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Halo |OT 20| It really does feel like Halo
- Thread starter Fracas
- Start date
Poodlestrike
Banned
Like said earlier, having a guiding intelligence changes them from a mindless horde into a truly alien threat. A little Lovecrafitan, actually.
K
kittens
Unconfirmed Member
One thing I really love about the Flood from Halo 2 onwards is how the idea of a massive unified intelligence sweeping across the galaxy and consuming all intelligence and technology it comes across is actually kind of alluring. There's a "that's terrible, but maybe ultimately better" thought that crosses my mind sometimes. And lord knows the Gravemind can justify their actions into the ground.
Poodlestrike
Banned
That too. The Gravemind is one hell of a spokesman.
NobleGundam
Banned
Posted? http://youtu.be/BADfTlB03Q0
FUNKNOWN iXi
Member
So glad they're doing this.
Loving the remastered cinematics bits here and there. So much more punch added by the more realistic mocap moves.
EroticSushi
Member
I get so excited every time I see a new snip of one of cutscenes done by Blur.
Welfare
Member
JoeDanny
Member
Pretty much anything he says is gold. "Grrrrr aaaarrrgghHhhhghhhhGGHGG" is my favorite.
I think part of the reason I don't like the Gravemind is because it reminds me an awful lot of this.
The Borg from Star Trek share a lot of similarities to The Flood. And The Borg started to lose their scary/cool factor after they introduced a central intelligence that controlled the entire collective. But I guess I should have seen The Gravemind coming. Given how Star Trek First Contact and Halo both borrow heavily from Aliens, I should have figured they'd both borrow the "Alien Queen" idea.
Demoncarnotaur
Member
Ohh, I just realized.. I can't wait to see what they do with the Flood. Those and the Brutes should be really cool.
I think part of the reason I don't like the Gravemind is because it reminds me an awful lot of this.
The Borg from Star Trek share a lot of similarities to The Flood. And The Borg started to lose their scary/cool factor after they introduced a central intelligence that controlled the entire collective. But I guess I should have seen The Gravemind coming. Given how Star Trek First Contact and Halo both borrow heavily from Aliens, I should have figured they'd both borrow the "Alien Queen" idea.
To be fair, the Borg originally did have an all-encompassing voice in Best of Both Worlds that would seem more akin to Gravemind than the Queen (in some ways).
edit: Well, not as vocal and singular as the queen. Nevermind.
K
kittens
Unconfirmed Member
Yeah, I almost mentioned the similarities between the Borg and Flood in my post above. I'm cool with them not being a totally original idea. They're still interesting.
Poodlestrike
Banned
I think part of the reason I don't like the Gravemind is because it reminds me an awful lot of this.
The Borg from Star Trek share a lot of similarities to The Flood. And The Borg started to lose their scary/cool factor after they introduced a central intelligence that controlled the entire collective. But I guess I should have seen The Gravemind coming. Given how Star Trek First Contact and Halo both borrow heavily from Aliens, I should have figured they'd both borrow the "Alien Queen" idea.
Yeah, I can see why that'd bug you. In my mind, the Borg Queen wasn't the problem, not really. The problem is that Voyager decided to hit the entire collective with the nerf stick so they could be a more regular threat. They actually became a lot less effective as the show went on, and thus, less scary.
Besides, the Borg already had a guiding intelligence beforehand, it just didn't exist in a single entity. Before the Gravemind, the Flood didn't have that.
Indeed, my thoughts mirror yours, but I also think that the Borg Queen represents a much bigger issue to the "idea" of the Borg than the Gravemind does to the Flood. The Borg were originally presented as a distributed hivemind, the Borg Queen centralized that--gave the Borg a face you could kill (and for the sake of the plot, if you killed the Queen it seemed to stop everything for a spell). For the Flood, they're less related to insects than an infection--and if you kill the Gravemind, you deal a lot of damage, but that isn't going to slow down the Flood for long as long as there are still vectors to infect. The idea that the Gravemind is just a natural stage of growth as the infection spreads is also a difference.
They go back to being the Flood in Halo CE--presumably they lose the ability to develop Pure Forms and more elaborate Flood structures, but they can still run around and infect stuff.
The Gravemind never really "dies" in that apparently once a new one/new ones form they have access to the memories of the "original".*
*Before Silentium, my big idea was that the Flood consciousness was in the Domain. That got dashed because in that book they say that the Domain was at least largely destroyed, but I think the implication you can take from the Forerunner Trilogy and Halsey's Journal is that the Gravemind might actually exist in slipspace.
To be fair, the Borg originally did have an all-encompassing voice in Best of Both Worlds that would seem more akin to Gravemind than the Queen (in some ways).
edit: Well, not as vocal and singular as the queen. Nevermind.
Yeah that's true, First Contact's Queen didn't hurt The Borg as much as Voyager did. Especially after they made the Queen seemingly ignorant of what's going on in her own collective and exploited that like an Achilles heel.
Continuing with the Borg parallel, my own fanfic-ish idea of how to introduce a Gravemind like character could have been more like a Locutus of Borg scenario where The Flood create a "Gravemind" type leader through taking over a certain humanoid and turning it into a unqiue Flood.
