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The Elites also hold onto pre-covenant traditions and are generally skeptical. They're willing to believe and have faith but also to question their religion, hence why they were confused as to why humanity was marked for death rather than offered a place in the Covenant. Truth even tells the Arbiter in 3 that the Elites never truly believed in the Great Journey. They can look facts in the face and make a choice. Tartarus is given the truth directly from Spark in Halo 2 and rejects reality for blind loyalty to the Prophets' lies. No wonder the prophets wanted them as their new bodyguards. Still, I feel at least a little bad for the prophet species outside of the Hierarchs. They definitely were ready to sign the death warrant for the Elites and replace them with the Brutes, but only Truth Regret and Mercy knew that humanity were the true forerunner reclaimers and by the end Truth was the only one who had an idea that the Ark would keep him safe from the rings. But most of the prophets died at High Charity, so they're basically extinct between getting munched by the Flood and hunted down by vengeful Elites.
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Dec 10, 2020 18:19
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Hopefully the Prophet of Chastity can show them how to get their mojo back
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Dec 10, 2020 18:25
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RBA Starblade posted:Hopefully the Prophet of Chastity can show them how to get their mojo back Show me what you can do with that long flexible neck of yours.
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Dec 10, 2020 18:31
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Arcsquad12 posted:Show me what you can do with that long flexible neck of yours. "The Master Chief comes." - Geoff Keighley
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Dec 11, 2020 03:26
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Been reassessing Halo Reach a bit and while all my criticisms of the story hold true I think the meta narrative of Bungie talking directly to the fans is quite sweet. I didn't realize that the original 360 release had a thank you / farewell letter from Bungie during the Pillar of Autumn cutscene since that's not in the MCC release. It's a great bookend to almost a decade of Halo being top dog and it made me realize that Halsey isn't talking to Noble Six at the end of Lone Wolf, she's talking to the player as an in-universe recognition that the Fandom was the reason Halo survived. I still think that hiding loading screens is a lost art and its a shame that the credits don't play in Halo Reach to make the sudden jump to Lone Wolf hit harder. MCC just goes straight from the Autumn finding Halo to smash cut back to Noble Six's last stand.
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Dec 12, 2020 03:15
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I've been having some issues with crossplay. Recently my friend and I have been playing online with me hosting. I'm on PC and he's on an Xbone. Whenever we launch a match, he gets dropped from the game. He can join a new multiplayer game just fine and play a match but when I finish a match and invite him back to my party we get told he's been temporarily banned from matchmaking. It kinda sucks and I was wondering if it's a known issue for crossplay.
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Dec 13, 2020 22:20
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playing halo 4 for the first time since release. i don't know that there's any saving the line "These Covenant seem more fanatical than the ones we dealt with before." 10 minutes into the game after they've...shot at me. i guess they're shooting in a fanatical way.
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Dec 14, 2020 08:17
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I remember the covenant in, I think, 3? 2? having shrines next to their equipment box-things.
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Dec 14, 2020 10:34
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i guess you can hand wave it away as Cortana going rampant. hell, wave away all the had writing as rampancy. 343i has gone rampant
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Dec 14, 2020 17:22
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Xinder posted:playing halo 4 for the first time since release. i don't know that there's any saving the line "These Covenant seem more fanatical than the ones we dealt with before." 10 minutes into the game after they've...shot at me. i guess they're shooting in a fanatical way. They're in shirtsleeves, it's casual fanaticism.
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Dec 14, 2020 21:08
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They also said thr Covenant were more fanatical in Halo 3 because the Brutes treated grunts even worse than the Elites did. But really, the Covenant in 4 are pushovers until you encounter a grunt with a needler in the open. Then you're just dead.
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Dec 14, 2020 21:25
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Sally posted:i guess you can hand wave it away as Cortana going rampant. hell, wave away all the had writing as rampancy. 343i has gone rampant but chief is the one who said it??? i was actually starting to have fun with halo 4 and then the librarian cutscene drained away any enthusiasm i had so i stopped for the night Xinder fucked around with this message at 22:36 on Dec 14, 2020 |
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Dec 14, 2020 22:26
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haha i only played the game a few weeks ago and i'm already forgetting it
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Dec 14, 2020 22:53
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Wait there are needlers in Halo 4? Somehow I played the entire campaign on Heroic not once, but multiple times (to get a lot of the par times/scores plus a bunch of other achievements) and managed to completely avoid them. I guess it makes sense that they’d be there somewhere but...What the hell.
