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Halo |OT 20| It really does feel like Halo

D

daedalius

Member
mastrbiggy said:
Last night I got to play H5 TS on Midship. I only played one match so this is mostly just my initial thoughts and not in any way a proper dissection of the game. Take it as you will.

Movement & Animations
I really liked the base movement of Halo 5, it felt fast and fluid. One thing that every Halo has failed to nail is the sense of weight and power of a Spartan. H5 finally gets it right. Every movement feels impactful and weighty without affecting player mobility. Initially, it seems visually cumbersome, but it started to feel natural after a while.

I think having thrusters is a nice addition, but it needs to be toned down. It allowed you to get out of the blast radius of grenades and retreat when losing a gun fight too easily. In its current state it seems like a get out of jail ability. I think it should act more as a strafe to throw off an opponents aim. Many people complain that sprint allows players to retreat from their mistakes too easily, I feel that thruster in its current form is exactly that and in some ways more problematic.

Sprinting is sprinting, not much new here. I’m not the biggest fan of sprint in Halo, but the new shield recharge/sprint mechanic is a interesting approach to try and punish players for abusing it. I found myself trying to use it to run away from a gun fight and paying the price because my shields never recharged.

I’m not sure how I feel about ledge climb, I don’t think it really takes away from the game, but it certainly does give players more options in terms paths they can take on a map. I never tried the ground pound or charge abilities so I can’t really comment on how they work. I did see multiple people get destroyed for trying to use it. Seems like there is some risk/reward aspect to using these abilities.

Gunplay
I was extremely pleased with the base gunplay. Aim assist is dramatically reduced from H4 - firefights are certainly more challenging and require more precision/skill. This increases the skill gap when compared with H4 (which I though had pretty good base gunplay already). Small refinements in aiming/aim acceleration are certainly welcomed and make the game feel more responsive and precise.

Hip fire is still as important as ever and as accurate as ever. Unlike modern shooters, H5 scoping doesn’t seem to improve accuracy or spread, at least on precision weapons like the BR, Pistol, and DMR. Pretty standard stuff for any Halo game. I’m not sure how the AR’s aiming mechanic affects its output though.

This brings me to the new scoping mechanic. The current scoping mechanic in H5 is a sort of hybrid between the typical ADS that you find in modern shooters and Halo’s traditional scope mechanic. Default controls require that you hold down the left trigger to scope and being shot kicks you out of scope. I think scoping in H5 goes a little beyond just being “visual ADS”, but it certainly isn’t the ADS that you find in games like CoD or BF. I know it really doesn’t mean anything when I say I don’t like it, but I need to spend more time with it to fully understand how it works and how it impacts the game. I’ll just leave at that.


Weapons (the ones I used)
The Assault Rifle felt like a mix between the H3 and H4 AR. The pistol was really strange at first, but it seemed pretty effective. Damage output felt similar to H4, perhaps a little more effective in H5 though. The BR and DMR worked as you’d expect, not much new here. The sword was pretty devastating, especially when paired with sprint and thruster. Grenades seemed similar to H4 in terms of damage output.

Other stuff
There are some neat additions like Spartan chatter. Had a few Spartans congratulate me on getting a headshot. I found it kind of humorous, but I hope there is an option turn it off. There are now visual and audio indicators for static power weapon spawns, which I’m completely fine with.


Closing thoughts
Playing Halo 5 was a really weird experience for me. There are certainly improvements over its predecessor and things that I really liked, but there were also a handful of changes that caused concern. These concerns come from someone who wants to hold onto Halo of the past, but also someone who is concerned with how these additions/changes impact H5 moving forward.

I’m definitely looking forward to sinking more time into the game when the beta releases and providing more in depth thoughts.
Click to expand...

That biggy, he's so hot right now.
 
C

Computron

Member
Top of the page repost

I ran Mix's gamertag list through excel and generated NeoGAF format links to each persons gamertags with their NeoGAF name



Click each username to go to their xbox live website where you can quickly add them to your friendslist.

