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White Coke posted:Do you only carry one type of grenade at a time? In fact, the UI is so minimalistic that I find it hard to see stuff in it sometimes. While most games opt for a big red health bar and, dunno, green for the shields, Halo has the same pale blue somewhere in a corner, and not one you'd think. I'm eternally grateful for the danger sound indicator, or I'd never know when to start hiding, especially on Legendary. My biggest gripe with Halo 1's UI in particular is the "pick up weapon?" dialogue. It's semi-transparent, super pale blue like the rest, tucked in a tiny corner of the screen, just terrible. I don't notice half the weapons that are lying around. Later Halos make that way clearer, I'm a bit sad they didn't back-port that. Sure, there's not that many weapons, but it really takes conscious effort for me to see that there is a new Plasma Pistol for me to pick up, tyvm
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Jan 23, 2021 18:44
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Correct me if I’m wrong on this, but I was the under the impression that Sgt. Johnson was a unique marine character model that got popular enough to spin off into a proper character with a retconned backstory — kind of like Barney from Half-Life. I don’t think they even mention Johnson by name outside of that one launch event, do they?
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Jan 23, 2021 22:51
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theenglishman posted:Correct me if I’m wrong on this, but I was the under the impression that Sgt. Johnson was a unique marine character model that got popular enough to spin off into a proper character with a retconned backstory — kind of like Barney from Half-Life. I don’t think they even mention Johnson by name outside of that one launch event, do they? You're pretty much dead on, yeah. I actually have a video essay style video to go between Halo 1 and Halo 2 and about half of it is talking about Sgt. Johnson. But for now, he's just one of the guys. edit: Your Barney comparison is actually really good. I wish I thought of it when I was working on that video.
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Jan 23, 2021 23:17
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Of note, there are a few locations where the Sergeant you find is set in stone, like in the Halo level, that first Sergeant you find is always Johnson. The other Sergeant is Stacker, and in a few areas, which sergeant you find is randomized between the two of them.
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Jan 24, 2021 00:25
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 04 - The Silent Cartographer We're going to need a vacation after this particular day at the beach.
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Jan 30, 2021 16:06
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Well, now that we've reached this level, I'll go ahead and post the video that introduced me to the insane physics fuckery that Halo provided. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGQIQljaAc0
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Jan 30, 2021 20:11
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Something I'd like to note about the Anniversary graphics: they do actually change something about the gameplay. Or rather, they don't, and that's a problem. The collision geometry stays the same whether you're in classic or anniversary mode, even though they don't always match up quite right. I found this out by spending five minutes trying to snipe through the cliff edge at the start of Truth and Reconciliation.
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Jan 30, 2021 20:31
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To be fair to the hunters, their weak spot is a lot harder to hit when you're using a controller, which is what the game was originally designed around. With a controller, I find it much easier to melee them to death. Edit: Removed the quote; that was a fuckup. hectorgrey fucked around with this message at 15:41 on Jan 31, 2021 |
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Jan 30, 2021 21:17
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hectorgrey posted:To be fair to the hunters, their weak spot is a lot harder to hit when you're using a controller, which is what the game was originally designed around. With a controller, I find it much easier to melee them to death. ...Eh? I was talking about terrain geometry.
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Jan 30, 2021 21:26
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The subtitle thing Youtube discontinued was where the community could submit subtitles in any language for a video and the original uploader of the video could quickly approve them. This was nice and convenient and a cool way for viewers to help out content creators, which is why Youtube discontinued it.
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Jan 30, 2021 21:49
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After watching the Warthog jump video, I looked up a Tower 2 Tower video as mentioned from before. That's really impressive.
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Jan 30, 2021 22:20
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El Spamo posted:Well, now that we've reached this level, I'll go ahead and post the video that introduced me to the insane physics fuckery that Halo provided. Haha I knew someone would, it's the first thing I think about when it comes to The Silent Cartographer. I'm actually super surprised it's available on YouTube, it has quite a lot of copyrighted audio. I also have a planned bonus video about warthog jumping, but I won't be releasing it for a while.