Actually, fuck, that's Kerrigan from Starcraft.
GringoSuave89
Banned
To be fair, the Borg originally did have an all-encompassing voice in Best of Both Worlds that would seem more akin to Gravemind than the Queen (in some ways).
edit: Well, not as vocal and singular as the queen. Nevermind.
This. The Borg Queen deflated a lot of their scary cred cause she was a) pretty counter to Borg we had seen before and b) a shoehorned romance/creepy infatuation with Picard.
Poodlestrike
Banned
K
kittens
Unconfirmed Member
I actually have something positive to say about H2A medals! It's good to see the hail mary medal is coming back. That's one of the few new ones from Halo 4 that I really liked.
Collect more biomass to assemble another proto gravemind in the feral stage then go back up to the coordinated stage once that's complete.
Which would have far less freedom story wise probably.Without it, they'd just be a bunch of Space Zombies.
If any Halo game needs a Hail Mary medal it's Halo CE. You could chuck nades like a champ in CE.
Cross-map 'nade spam on Hang 'em High all day, 'ere day!
Also, CE was the only Halo (I believe) that had an "Infinite Grenades" custom option.
So long as there were 4 or less players in the game. Plenty of warthog launching shenanigans were had because of the infinite grenade option in MP.
Halo 3 had an unlimited grenade option. They refilled basically as fast as you could throw them.
Maybe now it'll ascend to something greater than the "die after throwing a grenade" medal.
FUNKNOWN iXi
Member
Grenades after CE were sawft, especially throwing them. Spartans in CE were throwing BULLETS, not based on momentum, and their fuse times were longer, allowing for POWER. Strafe was better too, so reacting to grenades being that strong wasn't a problem. The problem was allowing 4 of each lol
This is how I felt throwing grenades in Halo 2&3:
This is how I felt throwing grenades in Halo 2&3:
Fahzgoolin
Banned
I think part of the reason I don't like the Gravemind is because it reminds me an awful lot of this.
The Borg from Star Trek share a lot of similarities to The Flood. And The Borg started to lose their scary/cool factor after they introduced a central intelligence that controlled the entire collective. But I guess I should have seen The Gravemind coming. Given how Star Trek First Contact and Halo both borrow heavily from Aliens, I should have figured they'd both borrow the "Alien Queen" idea.
Honestly the gravemind isn't as cool until you see some of the backstory and lore surrounding him, including mendicate bias and all of that.
OriginsEdit
As the Forerunner-Precursor war drew to a close, the few remaining Precursors that were pushed out beyond the edges of the galaxy to Path Kethona sought vengeance against the Forerunners. A few Precursors were spared by the Forerunners, while others became a dust which could regenerate into their past forms. Over time this dust became so corrupted that it could only cause horrific diseases. The Precursors saw a chance for revenge and so they created the Flood to destroy the Forerunners as a final act of vengeance against them.[5] They sent several ships containing this powder to Forerunner controlled planets.
source: http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/Flood
I don't see having 4 as a problem; they allowed players to use them as a versatile tool rather than sparingly. The reason it worked though is because you could avoid poorly thrown grenades much easier than you can in later games due to how the detonation timer worked.
K
kittens
Unconfirmed Member
That's not what it's for, though. It's for getting a long distance grenade kill.
I'm fully aware of the intent. But all it did was check the distance between the exploded guy and the character that threw the grenade. Which meant that it was frequently awarded after people threw a grenade, died, and instant-respawned across the map.
Arbiter is so badass. He better come back to H5. And by coming back I mean more than one random cutscene.
K
kittens
Unconfirmed Member
Ohh, gotcha. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that happened to me once or twice. I remember getting some multikill medals after killing one person, dying, and then getting a few more kills on the respawn.
Hail Mary was such a good medal to get.
Grenades after CE were sawft, especially throwing them. Spartans in CE were throwing BULLETS, not based on momentum, and their fuse times were longer, allowing for POWER. Strafe was better too, so reacting to grenades being that strong wasn't a problem. The problem was allowing 4 of each lol
This is how I felt throwing grenades in Halo 2&3:
This was definitely the feeling going from CE-->2. It felt like instead the Spartans went from throwing fist-sized rocks to small, lead bowling balls.
Indeed, got some great ones killing campers hiding around the downed Pelican on Ragnarok.
Honestly, can't wait to see this particular medal in old games because I always LOVED long-range grenade tosses.
EDIT: Really wish I could .gif some of my saved films because I had some fantastic long-distance sticks from Halo 3/Reach era. Does anyone know a way to do something like this?
Two options:
1-Use a capture card (you can of course send the replay file to someone else who has a capture card).
2-Doable by yourself with a USB stick (for Halo 3) or without needing one (for Reach and 4): frame-by-frame screenshot the clip in replay mode and extract the images. The upshot is that you get downsampled-from-4K 1080p (albeit jpeg'd) (and no motion blur) footage of the games, the downside is that it's a pain in the ass.
Or that it made more money than Spider-Man 2
Good choice there.
Kinda too bad they never implemented a checklist selection in the OS.
(*cough* DOA5 screenshots)