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Halo |OT14| They call it Halo

malfcn

Member
Well, SpOps would have been fun if it weren't for me being paired up in a YOLO lag fest. Will replay, and hope for a better squad and connection.
 
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From one of the top guys in the Virgin tournament. Weren't the guys at Virign saying it was "surely" was a competitive experience?

Can't wait to talk about the good times of the Virgin™ Gaming Tournament like we do with Final Boss in Halo 2.
 

Computer

Member
Some subtle feelings against the competetive stuff were there, but good lord he slurped hard when talking about CSR.

I honestly don't know if its possible to implement it in game or not, but they literally said its to prevent people from boosting/selling accounts. He would not shut up about how 343 has obviously did all they could to implement it.

I know they can put ranks into the game. Do you remember when they totally redid the Halo 3 ranks into something completely different? They looked so much better at Halo 3 launch they were gold n stuff I don't know why they changed them.
 

CyReN

Member
I don't think I appreciated how colorful the maps looked back in Halo 3, wow. Really makes the current set feel dismal.
 

Havok

Member
With the skulls for the weekly challenge (specifically Mythic), the AA guns on Reclaimer take two railgun rounds from the Mammoth to explode.

At least you're in cover unlike the end of Reach LASO where the cruiser took two shots to die, but having to wait for the target designator to recharge is obnoxious.

Increased payout is a welcome change. Folks will hopefully not be crippled by gameplay items being locked behind progression quite as long.

XP not carrying over from one specialization to the next is one of the dumbest things in the world. I was 109 with just a few thousand XP to go, so before I went and got the 30k campaign challenge I went and grinded out the last bit in a Spartan Ops match so it wouldn't waste 28k XP. How hard would it have been to just have the XP carry over?
 

Nowise10

Member
Halo 4 Grifball is absolute trash. 2 out of the 5 games I've played have been extremely similar in gameplay, and its just terrible. Why do they always mess up?
 

Enfinit

Member
We already do. That group is a joke.
Oh man they act differently and have different mindsets then myself they're a joke!

Really? They're pretty good guys, just because they share a different mindset doesn't mean we have to douche on them, I think.
I agree. I was being sarcastic.

We should photoshop their faces and share them on twitter with the HaloGAF staff with people they don't know.

Ok, that was a little weird. Can't form an opinion on an entire population based on one individual (or a couple).
 

Madness

Member
I'm sorry I'm a bit late but I wanted to add my junior two cents to the MS/Virgin tournament responsibility debate.

There is very little blame that should go to MS/Virgin/343... They made a tournament where the rules were simple, the more you play, the more chances you have at winning.

They shouldn't have to account for extreme examples of how this can be abused by players. For example, if it was a tournament based on skill, who knows what the extremes are. What if some guy who wants to win, kidnaps a Ninja or Juices and puts them in a hole in the ground and sends Halo 4 and an Xbox 360 down and tells them to play their best or else they get the hose. Should they be blamed for that too?

It's a stupid example I know, but that's my point. I doubt they were thinking people are going to take vacation time from work, drink 3 liters worth of energy drinks and chug bottles of caffeine pills and who knows what else to win.

Where is personal responsibility these days? Why is there always blame to go around at a time when only the person himself is to blame?

Microsoft and Virgin didn't force anyone to do anything. These people made their own choices and decisions and should suffer the consequences, poor employment, health problems etc.

It's not even something dangerous like who can chug the most water in a short amount of time, or who can do the most insane stunt jump.

All they stipulated was that you play halo, the more you play, the greater chances you have to win. They even sort of accounted for the fact some people would play more than others and introduced tiers.

Now yes I agree, a tournament based on grinding as opposed to skill is bad. I would have liked a tournament where you play based on skill. But I think its a 'reach' for anyone to say it's Microsoft fault and they should know better.
 

Madness

Member
I don't think I appreciated how colorful the maps looked back in Halo 3, wow. Really makes the current set feel dismal.

This... Take a look at Valhalla vs Ragnarok. Sure the graphics are improved but there was a great contrast of color in Halo games I liked. Bright purples, neons, greens, etc.

Now Halo 4 resembles other 'next-gen' games which add a lot of yellows and browns for added realism like resistance, gears of war. Don't get me wrong, I think what 343 did was wonderful with the aging hardware, I just wished there was way more color on the maps. Exile is probably the best looking map and yet it has this yellow tint I can't really not acknowledge.
 