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Dec 15, 2020 06:28
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The needler in 4 is downright broken in ways it hasn't been before. It takes less shots to do a super combine, the shots fly a hell of a lot faster and they are much better at tracking targets. If you're in the open and a grunt or jackal gets a burst off before you shoot them say goodbye to your shields if they don't kill you outright.
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Dec 15, 2020 07:01
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Sally posted:haha i only played the game a few weeks ago and i'm already forgetting it When I last tried to pay Halo 4, my niece found it in my collection, and I was surprised I owned it. Turns out I'd beaten it and had saves on my harddrive.
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Dec 15, 2020 08:00
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the big thing about needlers in 4's campaign is that they can do a super combine on you they could also do that in CE, but generally are less aggressive with it than 4. I also think they had to take out your shields first in CE before it would explode but I might be wrong. I'm actually going through CE now on legendary and I've been exploded a few times, but only in situations where I was dead anyway.
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Dec 15, 2020 08:22
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Mazerunner posted:the big thing about needlers in 4's campaign is that they can do a super combine on you Grunts in CE, even on legendary, don't fire needlers fast enough to super combine. Even in groups they rarely manage it. This is also why marine allies with needlers are worthless (RIP fire team Zulu guy who charged a wraith with one). Elites with them will gently caress you up but there's less then 5 needler Elites in the whole game though iirc.
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Dec 15, 2020 13:52
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Anita Dickinme posted:I actually liked TFA but yes, I wish they’d just redo 8 and 9. The thing I hate the most is how the just hosed Fin. He was the most interesting part of the new trilogy to me and they just side-lined him. TROS is so bad to Finn. He gets among the most interesting and personally impactful storylines in TLJ and...whoops! Time to just make him scream REYYYYYY a bunch
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Dec 15, 2020 15:58
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General Battuta posted:Almost nothing in Halo 2 or 3 makes any sense if you stop and think about it logically, because Bungie was either frantically stitching levels together while dying of crunch or writing by committee. (For example, try to figure out why Truth wanted Tartarus to activate Delta Halo, or how he intended to use the Ark without any humans.) Its less that the Pre 3 story was perfect and more that Halo 1-3 had a very consistent tone, and then 4 and 5 have a jarringly different tone. Returning to 3's style is the best move forward, and doing that while still reconciling with 4 and 5's story changes to the setting is very difficult. Arcsquad12 posted:It worked out at the cost of nearly killing Bungie. Halo 1 was a mess in development and Halo 2 was one of the most disastrous design cycles that is known to the public about game development. Halo 3 is the only game they made that was shipped more or less as intended and that was only because they made massive concessions in pre production and focused on refining what worked in the gameplay from the first two games. ODST was hastily repackaged as a standalone game to meet Microsofts demands for two more Halo games before Bungie could go free, and Reach has a fair share of issues that I am pretty confident I can attribute to burnout. Destiny is 100% the same level of development hell, though. Arguably much worse, since they have this "live game" mentality and keep tossing out content that took them months to make for new content that players burn through in weeks. Its not a consistent design and I feel really bad for the artists and engineers still at Bungie since the people in charge (Luke Smith) keep changing their loving minds on what Destiny even is, floundering to find a good game among the mess.
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Dec 15, 2020 22:25
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Finished 4 tonight and I feel like the problem is ambition. Halo 4 tries to be a big emotional space opera, but it's problem is that it's trying to do that in Halo. Halo was never about that and it just feels like it's trying too hard. I don't think the writing is necessarily worse, but it's certainly not better and the attempts to be something greater than it is backfire to make all the problems stand out more.
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Dec 15, 2020 23:06
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Zaphod42 posted:Its less that the Pre 3 story was perfect and more that Halo 1-3 had a very consistent tone, and then 4 and 5 have a jarringly different tone. Returning to 3's style is the best move forward, and doing that while still reconciling with 4 and 5's story changes to the setting is very difficult. Every single Halo game has a jarringly different tone because every single Halo game is written by totally different people. Halo 1 — Staten on cutscenes, Microsoft guys everywhere else, McLees and Jones doing I dunno what Halo 2 — Staten with guest writing by last minute panic Halo 3 — committee who all hated each other, has almost no style or coherent vision except what Marty brings Halo ODST — pure Staten Halo Reach — some guy they brought in who nobody liked, then a rewrite by Frankie Halo 4 — the guy whose mom was dying of Alzheimer's  , except Spartan Ops by Brian Reed and crewHalo 5 — Brian Reed Destiny 1 — miserable people in a room slugging 5 hour energy with an absolute script deadline at 7 AM the next day Xinder posted:Finished 4 tonight and I feel like the problem is ambition. Halo 4 tries to be a big emotional space opera, but it's problem is that it's trying to do that in Halo. Halo was never about that and it just feels like it's trying too hard. I don't think the writing is necessarily worse, but it's certainly not better and the attempts to be something greater than it is backfire to make all the problems stand out more. I'll take ambition to do something, anything, over another round of quips and Joss Whedon worship or reheated Call of Duty ravioli. That's what I love about 4, it actually tries to say something. General Battuta fucked around with this message at 23:15 on Dec 15, 2020 |
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Dec 15, 2020 23:13
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"I played it when I was younger" isn't a tone btw
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Dec 15, 2020 23:14
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General Battuta posted:That's what I love about 4, it actually tries to say something. ...what does it say? Humans are special chosen ones? Rampancy ... sucks? 2 and 3 had way more to say in the drama about Elites, Brutes, Arby, Chief, Humanity, etc. Like, not a ton, but more than was in 4. General Battuta posted:"I played it when I was younger" isn't a tone btw That's a pretty horseshit argument buddy. Nobody said anything like that. Let me loving reply instead of inventing some easily dismissed bullshit, or don't bother making an argument in the first place and save us the time. Do you like arguing with yourself?