Need people to play with? Add each other and maybe send eachother a quick message.




VisceralBowl
Antigoon
Welfare
Ryn
VinFTW
Ragnarok Flames
Granadier
Poodlestrike
wwm0nkey
ArchedThunder
Blue Ninja
MasterChef420
IHaveIce
aHebrewMenagerie
Fracas
The Flash
GringoSuave89
rrc1594
jhferry
TCKaos
Glassboy
gAg CruSh3r
Fotos
Japarican
Jem0208
Sikamikanico
Fahzgoolin
Gandie
Subzero at a starbucks
StaticJam
GrizzNKev
HGStormy
Ohwiseone
Computron
cluckinho
BeamImpact
BigEvilTurtle
Ominym
JackHerer
yingyangryder
Blueblur1
BladedExpert
Der Flatulator
ViewtifulJC
Calm Killer
FUBAR McDangles
TharpDaddy
SmartWaffles
Deputy Moonman
Impala26
RowdyReverb
Neo+Gaf=Nerd_Fap
Rev3rb
Ein Bear
Deception
Sentient
CliQ
KiboSenshi
 
V

ViewtifulJC

Banned
dwells said:
I'm at six crashes/freezes now. This is impressive.
Click to expand...

I gave up. Will play when Frankie comes down with the hot patch to fix all the random crashes/booting/matchmaking load times/kicked out of games/hard freezes/etc.

Thank god for Mario Kart 8 DLC this weekend fam...Nintendo free online providing better experience/value than XBL Gold, what a world we live in
 
D

Digital Limit

Member
Someone posted competitive or "pro" Halo 5 gameplay, right? Where can I watch that?

ViewtifulJC said:
I gave up. Will play when Frankie comes down with the hot patch to fix all the random crashes/booting/matchmaking load times/kicked out of games/hard freezes/etc.

Thank god for Mario Kart 8 DLC this weekend fam...Nintendo free online providing better experience/value than XBL Gold, what a world we live in
Click to expand...

Yeah, let's throw on our headsets, exchange gamertags and play Mario Kart together! #lol
 
D

Dub117

Member
Computron said:
Top of the page repost

I ran Mix's gamertag list through excel and generated NeoGAF format links to each persons gamertags with their NeoGAF name



Click each username to go to their xbox live website where you can quickly add them to your friendslist.

Need people to play with? Add each other and maybe send eachother a quick message.




VisceralBowl
Antigoon
Welfare
Ryn
VinFTW
Ragnarok Flames
Granadier
Poodlestrike
wwm0nkey
ArchedThunder
Blue Ninja
MasterChef420
IHaveIce
aHebrewMenagerie
Fracas
The Flash
GringoSuave89
rrc1594
jhferry
TCKaos
Glassboy
gAg CruSh3r
Fotos
Japarican
Jem0208
Sikamikanico
Fahzgoolin
Gandie
Subzero at a starbucks
StaticJam
GrizzNKev
HGStormy
Ohwiseone
Computron
cluckinho
BeamImpact
BigEvilTurtle
Ominym
JackHerer
yingyangryder
Blueblur1
BladedExpert
Der Flatulator
ViewtifulJC
Calm Killer
FUBAR McDangles
TharpDaddy
SmartWaffles
Deputy Moonman
Impala26
RowdyReverb
Neo+Gaf=Nerd_Fap
Rev3rb
Ein Bear
Deception
Sentient
CliQ
KiboSenshi
Click to expand...

I'm down for customs in the evenings CST stang117 if you want to add me
And ihaveice I couldn't join your game on the invite I don't know what was going on.
 
T

therealminime

Member
Managed to play a single game. 4v4 Team Slayer on Narrows in Halo 3. It was great. Halo 3 cleans up so insanely well. The simple, neat art of 3 scales beautifully. Still getting my Halo legs back and acclimating to 60fps.


