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Halo |OT16| Oh Bungie, Where Art Thou?

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IHaveIce

Banned
Playing Castle with Greenskull and some other people.

Playing with him? Ugh. One of the most annoying guys.


Stream was ok, maps don't interest me from what I've seen. Streamchat was awful, handling of questions in the chat even worse.


I will say you will feel no difference tommorrow after ranks are out. They probably won't strengthen trueskill matching and we still don't know the ranges of matching ( like in Halo 3 it wasshowed "searching for 45-50" ) and how guests should work in ranked playlists.


Soo everything will keep being the same
 

Computron

Member
What do you guys think about this comment from Jonathan Blow:

Playing [Bioshock] Infinite, I realize that Halo-style recharging shields are actually a huge mistake in shooter design. But all shooters use them now. Since people are going to ask: There are two problems; one is about emotional pacing, one is about gameplay crispness and fairness. With shields, you are always doing okay in the medium and long term. They low-pass filter the emotional high of surviving a tight situation. You can have a tight situation on the order of 10 seconds, but not on the order of 5 minutes, which matters more.

The crispness problem is: In order to provide difficulty, designers now have to overwhelm your shields all the time, which means designing situations that are spammy (get hit from all directions so you can't process what is going on). These are confusing and not fun. These feel messy to play but they happen all the time because they have to. Or, like Infinite does, have super attacks that take away all your shields at once *and* 1/3 of your health, which feels steeply unfair.

Also, shields train the player to ignore getting hit most of the time, which becomes grating at the end when guys start hitting hard. (You trained the players for one thing but then gave them another!) I think shooters are much stronger experiences when it matters if you got hit. In shield games you get hit all the time, like flies buzzing.

Obviously the situation is very different when you think about this in terms of multiplayer gameplay.
However, what do you guys think about this in the context of Halo's campaign?

I think he makes somewhat of a valid point about not being able to build up tension that lasts over a minute or two.
I can't think of many examples off the top of my head of times of times when they addressed this other than perhaps Halo:CE's Library level when you are running aways from endless flood, although I am sure there have got to be more...
 
It'd be a lot better but I'd get bored after a while. We can still add new gameplay stuff without ruining it.
A lot of the Halo: Reach additions I didn't mind. It's that the core gameplay was too slow and the Armor Abilities felt like they needed more iteration (aside from AL, which should have been removed from the get-go). If Reach was faster, bloom wasn't an issue, and the maps were better designed, I think a lot of the core arguments against it would not have persisted this long. Despite having a wonky core, Reach still felt Halo-like while moving it in a new direction. I think that if Bungie had implemented a Title Update of their own they would have been more capable of addressing core complaints in comparison to 343. It's one of the few cases where I don't think 343 is at fault because they didn't want to alter someone else's product out of respect for the work done.

I would really like to have seen what Bungie would have done with a proper, timely, TU. Might have staved off the population decline for a bit longer, though the drop was always an inevitability, I suppose. Alas, time constraints from their winding down association with Halo nipped that in the bud. I also wonder what their other map packs would have been like. It's always been peculiar to me that the Achievements for the Noble Map Pack have listings in their description for "Noble 1", as if Bungie had planned to follow a similar route with their other maps.

I really liked the Noble Map Pack maps. I might or might not be in the minority, but those maps are some of my favorites from the game (particularly shieldless Anchor 9 and Tempest).
 
What do you guys think about this comment from Jonathan Blow:



Obviously the situation is very different when you think about this in terms of multiplayer gameplay.
However, what do you guys think about this in the context of Halo's campaign?

I think he makes somewhat of a valid point about not being able to build up tension that lasts over a minute or two.
I can't think of many examples off the top of my head of times of times when they addressed this other than perhaps Halo:CE's Library level when you are running aways from endless flood, although I am sure there have got to be more...

I like dishonored, you have health only but if you are severely hurt but survive you will go up to a certain amount of health, not full so you can still get a kind of i have to go find health and survive tension, but not an OMG I need to restart and play that section better feeling.

And that is how you run-on sentence! ^

Sitting at one heart in Zelda is annoying. BEEP BEEP BEep beeep
 

FyreWulff

Member
What do you guys think about this comment from Jonathan Blow:



Obviously the situation is very different when you think about this in terms of multiplayer gameplay.
However, what do you guys think about this in the context of Halo's campaign?

I think he makes somewhat of a valid point about not being able to build up tension that lasts over a minute or two.
I can't think of many examples off the top of my head of times of times when they addressed this other than perhaps Halo:CE's Library level when you are running aways from endless flood, although I am sure there have got to be more...

Halo's campaign is designed around the shield mechanic, and works just fine. Jonathan Blow is doing the reverse of the problem of developers that copy the Halo mechanic but don't account for it in the campaign design, and assuming that Doom/Perfect Dark/og Rainbow Six mechanics should be used in every game as well.

The problem isn't with the mechanics, it's the execution.

Playing a level like The Covenant, Halo, Delta Halo, Tip of the Spear, or Requiem with a fixed amount of health would be more annoying than fun/immersive/emotional.
 

Madness

Member
What do you guys think about this comment from Jonathan Blow:



Obviously the situation is very different when you think about this in terms of multiplayer gameplay.
However, what do you guys think about this in the context of Halo's campaign?

I think he makes somewhat of a valid point about not being able to build up tension that lasts over a minute or two.
I can't think of many examples off the top of my head of times of times when they addressed this other than perhaps Halo:CE's Library level when you are running aways from endless flood, although I am sure there have got to be more...

It made for challenging gameplay when I first bought ghost recon advanced warfighter for the 360...your health didn't recharge and unless you played smart, you were on your toes until you could heal or beat the level.

Rainbow Six Vegas then followed the new shooter norm and it's like Johnathan said, if you just avoided the high intensity fight, you got your health back. And the only times it overwhelmed you was things like grenades that were instant kills or shotguns or assault rifles that took off all your health.

I feel it hampers the advancement of AI and level design too because they don't have to worry about designing encounters that could possibly kill you unless you played smart and out fought the enemy.
 
I like dishonored, you have health only but if you are severely hurt but survive you will go up to a certain amount of health, not full so you can still get a kind of i have to go find health and survive tension, but not an OMG I need to restart and play that section better feeling.

To be fair, Dishonored's health system bears resemblance to H:CE's shield and health system. Most modern shooters have regenerating health and that's it, while Combat Evolved had shields and health. All Halo FPS games have underlying health systems, but they either recharged behind the scenes (Halo 3, Halo 4) or you made you hunt for a health pack (CE, ODST, Reach). Halo 2 was the exception to this bunch because health didn't regenerate. There were also no health packs. It undermined the metagame in minute ways that most people don't care about.

Dishonored, Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, and Mass Effect 3 are three games I can think of off the top of my head that work within this model. Reach is more in line with it since health recharges to a certain point, then stops until you can heal yourself up. I find it more appealing than relying on the shields and having the health in the background like 2, 3, and 4.
 
PDZ is probably the most satisfying FPS I completed this gen because of its health system and level design. No lie. Absolute regen works in Halo because of its weapon design, but I am way past every game doing it just cus. I miss being accountable for mistakes.
 
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