DLC Map Impressions:
So, I bought and played the DLC for a bit, and I mostly like what Im seeing.
Skyline
- I wasn't excited for this map when I first saw it, but from what I have played, it likely among the best so far in Halo 4.
- Skyline has a great layout and quite a bit of verticality, which I appreciate.
- It has a nice mix of cramped catwalks that spill over into medium range alleyways with decent sight lines.
- It's fun just to move around this map and try to string together jumps into elaborate escape routes.
- This map really works well with a lot of what the sandbox has to offer.
- I was going on a rampage with the scattershot for the first time, and the bullet bounce of the gun was insanely effective. I think I got more kills with it in that one game than in the entirety of my time playing Halo 4.
- The Carbine and its slight boost in aim assist work very well on this close range map. Coupled with it's cadence, which throws off a lot of opponents, the Carbine makes a fine weapon for skyline. I enjoyed picking that gun up again, its been far too long. DMR's been dominating to many maps, its nice to have variety.
- The included Sticky det' ordnance works well on this map.
- It is a bit confusing to figure out where you are some of the time. as I mentioned earlier, I think the lighting is a bit unfortunate toward this end.
- The lightmaps that they have for some of these maps are a bit too low res to support some of the features they included. For example, The tiny little light fixtures that are dotted along the walls, lighting the floors, have some pretty bad looking specular highlights because of this. The interpolation of the low-res lightmaps is causing the specular to 'twist' around in weird looking ways. Its not the only map with this issue, but other maps aren't so blatant because they don't include tons of these small lights.
- I love the skybox. Its a very detailed and unique like only a matte painting can be. (And its at a decent resolution on this map, probably since they can afford the extra memory with such a small map and half the skybox obscured)
- I love the speeding traffic out in the city on the horizon, as well as the falcon. (Why do they tease us?)
- Lots of great details.
Monolith
- I really dont like Monolith.
- The layout seems to promote camping and pushes players out along the boundaries.
- There is very little effective cover inside the map when you venture out of the platforms on the exterior, and with the exception of the initial rush for the power weapons, I don't see people use it often without getting donged, hard. I am not sure what to make of the mancannons, but they dont promote movement to the center, which might have been more interesting.
- The maps structure is also very cramped on the boundaries, which practically guarantees that you will often have to weed out sword wielders or boltshot users.
- These issues make it kind of annoying just to traverse the map.
There's no joy in actually moving around the maps since the middle is mostly not somewhere you want to be and the outsides are cramped, difficult to traverse and likely to contain campers.
- In addition, the map is pretty dark and bland from a visual standpoint as well.
- It is nothing we haven't seen before, and It's also a combination of the visual themes that I least enjoy from Halo 4.
- Its a darkly-lit, cramped space-boulder saturated with team colored flood lighting dashed with thin-bright forerunner light strips -- Which, by the way, are not only distractingly aliasing at most distances, but they also flicker a lot due to the way the low-res bloom postprocess works. For me, its rather distracting.
Its a noisy cacophony of rock and shiny nonsense. Do the forerunners ever make anything colorful? (without cheating through team colored flood lighting, that is) And its not like the space rock foundation is helping them.
- Also of note, why are there little rocks, pebbles and debris floating up from the map as though there is no gravity?
Meanwhile, all the Spartans and their gear is firmly planted by some mysterious force. That makes precisely zero sense.
Landfall
- Landfall has a wonderful aesthetic that I wish would be explored more often.
- Futuristic human industrial compounds have always been well done in the Halo games, and this one is no exception.
- This particular map evokes memories of Longshore, only its on a sunny afternoon and 100 years in the future. Halo 3 had a lot of these kinds of maps, and they all fondly stood out among my favorites.
- The choice of lighting is also great. When the last DLC map came out, I wrote up how much I loved the early-morning lighting style on Harvest. (Why have I not played that map in forever? The rest of the DLC come up very frequently in BTB )
However, Landfall is a step above the rest when it comes to lighting and atmosphere.
It was instantly my favorite, visually, from the moment I saw it.
- Lets have a look at that skybox .GIF again, shall we?
- HHHHNNnngggg....
- I have only played the map three times so far so I cant quite comment on the layout since asymmetrical maps can be quite complex in how they play.
- Much of the map seemed like it would go mostly unused, such as the seaside port that is littered with jumbo size Crates, but it actually seemed to work out fine.
- What constitutes a good small scale 4v4 map in Halo is pretty different in Halo 4 if you compare it to previous Halo games, and in that light, Landfall actually seems to works pretty well. I wonder what it would be like in BTB, if that ever happens.
- I want to play this map some more, but why does it always show up with extraction, leading everyone to veto it?
So overall, the map pack is decent and fills quite a few of the gaps in the current lineup.
Having these medium-short range maps goes a long way towards mitigating some of the complaints I have and have read from others regarding Halo 4. Its been a while since I sat down to play this game and had fun, But this managed because I think they play more to the strengths of Halo 4s sandbox. It makes you wonder why there were so few of these maps at launch, and what's in store for April's DLC.
Nerd