This... Take a look at Valhalla vs Ragnarok. Sure the graphics are improved but there was a great contrast of color in Halo games I liked. Bright purples, neons, greens, etc.

Now Halo 4 resembles other 'next-gen' games which add a lot of yellows and browns for added realism like resistance, gears of war. Don't get me wrong, I think what 343 did was wonderful with the aging hardware, I just wished there was way more color on the maps. Exile is probably the best looking map and yet it has this yellow tint I can't really not acknowledge.

And the water! I had forgotten what water used to look like.
 

blamite

Member
This latest Spartan Ops episode has made me want a screensaver of the spinning UNSC logo like the Infinity has. Does such a thing exist?
 
played halo 4 for the first time in a couple months at a friend's place over the weekend, no desire to play it again after that. Just so much bs ruining the game. might be back for the TU depending on what that entails, but who knows.
 

Tashi

343i Lead Esports Producer
played halo 4 for the first time in a couple months at a friend's place over the weekend, no desire to play it again after that. Just so much bs ruining the game. might be back for the TU depending on what that entails, but who knows.

What did you play?
 
What did you play?
a NASCAR remake that was ok, Infinity Slayer, CTF, Team Regicide. The only fun part of regular gametypes was Team Regicide but that's fun in spite of the halo 4 sandbox/gameplay. CTF is fucking awful. It's a total travesty of a gametype and I can't believe anyone actually signed off on it.
 

broony

Member
Spartan Ops #7 was amazing. Could have done with another location for part 5 but still amazing. Wonder how many more enviroments are left.
 

Duji

Member
I don't really want to get into this discussion, but there's a difference between McDonalds simply serving unhealthy food and them running a contest in which they give away 100,000 dollars to whoever can eat the most McNuggets in a week.
Yep. Big difference.
 

Moa

Member
So we only have 130 ranks because of CSR meant to be taking over?

:/

I'm still confused as to why we didn't just go the Halo 3 or Reach route, have an extremely long ranking system that takes a damn long time to reach, heck, Halo 3 even made it so a 50 was required to reach the highest rank.
 
I completed this week's Spartan Ops and I have to say it was damn good. I enjoyed the majority of the missions and I thought they were doable solo except for a few gameplay encounters. The last mission was awful on Solo. Especially the Server room when they spawn 3 Knights without any weapons to fight them. I mean DMR and BR are great weapons but you have no chance if they are 2 knights with Scattergun, and one with Lightrifle without dying. And dropping 8 Hunters at you isn't fair either. At least 343i put a lot of rocket launchers to pick up.

I thought the Spartan Ops team did a great job for only using one giant big map. I was not bored to see several Areas again because they were interesting. The only area I disliked or bored me was the server room. Furthermore I think the objective haven't been that great. Especially the nukes. Why not add a timer? Or why is there no "real" defense objective? They are but I mean something like "Defend the Generators" which would've lead to mission failure if all had got destroyed. Missed opportunities in my opinion.

I am looking forward to play more missions on Apex. (The location where the first mission took place) The area is just beautiful. It directly reminded me of CE's Halo mission. I hope 343i will do a homage to it in SpOps.

That's good. Because I'm nowhere near the max rank and I want all the specializations.
Me too. 3 ranks till I reach SR-50. Woot! To my defense I haven't played a lot between December and now.

Insane photoshop skills right their.
Wasn't it obvious the first area was the Hangar of Shutdown?
 

Havok

Member
Another Perfection challenge today. I'm going to be a broken record and put this out there: Please stop doing this. Understand that your playerbase is filled with assholes. Stop encouraging them.

At least this is giving me ammo for the article I'm outlining on the rights and wrongs of Halo challenge design, I guess.
Furthermore I think the objective haven't been that great. Especially the nukes. Why not add a timer? Or why is there no "real" defense objective? They are but I mean something like "Defend the Generators" which would've lead to mission failure if all had got destroyed. Missed opportunities in my opinion.
I mean, they've done exactly those types of objectives in the past with Spartan Miller (E5C1), Nothing Can Go Wrong (E5C2), and The Cauldron Base (E5C4), and they weren't particularly interesting. I think partially that's just because the point-to-point narrative isn't very engaging and the in-mission writing is hit or miss most of the time. I mean, you start off Chapter 4 this week
gearing up for this big defensive moment, then they immediately say "Hey by the way go press all these buttons that you probably should have pressed while you were gathering 6 Sniper Rifles and crate after crate of generic UNSC ammunition. Whoops, sorry, should have mentioned that before." "Whoops guess these have active camouflage that I can only uncover one at a time! Here's a button!"
And it immediately just feels like a video game instead of the meaningful story they're trying to tell because nothing that you're doing has any impact. I think that's true for the game's mid-mission narratives as a whole, including the campaign, to be honest.