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Jan 31, 2021 03:07
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I really like this level, but I also feel like it's one that perfectly demonstrates some of the early weirdness of this game compared to the later ones. Next to you and the Marines getting dropped off onto the beach and going to town on the entrenched enemy, the one area that always stands out in my mind whenever I think about this level is the part where you fight your first Hunters and they're set up as the number-one threat in the Covenant arsenal - and then they go down in one pistol bullet to the meaty bits (because they had to program shooting the Hunters' weak points the same as hitting the head for any other enemy), after which you pick up the shield-overcharge powerups that were clearly meant for the multiplayer. Hunters only ever even lasted more than two seconds when I played co-op with my brother back in the day because he would sometimes insist on fighting them in melee, and even that didn't level the field in their favor very much. Unrelated, one thing I always liked about the first game is how when you're playing in co-op, the second player gets the focus during scenes where you still have camera control like the start of this level. It's most notable in this one because you get dropped off in separate Pelicans, player one in the lead one and player two in the trailing one. Also, subtitles like these (that and LPing a lot of games that simply don't have them) are why I always just end up adding my own to my videos - that and it gives me opportunities to add in extra jokes with them. Carbon dioxide posted:The subtitle thing Youtube discontinued was where the community could submit subtitles in any language for a video and the original uploader of the video could quickly approve them. Such a shame that Youtube had the perfect opportunity to learn a valuable lesson from when they got rid of annotations for a stupid reason and didn't offer a better replacement despite having the framework to do so - and in typical Youtube fashion, the lesson they learned was not against removing features that people liked in the first place, but only against giving a stupid reason for it.
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Jan 31, 2021 03:22
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The reason you can't shoot out of the Pelican is because Long Tall Sally isn't playing.
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Jan 31, 2021 09:31
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Ablative posted:...Eh? I was talking about terrain geometry. Sorry; I have no idea why I quoted you. I must have misclicked and not noticed.
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Jan 31, 2021 15:41
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You guys talked about it being a shame to not fly the pelican, but it was actually in game and flyable in the original mac port. You just had to mess around and mod the multiplayer maps to have it replace one one of the other vehicles with it. It flew weirdly, and the crew compartment in the back had hitbox issues. The crew compartment chairs were treated like the warthog passenger seats, and I distinctly remember shooting the rocket launcher through the walls of the pelican.
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Feb 1, 2021 23:37
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I'm a little sad I hadn't spotted this earlier. Halo CE was the game that got me into gaming. We never had xbox live but I played the campaign of H:CE (and H2) over and over again both single player and co-op, just about every detail was burned into my pre-teen brain far harder than anything I ever learned in school or university. The soundtrack in particular gets me the nostalgia feelings like nothing else. I then got really into the speedrunning scene when I was at university - I wasn't good enough to actually get on any leaderboards but playing and watching streams was like 75% of my free time for a couple of years. It's such a part of my childhood that I actually find the new graphics really difficult to look at, it's all just wrong. All the dark things are too bright, and all the bright things are too dark. Truth and Reconciliation in particular, everything in that level was so dark and atmospheric and it's just lost it. Meanwhile the bright red and gold elites, and the blue and orange hunters, are all muted and washed out. And they're so visually busy on the internal sections, military installations aren't supposed to have so much poo poo on the walls! Thinking of the graphics, are you going to show off the old ones in action at any point? So far you've gone mostly for landscape shots, it would be cool to show off the old enemy models and how it looks to move around in those environments. In particular a look at the old energy swords is interesting, the translucent twin-pronged one is almost iconic at this point but in the original they're totally different. Also I want to nerd out about the grenade stack you showed in episode 3. A key part of halo tricking is that while the overshield is charging you are immune to damage, otherwise you would probably die there on first three grenades, let alone the two following grenade jumps. It's the same thing that enables the fall mentioned in episode 4, you get the overshield just before landing. The other interesting thing about it is that on higher difficulties they scale down damage (rather than increasing enemy health), and on legendary you actually get out on full health. Can I ask, how much practice did that take? Because when I learned the speedrun it took me basically a whole weekend to get it remotely consistently and you looked totally effortless.
