Can I just throw in my two cents for a minute?
Halo has been, fundamentally, the same game for ten years mechanically speaking. You can point to various things such as dual wielding, vehicle boarding, removable turrets, introductions of new vehicles/gametypes, buttons on maps, zero-gravity sections, minor tweaks in base movement speed or jump height, but Halo has been essentially the same game with new maps and a new coat of paint for ten years.
You see, I think that Bungie finally saw that by the end of their Halo parentage that people weren't really getting excited for Halo beyond their extremely hardcore fans, and even they had/have a great deal of franchise fatigue.
Halo: Reach was an attempt to stop this repetition with the introduction of Armor Abilities. Were there some flaws in them?
Absolutely. Was it change for the sake of change?
Absolutely. Does that make it inherently bad?
By no means.
Yeah, Armor Lock was weird. Yeah, you had to sacrifice mobility for specialization, but overall it was a pretty good idea. It certainly didn't kill Halo by any means - if anything it started the process of finding some kind of vaccine for the Franchise Zombie Halo has become. It gave players something new to use in multiplayer, new strategies to create, new experiences to have. It was
fun. Remember the first time you decimated a Ghost using Armor Lock? The first time you snuck up on a guy using Active Camo? The first time you used the Jetpack to slow your fall off of the Spire so that you could help move the core up the hill? The first time you tricked a guy in to assassinating your Hologram? It was awesome, wasn't it?
All the while you were still tossing grenades, using melee, and landing headshots - and it was still effective. You were also using Armor Abilities, but all of the rest of the sandbox was still there and still exactly how you remembered it.
The loadouts in Halo 4 are the logical extension of that. For the first time you get to intimately customize your experience of the game. Sprint is inherent, you don't have to sacrifice mobility to specialize anymore. You are given more types of specializations. Your team can set up sentries on your flag, you can play medic (which, from my experience, wasn't tantamount to ascending to Mount Olympus to lay a beat down the way you guys describe it), you can help push the front lines forward in seemingly one-sided objective games using the Hardlight shield and more.
Yeah, now you have perks, and they serve the same purpose as Armor Abilities did in Reach and that perks served in Call of Duty. Want to spawn with two rifles? Firepower. More ammo? Resupply. Grenadier for more grenades. From what I can tell none of this seems to be killing the sandbox in any way, it's making it play differently. Giving players more strategies, more experiences, more
fun.
OH NO, IT'S DIFFERENT. Yeah, but your golden tripod is still there. You've still got Halo in there. Suddenly you pull all of the good bits from Call of Duty and everyone starts to convulse and seize like you're in the middle of some kind of digital holocaust. It's not like the game is going to play like Call of Duty, it's going to play like Halo. That Halo you've had for ten years. The solid Halo gameplay philosophy is still there. You still have map control, vehicle combat, weapons with roles, strafing, jumping, and everything that you ever loved about Halo.
You know what makes Call of Duty play like shit? The terrible weapon selection, the horrible maps with no flow, the overpowered knives, throwing knives/hatchets, killstreaks, the tactical rails on tactical rails for all of the sights on those sights and your lasers. It isn't perks, it isn't the fact that you can upgrade those perks, it's the fact that at its base Modern Warfare was always a shitty campfest with a knife fetish.
Imagine taking all of the things that people like about Call of Duty -XP, customization, specialization- and then adding them to a
good game. It would make a great game, wouldn't it?
This isn't an attack on anyone, I'm just saying: guys, it's not that bad. In fact, it isn't bad.
And those are my two cents.
I got a question, for those of you who watched the Matrix Trilogy. Do you think the last 2 movies ruined the series for you as so many people say? I hear it's the polar opposite of Aliens, and they spoon feed you every detail, leaving nothing for the imagination.
So far I've only seen the first one. Wondering i'f I should go all the way.
Ehhh, the action was sort of okay maybe. The writing was horrible, and the Wachowski brothers really didn't know what they were doing. They tried to make everything philosophical, but instead of actually using any sort of philosophy they chose to make over-complicated statements about nothing in particular to look smart.
Confused Matthew has great reviews pointing all of this out, but they're spoileriffic.
