Demoncarnotaur
Member
I liked Gears 3's mp a lot, but the map packs weren't that special IMO. Still, that game looks a shit ton better than Judgment.. uninspired SP, no DBNO in MP, no Locusts in MP, etc. Some of the changes seemed nice, but now it just looks like a mess and ultimately doesn't seem like a positive move for the series.
That would be nice, more feedback both via animation and visual appearance would be really nice. The Prometheans just never hit the high note of the Covenant, and Im kind of tired of the Covies also.. so..its a lose lose situation now.
I like Wreckage a lot.. its the only one I have fun on from the new maps.
Yeah, I think Halo 4 suffered from so many different devs being involved.. I wish 343 would have handled more in house and just delayed the game honestly.
Amazing post.
I wish more the rest of the Halo games would take more notes from Halo 2 and ODST for story and CE and 3 for level and encounter design.
Yup, its depressing how Reach and especially Halo 4 never came close to anything like this.. I really wish they would have striven for more with Halo 4.
Once again, I agree completely.
That would be nice, more feedback both via animation and visual appearance would be really nice. The Prometheans just never hit the high note of the Covenant, and Im kind of tired of the Covies also.. so..its a lose lose situation now.
I like Wreckage a lot.. its the only one I have fun on from the new maps.
Yeah, I think Halo 4 suffered from so many different devs being involved.. I wish 343 would have handled more in house and just delayed the game honestly.
Amazing post.
I wish more the rest of the Halo games would take more notes from Halo 2 and ODST for story and CE and 3 for level and encounter design.
It's sad that in the following Halo games we never got any encounters even close to the scale of Halo 3's. Scarab battles were some of the most enjoyable moments in the Halo 3's campaign. The amount of different ways you can approach the encounter with the 2 Scarab's towards the end of The Covenant is pretty amazing. Depending on what kind of vehicle you're using the encounter can play out entirely different.
Warthog/Mongoose:
- Get a marine with a Rocket Launcher/FRG in the sideseat and face either Scarab head-on until it's temporarily disabled and you can board it.
- Launch yourself off one of the ramps and try to jump on top of the Scarabs.
Scorpion/Wraith:
- Shoot the legs of a Scarab until it's temporarily disabled, board it, fight off the enemies and destroy the core.
- Shoot the legs until it's temporarily disabled, shoot down the cover in the back and destroy the core while still in the Scorpion.
Hornet:
- Pilot the aircraft yourself, fly over to the Scarab, land on it and fight your way through the enemies.
- Pilot the aircraft yourself, fly to the back of a Scarab and try to shoot off the cover in the back, giving you a perfect shot at its core.
- Get on one the side 'seats' of the Hornet and let a marine fly you over to the Scarab. They will hover above one of them until you drop down onto it. They will even pick you up once you've destroyed the core of the Scarab.
I'm surely forgetting several ways in which you can approach it differently, but it still shows how people can experience it in a variety of ways. All this while being shot by two Scarabs, some of the enemies on the Scarabs, several Prowlers and half a dozen Ghosts.
I don't understand why Bungie went away from Scarabs when they were such a success in Halo 3. ODST started out with this trend by only making us fight it once during the entire campaign. Plus, that one encounter was incredibly limited when you compare it to the ones in Halo 3. The Scarab had no room to move around so it only spun around in circles and the only vehicle you had to your disposal was the Banshee so there wasn't much room for creativity. The only other team where you see a Scarab is during the final segment of the game and you don't even get to fight it. It fires its beam at the Elephant and just walks off. The Reach Scarabs are even more limited and only show up in cutscenes, as decoration in the distance (which I doubt 90% of the people even saw) or as walking platforms for Grunts to shoot their turrets from.
It was understandable for ODST to not have huge encounters mainly because the of the limited development time and resources but Halo Reach doesn't really have that excuse. The campaign takes place on the planet with the biggest military fortress of all the human colonies, yet we see nothing of that. From what we've seen it seems like Forward Unto Dawn itself carries more firepower in Halo 3 than the entire planet Reach does in Halo Reach. Now that I think of it, I'm pretty sure we only see a single Scorpion Tank during the entire Reach campaign and we only use it to kill some turrets, Ghosts and Revenants during the span of 10 to 15 minutes. Compare that to the four Scorpions during the Halo 3 campaign which you use for an extended period of time against Scarabs, Wraiths, Ghosts, Prowlers, Choppers and a shitload of infantry. You can get a fairly good idea of the difference in scale between the two games.
The Halo 4 arrives and while some of the environments are huge in scale there's never really a big and versatile encounter anywhere in the game. The Pelican level is huge but all you can is a bunch of a bunch of stationary Phantoms from a mile away. The Star Wars level was enormous but you did nothing except fly past a bunch of turrets and shoot four lightbulbs. 343 did try to replicate a Scarab battle, though. Pretty much in the literal sense of the word because the Lych is very much like a re-skinned version of the Scarab. Sounds great, right? Yeah, it would be had 343 not removed everything about what made Scarab battles fun. The aircraft didn't move, it didn't shoot and was only accessible in two ways: either go up the lift or jetpack up to it. It was essentially another piece of geometry which had flown into the level pretending to be a Scarab. The most offensive part of the Lych is that when you destroy its core it drifts off until it's right above the canyon close by and completely evaporates. I wouldn't call it an explosions. It was just *poof* and the aircraft was gone. No satisfying explosion, no huge chunks of the it still laying around the map, no sense of danger of you getting killed if you don't get away fast enough. Just a boring, underwhelming, scripted poof.
I can't say too much about Spartan Ops as I've only played the first two episodes after selling the game, but it does seem to give us encounters on a bigger scale. It looks like they're just throwing a shitload of enemies at you without much thought behind it, though. I think that's the biggest issue with Spartan Ops encounters. The levels don't seem to be designed around a single really good encounter. Either they're designed around campaign, they're designed around multiplayer, or they're designed around a number of encounters so they can be reused down the line. They're just throwing a bunch of enemies into an environment for the sake of giving players a hard time regardless of whether the encounter has any depth or not.
Hopefully 343 will up their game in Halo 5 in terms of scale of the encounters and just the encounter design in general. I want to fight an "evolved" version of the Scarab. I want to be able to approach in a varying ways. I want to see this:
Yup, its depressing how Reach and especially Halo 4 never came close to anything like this.. I really wish they would have striven for more with Halo 4.
Halo 3 also had some great on-foot encounters. A few examples:
(The fact that you can choose to fight the Chieftain in a 1v1 alone makes this one of the best moments of all Halos)
Shoutout to AscendantJustice.com for their great Hindsight: Halo 3 series.
Once again, I agree completely.
