. This does not punish the movement in the game. The Pistol also only has an effective range of 128 feet. This becomes a problem when people sit across maps and Thrust behind cover. High escapability + the inability to effectively punish players = this games biggest contradiction.
Let's look at the Assault Rifle. It is widely regarded that Halo is based around skill-based gameplay, and therefore precision weapons are said to "take more skill" than automatics. Therefore, the Assault rifle should not be as good as it is for how easy to use, yet it absolutely shreds players, and has an advantage over a player with a Pistol after performing a Spartan Charge. In every other Halo game, the player with the precision weapon (and host, lol) had the upper hand after a melee battle. This is obviously done to give lesser skilled players a fighting chance, but I think it does way too much body damage for how easy it is to use. That's the second contradiction. I do not think the AR should be useless like it has been in previous games, but I was able to nerf its effectiveness in custom settings by increasing damage resistance.
Going back to Thrust, I think this mechanic singlehandedly breaks Halo. First of all, I think one of Halo's strongest and most unique assets as a shooter were its strafe battles. You knew the other player was better than you depending on how good their strafe was. Thrust contextualizes that in a mechanic but doesn't truly add anything to the game that faster lateral movement wouldn't do. You can thrust way faster in Quake by jumping sideways, and I was able to replicate this with custom settings by increasing strafe movement. This is better for Halo because you can shoot while you do it, which makes it inherently offensive. But Thrust is inherently defensive because you cannot shoot while you do it. That breaks room-based maps by allowing people to move into doorway cover quickly; it breaks all the explosions in the game by forcing them to be overpowered to compensate for player escapability; and more importantly, it breaks level design because you are forced to scale maps at least 8 feet higher than normal to prevent players from making vertical jumps. There are two types of interaction in Halo: gun up and gun down. Obviously, your gun is up when you're not using any of the abilities, and it is down or unusable when you are. This means there are two different player states being accounted for in the level design.
Each block in this image represents 8 feet, or about the height of a Sprtan
This is how high the platform on the right had to be in every other Halo game (gun up state) to be inaccessible to the player (unless they had a Jetpack). That ledge is 8 feet taller than the Spartan
This is how high the platform has to be in Halo 5 to be inaccessible to the player. It's three times as high. If I lower that 1 foot, I can make it by Thrust Jumping.
Halo 5 is forced to be vertical not by principle of design, but by lack of any alternative, because otherwise players could just go wherever they wanted.
For example, look at how the Thrust affects the man cannon. While it is cool to change direction off of a man cannon at certain points, consider how broken Narrows CTF would be if you could simply launch the flag across the top of the map. Now consider what a designer has to do if they don't want people choosing wherever they want to go off of a man cannon.
Thrust doesn't operate within a vacuum. When combined with Sprint, Slide and Clamber, the player can scale ridiculous distances.
This is 3 times as far as you can move in every other Halo game.
Clamber on its own is fine, but in conjunction with the rest of the abilities it also fundamentally breaks level design, not just by allowing players to circumvent pathways, but suggesting that they can go wherever they want. Thus, Halo 5 has bred a new age of Halo players who expect to fly around the map. Clamber could be fixed on its own by shrinking the window that you can perform it, but then people will have to relearn the mechanic and there will be complaints from those who expect to use it vertically instead of "making a jump that you feel like you should have made", which is what 343 said it would be in their first ViDoc.
343 has encouraged this "go everywhere from anywhere" mentality in their level design by delivering free flowing maps, making player movement unpredictable and combat unpunishable, for the aforementioned reasons. This doesn't mean anything in Warzone where it's just a big sandbox of Halo fuckery, but Halo's smaller player counts play best with strict and linear pathing that forces the player to move around the map in a controlled fashion (like most competitive games: CSGO, League of Legends, Overwatch, etc.) which then allows them to use their abilities situationally and not generously. The most ironic contradiction is that they're forcing the game to be competitive through branding and hosting their own pro league. Gaming is inherently competitive, but Halo is not really looking at successful competitive games and learning from them.
Instead of designing strict maps for Halo 5, 343 designed a strict spawn system that is ridiculously predictable. Simply by positioning yourself at the furthest possible point within the respawn window, you can force an enemy player to spawn wherever you want them to every single time. Halo has unfortunately never had a good spawning system (outside of Halo CE's 2v2 spawns), but the current iteration is problematic because of how fast players can traverse a map to collapse on these spawns.
These are just some of the inherent fundamental issues with the game beneath the surface. I dislike other things like the incredibly cluttered sandbox (the DMR and the SAW have absolutely no reason for existing) and continued prominence of double melees in Halo when Halo's melee combat is incredibly shallow due to auto lunge (there was no lunge in Halo CE and you could duck under melees in Halo 2).
Most of these issues are fixable without throwing everything in the game out, but I don't think 343 is willing to do any of it considering that most of these issues are not well understood.