Played a good chunk of Cairo Station too and seemingly lost all progress when I cam back a few hours later. Ah well.
 
M

MouldyK

Member
Digital Limit said:
Someone posted competitive or "pro" Halo 5 gameplay, right? Where can I watch that?



Yeah, let's throw on our headsets, exchange gamertags and play Mario Kart together! #lol
Click to expand...

You laugh, but I would gladly play Mario Kart with people. :D Hunt for MouldyK on that there Nintendo Wii U contraption and we'll race while 343i sort their shit out.


Wait, they got rid of Friend Codes, right?
 
P

Plywood

NeoGAF's smiling token!
Dopus said:
Yes, you're right.

Ru8x9Sn.jpg
Click to expand...
Finally.
 
H

HowardRoark

Member
So of the Original Trilogy, my skill ranking seems to be at:

CE >>>>>>>>> Halo 3 > Halo 2/2A

Feels so good to play CE multiplayer again. WTF at the hit sounds though, it's really weird.
 
H

Homeboyd

Member
Never forget.
The Henery said:
Oh yes, absolutely, 100 percent, without question. The other day I was going to make a quick post: "Every time I hop on Halo 4, I'm repeatedly astonished at the continuing success of Infinity Big Team Slayer". Once I thought about it however, I realised that iBTB's success makes complete sense. Its continued success, population-wise, is the residual effect of Halo 4's launch physique.

There are vast, vast, numerous amounts of videogamers who enjoyed the original Halo trilogy. The PS2 dominated that console generation but had it not been for Halo CE's foundational pillar in the Xbox's lauch, and Xbox Live's perfect launch partner in Halo 2 then the Xbox would have gone the way of the Sega Saturn or Jaguar, forgotton and completely stomped into anonymity by the PS2. Halo 3's years at the top of the Live charts and respectable (for a years old game) subsequent tussle with COD releases bore out that there were still many, many gamers who enjoyed normal Halo gameplay.

Then Halo Reach happened and a lot of gamers who had nine years worth of gameplay muscle memory invested in Halo are thrown by having to stop shooting in the middle of a battle in order for their shots to be accurate. They have moments of dizzying frustration when a player they would have killed in a given situation in the previous three titles suddenly activates an invincibility button. They are killed by players who can suddenly fly over their heads from spawn and the game doesn't offer them a Y axis sensitivity to accomodate these new features. They enter Team Slayer, a safe bet of a playlist in the previous two titles and half of the maps are a turgid, mono-grey eyesore that are all visually alike and don't play particularly well. They go to BTB, a favourite for so many in H2 and H3 and there is not a single, non-forge map custom built for the mode, instead playing on built-for-an-entirely-different-mode horror shows like Spire and Boneyard. They actually get put into BTB SWAT on Boneyard, spawn Red stairs, and are repeatedly spawn killed in the open by a 3x zoom, single shot precision rifle.

These players think Halo Reach is not a very fun Halo game. They don't like the changes, they don't like the poor selection of maps, amongst other things. They look around for other places to put their gaming time; Black Op's releases on the back of three successful predecessors and, crucially, doesn't mess around with what made those games popular in the first place. It identify's a rivals strength of meta-features (Halo's theatre and social file sharing capabilities) and implements its own theatre which in many ways improves upon Halo's version and then offers players the social sharing side of it, not on a dev website or by jumping through hoops in game but through free rendered uploads to probably the most visited website on Earth in Youtube. Many of the gamers put off by Halo's strange new direction (no 1-50 wtf? Timing shots and no BR wtf? You can spawn with camo now wtf?) decide to go where a lot of their friends went, a safe, you know what you're getting deal in COD. Lots of them also get into Battlefield 3, a game that knows what it does best, very large scale military battles, is somewhat unique in the FPS landscape and sticks to it.