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Dec 15, 2020 23:17
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General Battuta posted:I'll take ambition to do something, anything, over another round of quips and Joss Whedon worship or reheated Call of Duty ravioli. That's what I love about 4, it actually tries to say something. But the other halo games aren’t any of those things? Except maybe 5 i guess but I didn’t play that one. This is a super weird argument to make. Also i was doing co-op all 6 games (1-4, odst, reach) with my wife who had never touched halo before. She liked 1 the best overall, but thought reach had the best gameplay. Her thoughts on 4 after we finished tonight were “this feels like it’s trying to confuse me so that I’ll buy the novels to understand it”
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Dec 15, 2020 23:24
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Halo 4 says "please buy the books"
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Dec 15, 2020 23:34
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feels like people are talking past each other itt
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Dec 15, 2020 23:46
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seems pretty wild to me to say that halo 1-3 each have a "jarringly different tone" from one another. they're really not very different tonally.
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Dec 16, 2020 00:22
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IronicDongz posted:seems pretty wild to me to say that halo 1-3 each have a "jarringly different tone" from one another. they're really not very different tonally. They're wildly different. Halo 1 is a Starhammer style mil-sf/horror riff on Aliens and the Culture novels; you fight purple Predators and fungal zombies from a very low level perspective without much high-level operatic storytelling; it's very textured and environmental and the best in the series until 4. Halo 2 is a highly choreographed and scripted alien political thriller with a talking Flood monstermind and Chief kind of along for the ride (he doesn't really do anything except kill Regret). Halo 3 is a...thing; it's half a game of nothing happening on Earth then half of a game of ticking off Halo 2 plot points level by level, with a truly gorgeous final cinematic. It notably lacks 2's focus on stage-play dialogue scenes and character motivations, with everybody pretty much reduced to a flat facade, except maybe Johnson who gets some genuine emotion. ODST is a game length Firefly tribute and Reach is a junkheap of sewn-together levels written by designers and filled with late 2000s Call of Duty dialogue. Hostile tangos spotted! Zaphod42 posted:...what does it say? The Master Chief and Cortana have an emotional connection, and he doesn't know how to process her inevitable death, which makes him sad and powerless for the first time. It's not some fancy subtext thing: that's the story, Cortana is dying and Chief can't cope. The Didact runs around in the background but he doesn't really matter except as a way to force the Chief and Cortana to depend on each other and no one else. This is also why Del Rio is a jerk, the game is about Chief being disconnected from everyone except Cortana. Nobody can relate to him and he can't relate to anybody. Nina posted:Halo 4 says "please buy the books" The books would only confuse you further, they have next to nothing to do with anything in Halo 4.
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Dec 16, 2020 02:10
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Imo 343 are cowards if they do not reveal that brutes are gay and lovingly groom each other.
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Dec 16, 2020 02:18
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General Battuta posted:The Master Chief and Cortana have an emotional connection, and he doesn't know how to process her inevitable death, which makes him sad and powerless for the first time. It's not some fancy subtext thing: that's the story, Cortana is dying and Chief can't cope. How is that any different from Halo 3's "Don't make a girl a promise you can't keep" ? The chief and cortana have an emotional connection and he has to rescue her because he had to leave her behind, which makes him feel sad and lonely for the first time. So the concept itself isn't really original. And the execution... there's two moments in the whole game that I can remember that touch on it, the part when you land on the planet and Cortana talks about rampancy, and the ending. Its not like there's lines and lines of dialogue between them about Chief's feelings. Its basically implied at most.