Fata1moose
Banned
They should nerf their range, decrease aim assist. Damage is fine.
That sounds reasonable. Removing it sounds dumb.
MeisterLeder
Banned
Agree.
Sure people complained about The Coalition and Gears 4 that they played it pretty safe but it IMO was the better decision than shitting on the Gears legacy.
Ive watched the Bonnie Ross talk she did at D.I.C.E and it was kinda hilarious how she was talking about respecting the Halo core and legacy etc. I havent seen anything of that so far....
Im still waiting for a proper successor to Halo 3.
Completely agree 100%. Halo 5's mechanics are tight, but certainly not "better than Bungie ever did", and I'm fairly certain anyone who played CE and even 2 semi-competitively and up would agree.
5 is just okay. It's a huge step up from 4, and I'd argue better than vanilla Reach. It feels better than 3, but competitively pales when put up against 2 and especially CE.
jizzlobber
Member
Dunno, I think halo 5 mechanics are easily the best in the series... But that's just me.
Try going back to previous games, slow as molasses and restrictive.
And saying thrust breaks man cannons and using marrows as an example is pointless because narrows is not even in H5... Yeah halo 5 mechanics in halo 3 would probably ruin some maps if you shut your eyes and imagine that scenario.
Try going back to previous games, slow as molasses and restrictive.
And saying thrust breaks man cannons and using marrows as an example is pointless because narrows is not even in H5... Yeah halo 5 mechanics in halo 3 would probably ruin some maps if you shut your eyes and imagine that scenario.
Twilight Gap
Member
Halo CE and Halo 2 are faster than Halo 5 when it comes to their time to kill and general game pacing. I didn't mention anything about responsiveness because I agree that Halo 5 feels better to control than the older games.
But if you're suggesting it feels better because you can't run and jump everywhere in the old games, then that's the point I'm making against it. "Restrictions" are good for smaller player counts for reasons I already mentioned. I didn't make this up; all of the successful competitive games have strict level design, including older Halo games. Overwatch is the most competitive console shooter right now and the levels are incredibly linear. While some characters can bypass this, most of them have to take long and often convoluted paths to reach certain vantage points, and that's what keeps all the abilities in check.
Of course, there was nothing fun about walking across Sandtrap, but that's what vehicles and man cannons were for. And there's nothing stopping the devs from increasing the default movement. There were plenty of creative movement opportunities around maps that didn't outright break their pathing and spawns, but I suppose the new Halo has already spoiled people on letting them perform all these incredible feats. I thought it had spoiled me too until I played Quake settings in this game and realized that Sprint and Thrust are irrelevant in the face of faster movement speed.
I think this game is built for Warzone and it wouldn't surprise me if 343 double down on that for Halo 6. Halo as it existed as an intimate team shooter is fading away because players want to feel like super heroes and not super soldiers. I don't blame them, but I don't think the game is better than its predecessors for that reason.
Thrust's issues are its vertical height and cooldown. By increasing the gravity on it, it no longer allows you to make vertical jumps and instead serves as a "fast fall" of sorts. But obviously that's not as "fun".
GringoSuave89
Banned
Thrust is the one mechanic I can deal with losing or having a major overhaul. I just hate not being able to shoot while thrusting.
One game in proving grounds and this certainly feels better than default radar. Coli ctf and I felt you could flank and escape so long as you didn't use abilities. I found my self crouch jumping where I'd normally clamber, and walking far more of the time. The tweaked radar gave me info on careless enemies or those desperate to escape or fly in, and that's it. It's too early to say but I think I love it.
Twilight Gap
Member
Wall jumping could honestly become a thing, especially as an alternative to Clamber. I could see some very interesting level design emerging from strategically positioned walls that allow the player to move around the map in unorthodox ways while still controlling their movement. Clamber's biggest problem is psychological, because even with a nerf to its vertical grab window, players still feel like they should be able to Clamber on things.
Twilight Gap
Member
I don't remember its implementation in Titanfall 2 when I played its beta, but I remember playing the Blops 3 beta and hating how context sensitive it was.
Both of those games are full of automatic weapons though. It's difficult to use a single shot weapon while moving like that.
Post A: Complains about additional movement options ruining Halo and "breaking" map design.
Post B: Wants wall jumping in Halo.
Twilight Gap
Member
Post A: Complains about additional movement options ruining Halo and "breaking" map design.
Post B: Wants wall jumping in Halo.
And? I like rocket jumping in Quake, grenade jumping in Halo 2, and I don't see the problem with bouncing off of a wall if you could A) shoot while you do it, and B) only do it on a vertical surface. It's hardly as game breaking as Clamber, and it's not the same as Wall Running, which I don't see working for Halo.
I really wish if a game is going to have it it's just a natural part of movement. if I strafe and go against a wall, do the animation of me wall running to everyone else but keep the first person like i'm still just strafing. If i stop moving then I fall down.