Pressing buttons is all video games are in the end, but it's the dev's job to make those button presses impactful (which to be fair, I think the Chapter 4 moment where you
blow the shit out of that cruiser out the window
hits that bar), and throwing loads of them one after another with some semi-bland talking heads chattering in the background (which for whatever reason I found very hard to pay attention to this episode, moreso than the others) isn't achieving that goal.

I can never tell what deserves a spoiler tag with Spartan Ops.
 

Madness

Member
So we only have 130 ranks because of CSR meant to be taking over?

:/

I'm still confused as to why we didn't just go the Halo 3 or Reach route, have an extremely long ranking system that takes a damn long time to reach, heck, Halo 3 even made it so a 50 was required to reach the highest rank.

But SR-130 should still take a decent amount of time to reach. I mean each specialization from 50 onwards takes as long as going from 1-30.

I wonder how many people who hit SR-130 used any sort of double xp. There were numerous people who would just take photos of doritos bags etc. I used two matches myself from a mountain Dew and used it to play spartan ops and I got roughly 10k+ both times. Now imagine the people who had 50-200 matches.

I think Frankie/Stinkles should chime in here and tell us the total amount of Halo 4 players that have hit 130 and how many of them used double xp. I play regularly, not as much as I could, and I'm SR-98.
 

Moa

Member
But SR-130 should still take a decent amount of time to reach. I mean each specialization from 50 onwards takes as long as going from 1-30.

I wonder how many people who hit SR-130 used any sort of double xp. There were numerous people who would just take photos of doritos bags etc. I used two matches myself from a mountain Dew and used it to play spartan ops and I got roughly 10k+ both times. Now imagine the people who had 50-200 matches.

I think Frankie/Stinkles should chime in here and tell us the total amount of Halo 4 players that have hit 130 and how many of them used double xp. I play regularly, not as much as I could, and I'm SR-98.

I'll admit I used Double XP with the combination of Spartan Ops, but I honestly didn't expect SR-130 to be as short as it was, once I hit SR-50, I remembered someone from 343i saying "one Specialization is like SR-40 to SR-50", to which I thought, this is going to be a really short lived game unless they bring more ranks out.

Believe it or not, people these days love progressing, love unlocking things for ranking up, the fact there wasn't a visible competitive ranking system in-game day one but there was a progressive one supports 343 understood that, but they made it way too short, I'd be going off on a long shot here saying the lack of ranks made the game lose players, but it probably did.
 

Madness

Member
I've enjoyed spartan ops too and I feel that given better hardware and more resources they could have really made a great mode.

I think the experience David and his team are getting though should make any future firefight or spartan ops modes amazing in the future.

They get to see what works and what doesn't, they see what people like and what they don't. I'm not a dev, but I'm assuming by the end, David should have a great idea of what encounters fans of the series prefer, what they dislike.

The first season, my biggest issues with the game were lag and it being tedious. You just killed those 15 watchers, 20 crawlers and 5 knights? Here go press this button and repeat in the same area.

There's a reason shootout at Valhalla played amazing. You started off near ghosts, you had to turn on turrets while fighting jackals and grunts. Then elites dropped in and more jackals near the far side turret. You had tons of weapons. No more button presses. Then you had mantis drop in to fight banshees, phantoms, hunters and elites generals and a wraith. It got pretty intense on heroic and legendary.

In-game cinematics, seeing the cruiser come at the end, get blown apart etc. The only thing that was bad was the hud waypoint diarrhea when you had like 10 banshees and 3 phantoms.

I'm liking episode 6 and 7 a lot. Some frustration of mine is still based on the problems I had with first 5 episodes, but I actually had fun with episode 7, the CG was top notch, the environments were great. And there was very little lag.
 
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