Fast forward to October 2012 and these players who loved the original trilogy but checked out with Reach, they see the Halo 4 PR train in full swing. "Oh hey, look, the Master Chief's back" they say. They remember paying the same price for ODST as they did for Halo 3 but ODST didn't have proper multiplayer nor the Chief. They remember paying full price the following year for Reach, which again didn't have the Chief, and being put off by the weird, unexpected things in the multiplayer. So they see the Chief and they associate him with the last game he was in, Halo 3, that game that they and their friends had lots of awesome times with. So they look forward to Halo 4's release because hey, Chief's back, so Halo will be normal again right?

This is where one goes back to the point about Halo 4's launch 'physique'. The launch state of a game is arguably its most important. It is where the vast majority of players who don't read forums and gaming press etc get their idea of a games identity and the game developers intent for the series. Many of those players that Reach lost are back for Halo 4 in launch week, eager to give the franchise another shot.

They load up the game and tentatively enter War Games ("I think this is the multi, guys"). The party lead and their buddies look for a playlist they remember loving, Team Slayer, but there is no sign of it. "Just pick the top one, come on party leader!". So they enter Infinity Slayer. They play five hypothetical games. The voting for these five games goes 'Adrift, Complex, Complex, Adrift, Abandon'. The maps quality don't seem very high and now it appears everyone has a power weapon at some point, and that guy they just killed pressed X to spawn without punishment and cleaned them up while they waited for their shields to recharge, completely unfairly. Weapons are confusingly spawning at random, with no explanation as to why that is happening (it didn't happen in the ten years they played Halo before). They play another bunch of Infinity Slayer and soon come to realise that there's only four 4v4 maps and two of them are objectively poor for Slayer. So they venture over to Infinity BTB and, while the gameplay problems remain from their 4v4 experience, at least there are more maps on offer.

So what happens to this hypothetical party of four a week after Halo 4's release? Three of them go to Black Op's 2 or back to Battlefield 3 (COD does weapon unlocks and instant respawn far better than Halo ever will and BF3 is built around large scale combat and, crucially, let's you drive a vehicle more than five meters without getting stunned by a spawn weapon). One stays (the opening populations were around 400, 000 and then dropped to a quarter of that). The one who stays motivation for doing so is as multitudinous as Halo's confused identities. It might be a love of heavy BTB gameplay, it might be because that player is one of those who is an absolute sucker for levelling systems no matter what the gameplay and wishes to reach SR 130. It might be that they fucking love the party gametype Regicide. But the question isn't why so few stayed it's why so many chose to leave...

Halo 4 sold so many copies because it it had an 11 year established base of users and previous customers right? For 9 of those years Halo was about equal starts, checks, balances and largely reasonable design. I don't think it's unreasonable to think that many of that established user base came to Halo 4 expecting a direct, regular Master Chief sequel to Halo 3, Reach being the equivalent of an experimental off-shoot branch, not the foundation for Halo 4. Those players came to Halo, experienced instant respawn, random weapon drops, camo sniping, camo boltshotting, their favourite Warthog being stunned every three seconds by an unlocked spawn weapon, no ranked/social choice and realised they had to play for hours in order to unlock a perk so they didn't frequently run out of ammo (weapons vanishing every 12 seconds as they do). They probably realised at that point that all these things that were making Halo not feel like the game they'd enjoyed for a decade were being done better in other games in which they made sense. And so, they went to those other games.

So, COD does unlock systems and fast, one shot kill, 60fps gameplay best. Battlefield 3 cornered the big battle market. What was always Halo's core strength? FOUR VERSUS FOUR, arena based slayer and objective gametypes. 343 launches with four smallish maps, and a shit load of BTB content. 6 of its subsequent 9 DLC maps are BTB. Halo no longer has a grip on thaepopular area of the 4v4 market. People who bought or rented Halo 4 to see if it was normal again have disappeared. They won't be back five months from launch when it's announced in a corner of an internet forum that Team Throwdown, a normal-ish Halo playlist is coming to Halo 4! After that opening week they've made their mind up and you've lost them forever. Well, at least until Halo 5 rolls around but even then they might not bother. See, next time, Halo won't have the 'Master Chief wasn't in those games so it doesn't count' excuse. Master Chief, along with the Halo name, is now tainted.
Click to expand...