Every game is like
"Sprint and then.. okay no you did it at the wrong angle.. fuck.. okay try ag- no you didn't sprint 3 seconds before hitting the wall.. goddamnit forget it, nobody is using the wall running parts for shortcuts anyway"
remember those Forge maps where it had the optical illusion that you were walking on the walls? like that.
Twilight Gap
Member
Wouldn't players find it annoying if they didn't want to run up the wall, but happened to strafe into it?
I think a well designed game needs to not require a million button presses, but in that scenario it might end up requiring its own action input.
GringoSuave89
Banned
cuts were made. send complaints to the Spartan Company Suggestion Box
User 73706
Banned
Regarding motion tracker update wonkiness: I know Halo 5 is the most modular version of Halo so far from a programmatic standpoint, and it's probably just a networking / server thing, but adjusting the Motion Tracker to be exponentially more specific than its original intended purpose over a year after launch can't be easy with whatever sustain team they still have. Consider that before the Motion Tracker was basically just a binary check - if the player was in motion and not crouching, they showed up, and that was it. Now they've got to have specific use cases for a number of player abilities that are all coded differently, and they've got to tie it to the player's firing events but only for specific weapons.
Regarding movement: CE is my second-favorite (H5 being the first), but I just can't to back to CE at this point because Chief handles like a damn tank slathered in vaseline. Halo 5 took the snappy, haptic and responsive elements from, say, something like Smash Bros. and applied them to the player's vanilla movement suite, and it just feels amazing. Wallrunning I could see working with the current sandbox because it's basically grounded crouching applied to vertical surfaces in that you're having to "lock in" your lateral motion in some capacity. I'd be happy with wall-jumping too, though.
I think Spartan Charge could probably do without being able to be let off instantly (even if it's just, like, a 0.2-second windup animation), and I really wish you could stabilize without having to be in scope, but otherwise I'm fairly happy with H5's movement options. While a lot of games with double jumping instinctively have me trying it in games where double jumping doesn't exist, I can't go back to the older Halo titles without trying to clamber over everything, but given its origins as a primarily network-oriented console shooter having something like that to fudge over small gaps makes total sense. I actually do kind of wish we had a double-jump and traded Sprint for a faster base movement speed, but at the same time it does make segregating the various Spartan Abilities into realistic control sets a bit easier.
My only thing is that the map design for the most part is still just so rooted in... well, having roots. Operating in fairly vanilla vertical movement options, clamber routes notwithstanding. In order to keep maps semi-open but still giving players ways to actually fluidly navigate the environment and not be caught somewhere where their only option to escape is lateral movement I feel like they need to explore some more alien geometries - little floating monoliths players can clamber onto, somewhat reactive floating panels that sink and bounce as players mess with them (e.g. Midship but smaller and more frequent), maybe even Heat Man-style tele-platforms, etc. Movement is practically a fourth pillar to the combat at this point with how expanded it's become, but it's still mostly fallen to the wayside outside of some fairly linear integration with maps.
Regarding movement: CE is my second-favorite (H5 being the first), but I just can't to back to CE at this point because Chief handles like a damn tank slathered in vaseline. Halo 5 took the snappy, haptic and responsive elements from, say, something like Smash Bros. and applied them to the player's vanilla movement suite, and it just feels amazing. Wallrunning I could see working with the current sandbox because it's basically grounded crouching applied to vertical surfaces in that you're having to "lock in" your lateral motion in some capacity. I'd be happy with wall-jumping too, though.
I think Spartan Charge could probably do without being able to be let off instantly (even if it's just, like, a 0.2-second windup animation), and I really wish you could stabilize without having to be in scope, but otherwise I'm fairly happy with H5's movement options. While a lot of games with double jumping instinctively have me trying it in games where double jumping doesn't exist, I can't go back to the older Halo titles without trying to clamber over everything, but given its origins as a primarily network-oriented console shooter having something like that to fudge over small gaps makes total sense. I actually do kind of wish we had a double-jump and traded Sprint for a faster base movement speed, but at the same time it does make segregating the various Spartan Abilities into realistic control sets a bit easier.
My only thing is that the map design for the most part is still just so rooted in... well, having roots. Operating in fairly vanilla vertical movement options, clamber routes notwithstanding. In order to keep maps semi-open but still giving players ways to actually fluidly navigate the environment and not be caught somewhere where their only option to escape is lateral movement I feel like they need to explore some more alien geometries - little floating monoliths players can clamber onto, somewhat reactive floating panels that sink and bounce as players mess with them (e.g. Midship but smaller and more frequent), maybe even Heat Man-style tele-platforms, etc. Movement is practically a fourth pillar to the combat at this point with how expanded it's become, but it's still mostly fallen to the wayside outside of some fairly linear integration with maps.