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Halo |OT15| Beta-tested, GAF approved

S

Syphon Filter

Member
This hud looks nice, anyone agree?

uJDMtuA.jpg
 
B

Blueblur1

Member
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...

I saw this post via Ghaleon's Twitter post. Great post, Henery.
 
MrGreencastle

MrGreencastle

Member
Overdoziz said:
Remind me again why there are category object limits.
Click to expand...

Download that map and check out the frame drops: https://www.halowaypoint.com/en-us/.../details/4b7d511d-dfaf-468b-9c3c-b44adda272d8

--

A couple more:

Landslip (Avalanche-mini): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAKeUB_RjMg&feature=player_detailpage#t=311s (5:11)

and from the same video, Ghost... something, inspired by Ghost Town: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAKeUB_RjMg&feature=player_detailpage#t=446s (7:24)

Centennial is in there, too, and the narrator compares it to Exile, but "done right". Also an interesting Zombies map earlier in the video, as well. Custom games may end up becoming pretty bananas with this Forge map.
 
H

Havok

Member
Woof. Framerate tanks hard on that miniaturized Blood Gulch when you look through the teleporters.
Deadly Cyclone said:
So your Xbox doesn't explode. 5 best have no (or a very very high) limit.
Click to expand...
I mean, that's why the overall budget exists, though (along with the ability to assign prices to specific objects). I'm sure there's probably some technical limitation, but only being able to place 50 combined items from the Natural category is a ridiculous cap.

Syphon Filter said:
This hud looks nice, anyone agree?

http://i.imgur.com/uJDMtuA.jpg[IMG][/QUOTE]
No thanks. Function should take priority over style. Heck, if I had my way I'd get rid of the lines in the H4 HUD, even as minimal as they are.
Click to expand...
 
D

Dongs Macabre

aka Daedalos42
Madness said:
I always thought a way to switch up gameplay, was to create night/day variants. For example, Valhalla. We've seen what it can look like with snow etc. What if in one variant, you have Carbine rifle starts, all weapons on the maps are covenant based and the sky box is night with covenant cruisers and phantoms etc.

Pretty dumb I know, but it switches up gameplay from time to time. Sort of like that Makin map from world at War, it played so differently when it was daytime.

Remember, a lot of the sandbox is created for campaign, doesn't necessarily have to transfer over to multiplayer.

I believe someone showed how certain that filters to simulate night and day can change the look of a map, maybe they can explain the covenant variant by stating that they assaulted this area in the night, set up base etc.
Click to expand...
It would be cool if you could do stuff like that in Forge. Or better yet, add an actual map maker that lets people bundle variants together.
 
O

Overdoziz

Banned
Deadly Cyclone said:
So your Xbox doesn't explode. 5 best have no (or a very very high) limit.
Click to expand...
There's already a total object limit and a budget limit which is linked to object budgets which are based on how much the object stresses out the engine. Why limit Forgers even more with a category budget limit? Let people place 10,000$ worth of 4v4 blocks if they want to.
MrGreencastle said:
Download that map and check out the frame drops: https://www.halowaypoint.com/en-us/.../details/4b7d511d-dfaf-468b-9c3c-b44adda272d8
Click to expand...
I saw the framedrops in the video, but that doesn't take away that category object limits can really hinder Forgers in creating a consistent look throughout their map.
 
K

Karl2177

Member
Good stuff Henery.

And I would love to make an entire map out of building blocks and inclines. But I can only place 100 blocks and 50 ramps(I think).
 
T

Tunavi

Banned
Wahrer said:
I did a bunch of Spartan Ops stuff solo just because nobody else was ever on. People don't play Spartan Ops.
Click to expand...
because halo AI netcode is pathetic, I tried it by myself. The respawning without resetting to checkpoints ruins the entire gametype. Such bad design.
 
M

Madness

Member
I'll preface this by saying I liked Reach, thought it was a great game (not necessarily a good competitive Halo multiplayer game) but a good question for Josh and the team.

"Why, after seeing the negative reaction from longtime fans of the series towards Reach and armor abilities, did you decide to expand the on the Reach style of multiplayer, as opposed to the Combat Evolved Anniversary playing style, for Halo 4?

I worded it pretty weird, but I mean, I'd like an answer. A lot of people who hated Reach, liked the anniversary playlist. Why not use that as a base to reboot the series somewhat, take it back to its Halo:CE or Halo 2/3 style of play?

It's what Henery's post touches on. And the result is, close to only 30k players still playing only 5 months since launch. Out of 7 million+ sales and nearly 11 million+ players, you are peaking at 35k players or less a night.
 
R

Redford

aka Cabbie
Madness said:
I'll preface this by saying I liked Reach, thought it was a great game (not necessarily a good competitive Halo multiplayer game) but a good question for Josh and the team.

"Why, after seeing the negative reaction from longtime fans of the series towards Reach and armor abilities, did you decide to expand the on the Reach style of multiplayer, as opposed to the Combat Evolved Anniversary playing style, for Halo 4?

I worded it pretty weird, but I mean, I'd like an answer. A lot of people who hated Reach, liked the anniversary playlist. Why not use that as a base to reboot the series somewhat, take it back to its Halo:CE or Halo 2/3 style of play?

It's what Henery's post touches on. And the result is, close to only 30k players still playing only 5 months since launch. Out of 7 million+ sales and nearly 11 million+ players, you are peaking at 35k players or less a night.
Click to expand...

4 is more CoD than Reach which is more Halo than 4, so the answer is coincidental "feature-parity" + greed, I'd personally say.
 
S

StalkerUKCG

Banned
GrizzNKev said:
Ripped models and textures are generally looked down upon in the modding community, but I still have to admit that's awesome.
Click to expand...

Really does not seem that way lately. Reach models are being released at a relatively steady pace. H2 and H3 ripped tag sets fill up virtually every map you can download and Halo 4 content has slowly started leaking out from those who have the required ripping tools and a full tag set is in the works.
 
G

GrizzNKev

Banned
StalkerUKCG said:
Really does not seem that way lately. Reach models are being released at a relatively steady pace. H2 and H3 ripped tag sets fill up virtually every map you can download and Halo 4 content has slowly started leaking out from those who have the required ripping tools and a full tag set is in the works.
Click to expand...

Huh. I stopped following it around 2008 when I got my first Xbox. I kind of figured they'd still have the same standards. I mean, dudes like Masterz1337 are still around.
 
A

Akai__

Member
Siggy please :(

It was so fucking intense. I think he will beat the WR this month for sure. He had tough luck at some parts, like when he ran into the Goomba and such. However, he gained 27 seconds on his most hatred part, which was incredible. Pulling that 8000 viewers with SM64 is also very amazing.

Believe in Siggy!
 
K

Karl2177

Member
OT, but I know a few of you are graphic designers/are better at Photoshop/Illustrator than I am. Is there a way to extrude a transparent layer from an object? What I've been doing is using the eraser to a poor effect.

As an example, this is what I'm going for:
g42PlS5.png
Click to expand...

What I want to know is if there is an effect that does something like this(pardon my laziness with the curve of the P) and covers anything below it:
heBvnHB.png
Click to expand...
 
S

senador

Banned
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...

I had to drop in and say that this post is tucking amazing. I really feel it nails it all. It also gives me a sad. Come back Halo...
 
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