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Feb 4, 2021 17:51
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The fact that you can kill the Hunters with a single pistol shot is so wild to me. It works even on Legendary, they really hard-coded that weakness in. I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that it's obviously way harder to aim on original XBox than it's with a mouse + KB. I don't think I could do Legendary on console, I'm simply not good and practiced enough for that (my buddy maybe, who played the game as a teenager to death) - also, I'm left-handed, so aiming with the right stick is always a bit more difficult for me. Clicking on heads is way simpler than aligning the crosshairs, and the same goes for weak points. Hunters do get way harder to kill as the series continues, tho. In Reach on Legendary, whoo boy those are some nasty encounters.
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Feb 4, 2021 18:01
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Deformed Church posted:Thinking of the graphics, are you going to show off the old ones in action at any point? So far you've gone mostly for landscape shots, it would be cool to show off the old enemy models and how it looks to move around in those environments. In particular a look at the old energy swords is interesting, the translucent twin-pronged one is almost iconic at this point but in the original they're totally different. Someone asked about the old graphics a couple of pages ago and I gave some thought to doing a bonus video for it, but I don't think I'm going to do it. It'd end up just being a random gameplay montage with very little interesting commentary, and truthfully I don't think it adds enough value to the LP. I'm just going to leave the single instance in each level where I show a non-action shot of the original graphics as a reference. As for the grenade jump stuff, that probably took me something like 15 takes. I was getting pretty frustrated doing it, but maybe I got off easy. The bonus content in the next video took me something like double that though, so look forward to that. Simply Simon posted:The fact that you can kill the Hunters with a single pistol shot is so wild to me. It works even on Legendary, they really hard-coded that weakness in. I feel like people overstate the difficulty of aiming with controllers, but it's not really a simple thing. It takes a lot of practice to be proficient with a controller compared to M+KB, but once you are stuff like shooting the hunter's weak spot is easy. Of course the other problem with controllers is that it's a much more perishable skill. I beat every Halo game up to number 4 on legendary using a controller, but I would not be able to do that now. It's going to be really interesting when I have to record Halo 5, since it looks like that's never coming to PC.
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Feb 4, 2021 23:19
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 05 - Assault on the Control Room On our way to the Control Room, let's take a walk through a winter warzone.
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Feb 5, 2021 19:54
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That is one weird looking tank. Reminds me of the mammoth tanks from Command & Conquer 3 with a dorky turret.
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Feb 5, 2021 21:51
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Shame you didn't manage to keep Johnson around longer. AI Marines with Sniper Rifles are actual monsters. Last time I played this level, Johnson sniped a Hunter in his weakspot... from the front. On three separate occasions. Do NOT underestimate those guys.
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Feb 5, 2021 22:12
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Simply Simon posted:The fact that you can kill the Hunters with a single pistol shot is so wild to me. It works even on Legendary, they really hard-coded that weakness in. IIRC it's an extension of how the damage system is set up. A shot to the (unshielded) head with a headshot enabled weapon is an instant kill, regardless of how many HP the target has remaining. There are only two head-shot enabled weapons in CE: the sniper rifle and the pistol. And although Hunters don't have heads per se, their weak points are coded exactly the same way. So a pistol shot to the weak spot is a 1-hit kill in the same way as a headshot to an Elite with its shields down. I suspect it was more a matter of "we need to wrap up development on this enemy and move on to other things NOW" more than anyone's idealized design, given that it sort of trivializes the encounters. In any case, they reworked how Hunters take damage in Halo 2, and that was the end of 1-shotting them with a pistol on Legendary.
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Feb 5, 2021 22:55
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Being able to hijack the banshee here is pretty odd because if I remember right it's drat close to, and possibly outright, the only time the player can pilot one. Which is interesting, because you were very clearly not intended to invalidate the level like that. So the banshee was fully realized and player controllable despite the fact that the devs didn't intend you to have any access to it. They did patch them into the PC version eventually if I remember middle school wars over which version was better.