Halo 5 appears to be fixing some of the more obvious flaws with Halo 4 in terms of balancing, I just (personally) wish all the fluff (AA's, SA's whatever you want to call them) was eliminated as well. This post should be in every Halo OT.
 
V

ViewtifulJC

Banned
Reagan's BR said:
Is there a bug list?

-Had the connecting to match popup all game
-Radar in cutscene
-Cutscene music spill into game
Click to expand...

-dropped out of games entirely
-vote for map/gametype, wins, picks something else entirely
-hard freeze when looking at active roster
-game showing a black screen with some text in the lefthand corner "Untracked build, won't upload"
-five people on a team in a 4v4 playlist
-guests showing up in ranked playlists
-10 minutes searching for people and then hard freeze when game starts up

wheeeee
 
D

dwells

Member
Zeouterlimits said:
We should open a public jira.
Click to expand...

I actually think this is a really good idea. Even if 343i doesn't interact with it and the community is left to track it, that would be good.

If anyone wants to seriously do this and use JIRA or some other bug tracker, that would be awesome.
 
B

buddha0991

Member
Rex Sword. I forgot how the Halo 2 Outskirts alone has more secrets and Easter eggs than entire games these days.

I would like to be added to that custom game list thing too!

I'm diaceofspadesib! Dumb gamertag I know but I am not gonna pay to change it lol. Be warned, I haven't played these games in ages and I SUCK, but if you are lookin' to do fun custom games in any of these games, I'm down!
 
J

jem0208

Member
Poodlestrike said:
I've made it into a game, yeah.
Click to expand...

I've got into exactly 3 games. First one I lagged out in about 2 minutes, second I actually managed to finish however it was 3 vs 3 when it was meant to be 5 vs 5 and the third was 5 vs 2 which I quit from in about 3 minutes.


This is so frustrating.


buddha0991 said:
Rex Sword. I forgot how the Halo 2 Outskirts alone has more secrets and Easter eggs than entire games these days.

I would like to be added to that custom game list thing too!

I'm diaceofspadesib! Dumb gamertag I know but I am not gonna pay to change it lol. Be warned, I haven't played these games in ages and I SUCK, but if you are lookin' to do fun custom games in any of these games, I'm down!
Click to expand...

Yeah, outskirts is awesome. I went to get the hidden sniper which is very useful.
 
D

defghik

Member
Amazingly, I found a game in about 2 minutes in the Halo 2 classic playlist. It was 4v4 Midship, and it ran flawlessly from start to finish... until the game crashed loading the postgame lobby.

What a mess.
 
S

Sordid

Member
I got into a Halo 3 team slayer game and it turned into multi team but I was on purple team myself. I lost. Got into another which started 4v3 and it split up my party. Yay! Tried the CEA campaign to pass some time and every time I fired a gun it made the plasma pistol overcharge noise (and it didn't acknowledge that I finished Truth and Reconciliation after I did)

What a joke.
 
K

kittens

Unconfirmed Member
Impala26 said:
Are Customs even working better tonight for anyone?

If so, maybe we could at least attempt a HaloGAF party...
Click to expand...
Customs have worked really well when the lobby system works well enough to get a party together.
 
RowdyReverb

RowdyReverb

Member
kittens said:
Customs have worked really well when the lobby system works well enough to get a party together.
Click to expand...

Yeah, lobby behavior is just downright bizarre. For example, only one friend shows up on my roster even though several are playing MCC. I really hope that most of the problems can be traced to one root cause that fixes everything with parties, roster, and matchmaking
 
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