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Dec 16, 2020 02:24
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General Battuta posted:Imo 343 are cowards if they do not reveal that brutes are gay and lovingly groom each other. I mean the brutes kind of are like that. They're incredibly social dependent to the point that they throw berserk tantrums when their pack brothers die.
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Dec 16, 2020 02:41
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The Chief and Cortana's connection is a good part of Halo 3! I just don't think it is explored nearly as well as Halo 4. The hand-animated cutscenes, the more quippy action-focused scriptwriting, and Cortana's instant recovery from her imprisonment by the Gravemind all undermine Halo 3's ability to do a lot of work with that relationship. The Chief never expresses much about her absence until he actually rescues her; he's always on mission, an empty suit of armor taking orders from the nearest talking head. If not for the last-minute addition of the (obnoxious) Cortana flashes in various missions, she'd barely be in the game.Zaphod42 posted:Its not like there's lines and lines of dialogue between them about Chief's feelings. Its basically implied at most. There ARE lines and lines of dialogue between them about Chief's feelings! Well, at least lines and lines from Cortana — Chief doesn't talk so much. The cutscenes at the beginning of "Shutdown" and "Composer", as well as the scene in "Composer" after said Composer gets fired (the level outro, I think?) really show off what Halo 4 does well with the two characters. They do a clever thing with the Chief where he's constantly telling Cortana to focus on what needs to be done next in gameplay, which is standard game writing; but it's also clearly the Chief trying to use his next tactical objective as a distraction from Cortana's death. The player's frustration with Cortana for hesitating or failing to provide useful information to assist gameplay must echo John's frustration. The best moments in the game are where this truce breaks down and John is forced to directly address her condition. quote:Cortana: "Are you okay?"
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Dec 16, 2020 02:44
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Arcsquad12 posted:I mean the brutes kind of are like that. They're incredibly social dependent to the point that they throw berserk tantrums when their pack brothers die. They'll also shout HE WAS MY LOVER (but only if you have IWHBYD on, maybe?) This was probably just a gay joke in 2007 but it's rather touching. Have I made this exact post before in this thread? Am I going rampant about gay brutes?
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Dec 16, 2020 02:45
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General Battuta posted:Am I going rampant about gay brutes? Pretty sure not posting about gay brutes is what makes you rampant
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Dec 16, 2020 02:48
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General Battuta posted:They'll also shout HE WAS MY LOVER (but only if you have IWHBYD on, maybe?) This was probably just a gay joke in 2007 but it's rather touching. Have I made this exact post before in this thread? Am I going rampant about gay brutes? I want a 19th Century male friends photograph of Pavium and Voridus.
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Dec 16, 2020 02:50
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One last MCC dev blog for 2020. It's primarily a retrospective on the last year of development, but here's the pertinent bits:
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Dec 16, 2020 07:48
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I actually gave it some thought over the night and I'm going to take back what I said. The Cortana stuff, while badly written, is fine. And if that were the worst of the game's problems, I'd be more into the game as a whole. It's the Forerunner stuff that's the problem. Everything to do with the Forerunners just drains me of enthusiasm. The Didact is a terrible one-note villain who isn't even fun to fight, doesn't get a cool boss fight, and doesn't get a particularly fun cutscene death (i'm thinking Truth specifically here, and how as a teen arbiter killing him made me hoot and holler). And there's no saving anything to do with the Librarian. That cutscene dropped the bottom out of the story in quality; the deepest nadir by far. I suppose part of this is me being bothered by 343 throwing out the old Forerunner lore that was heavily implied by 3. Spark looks Chief in the eye and says "You are Forerunner." and I guess 343 decided to interpret that in a symbolic sense, but it felt pretty clear to me that the idea was that when the Forerunners nuked the galaxy, they left a few of their kind behind on Earth and they became humans over the intervening 100k years. Not super important to me, but it felt pretty obvious. "Ancient humans were better than you because Didact gene-modded humans to be stupider and weaker" is a horrific plot point and makes me want to vomit with the weird thematic implications. It's very Thulean. None of this is helped by Halsey's one appearance in the game implying that Chief is closer to those ancient humans because he's a sociopath and that makes him an ubermensch. So yeah, the Cortana stuff is just whatever but it's tied to this garbage so it would basically need a page one rewrite to fly.
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Dec 16, 2020 08:18
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I still don't know how someone designed librarian with a penis head and everyone was like, yep good
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Dec 16, 2020 09:05
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Mazerunner posted:I still don't know how someone designed librarian with a penis head and everyone was like, yep good I think you mean, penises evolved to be shaped like her head due to the genesong.
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Dec 16, 2020 12:44
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