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Feb 6, 2021 00:03
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FoolyCharged posted:Being able to hijack the banshee here is pretty odd because if I remember right it's drat close to, and possibly outright, the only time the player can pilot one. We will definitely get a chance to play with Banshees later. I wouldn't be so sure that the devs didn't want the players to be able to grab one. Every other time we've seen Banshees so far they've already been flying around. There's no reason they couldn't have done that here, or placed them farther back, or even just restricted them from the player in code. I personally would guess that they wanted it to be an option. Something that the player would restart the level to try and make happen. In the PC version of the game I think they added the Banshee into multiplayer, which they weren't in the original release.
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Feb 6, 2021 04:12
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There were also Banshees back at the start of the level in test copies.
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Feb 6, 2021 05:45
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FrenzyTheKillbot posted:In the PC version of the game I think they added the Banshee into multiplayer, which they weren't in the original release. PC version definitely had them in multiplayer. I played the demo pretty heavily for a period of about two weeks around 2004 or so, I distinctly remember playing a server that advertised itself as having a "no Shees" mod but did not actually have any sort of mod that removed Banshees, everyone just joined in a chorus of "NO SHEES" whenever you jumped into one. Unrelated (unless it was the same server, I can't remember now) I also remember one game where there was a teammate who was AFK the entire round, so I eventually took to just teamkilling him whenever I found him. I think by the time the round ended I'd killed him more than any enemies had.
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Feb 6, 2021 06:41
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Hoo boy, this level. We had a hell of a time with it on Legendary co-op. I think I've already mentioned itt that the co-op system in the MCC does Checkpoints very badly, and even worse, it does not save them between sessions: you have to beat the entire thing in one go. With a level of this length, that's a big ask, considering that you'll die a LOT - y'all weren't kidding wrt the difficulty of the double bridges, but the open areas with Wraiths also are no slouch. Also, because the MCC has poo poo servers and netcode or whatever, the game crashed once about two thirds through the level, erasing our progress, and once more about a third through I got dinged by the anti-cheat protection for no reason. We got quite familiar with these rooms. However, there was one nice thing: when we first played this in the original version, I had no loving idea how to navigate. We kept repeating the same rooms, then there was an open field I got utterly lost in, and I just kept getting ported along with my buddy who did know the way, but then I wouldn't know which way to even go, and sometimes walk backwards, and then port him backwards, total mess. No, I did not notice the arrows on the floor, and he didn't tell me about them. This time around, I noticed the arrows, and suddenly, I was the one who knew where to go. It had been a while for him, so he went off shoddy memories, but I just followed the path the game drew. I've gotten way better at orientation both irl and in videogames since my first playthrough, and it really showed. Cool little proud moment. Speaking of the open snow field: it's a really weird part of the level, where the obvious path just breaks down completely for a bit, mostly owing to there being a central structure which you can sometimes enter, sometimes not (if the enemies open the doors for you), and then inside there's a way up to a balcony, and you emerge...somewhere, and it's so, so confusing and easy to get turned around. And the building is almost completely useless! There's, like, active camo and that's it. It's such a weird level design element. And finally, I strongly agree that the first time you encounter the building that houses the control center is extremely badly done. I've said it before, but Halo has a very hard time directing the player's attention to its setpieces. Which is baffling, as they obviously spent a lot of time making them. They got better with it as the series progressed, but I still think one of my biggest issues with the games is that cool poo poo keeps happening, but you often almost only see it by accident!
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Feb 6, 2021 22:18
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So today I'm not releasing the next level of Halo. Instead I've published a handful of videos, and I'm doing a history post to give them some context. In 1997, after releasing the third Marathon game and the second Myth game, Bungie decided they wanted to do something different. Under Jason Jones, they started a project with the idea to merge the real-time strategy gameplay of Myth with the sci-fi shooter genre of Marathon. Essentially they were thinking Starcraft but without all the resource gathering and base building. This project went through a few different codenames: "Armor", "Monkey Nuts", and "Blam!". We've mentioned in the LP that Halo started as a Marathon game, but this a little disingenuous. Bungie has stated that they never intended this new game to be a Marathon sequel, but I don't know if I believe them exactly since they were using the Marathon logo in their UI partway through development.  There's not a whole lot of footage available of the early work, but you can see some of it in this video that Bungie showed at their Halofest at E3 the year after Halo launched. Just note that the later parts of this video will overlap with the rest of the history post. The Evolution of Halo A few of the big features that Bungie was focusing on were 3D level geometry, major vehicle integration, and a physics engine so that the vehicles would interact properly with that geometry. Things were going well, but during testing they kept coming back to a little "game" where they would put some marines in the Warthog, attach a chase-cam to it, and then drive it around jumping it off hills and cliffs. They realized they needed to make the game more like that instead of the strategy and tactics game they had envisioned, and Project Blam! tranisitioned into a third-person action/adventure game instead. At this point they didn't have a whole lot of the details nailed down, but they did know there was a ringworld, aliens, space marines, and supersoldiers. They managed to get an audience with Steve Jobs and convinced him to let them present at Macworld 1999, where they showed this: Macworld 1999 Presentation It's very interesting how you can see so many elements of Halo in that presentation. The green-armored, gold-visored supersoldiers and their Warthog, and the Elites and their Banshees. Even the flag at the end (or similar) shows up as a multiplayer asset in the final game. The vehicle physics make a big impact, but the seamless transition between the indoor and outdoor environments was revolutionary at the time. This was around the time of Half-Life and I'm sure everyone knows how awful the loading times were in that game. Bungie was saying they were working on an entirely open-world map for the game, as well as native flora and fauna and day/night and weather cycles. Unfortunately, none of that ended up in the final game, but the impressive environments and vehicle physics remained. I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere but the soldier's gestures in the presentation make me wonder if the game still had some strategy elements in it at this point; something more like the squad-based tactics of the Ghost Recon games. In any case, they continued to improve and refine the game and almost a year later they presented at E3 2000: E3 2000 Presentation This build looks a lot more like the Halo we ended up with, so many of the characters and assets look almost final. Despite that it's probably worth noting that they really didn't have much of an actual game at this point. The E3 presentation (and the Macworld one for that matter) weren't actually finished and ready to go until the day of the presentation, and they had to rely on some tricks and band-aids in order to get the demo working correctly. And even though they clearly had a lot of concepts and assets realized, they had no idea what story they were even going to tell. Bungie was also dealing with some money troubles. They had made an agreement with Take-Two to license their older games for console release, and even at the time of the E3 presentation where they advertised Halo for PC and Mac, they were pretty deep in negotiations to be acquired by Microsoft. Obviously the acquisition went forward and Halo was eventually turned into a first-person shooter, completed, and released as a launch title for the Xbox and the rest, as they say, is history. I want to leave you with one last video, from when Bungie still planned on releasing a PC game. Enjoy! Halo Surprise! FrenzyTheKillbot fucked around with this message at 01:11 on Feb 13, 2021 |
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Feb 13, 2021 01:02
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One of the funniest things to me about the development is reading that people took its plot - what with it involving a US-inspired group of soldiers fighting a group of religious aliens after they'd launched a major attack on a human colony - as an allegory for 9/11 and the War on Terror, and the writers had to explain that it was just a coincidence considering the game came out only two months after the attacks, and the vast, vast majority of the writing and design happened well before then.
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Feb 13, 2021 04:23
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lol
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Feb 13, 2021 12:13
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Fascinating stuff, thanks for taking the time to collect those videos! I love how candid the developers in the first video are. "We wanted to have like 30 guns, but Microsoft told us we had 5 months to finish the game." "Yeah the E3 demo was entirely scripted, all smoke and mirrors." And my favorite quote: "Halo used to be cool." It's also nice to see their priorities for the Macworld demo, as what's already finished is: - main theme - logo Rest is optional. Finally, wow the voice acting for Master Chief was always the worst of the bunch, huh
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Feb 13, 2021 15:57
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I think it was probably pretty normal for turn-of-the-millenium video game development, but Bungie was very much flying by the seat of their pants to get things working and finished, while also in the mindset that video games are fun and so making video games should also be fun. They were always very good about poking fun at themselves and totally admitting when they bit off more than they could chew. I didn't want to get too deep into details but the Master Chief comment is interesting because he, as a character, came about pretty late in development. In the early days the supersoldiers were just another battlefield unit, not really "special" in any way. It seems like when they transitioned to third-person shooter it was obvious the player should be controlling one of them instead of just a normal human guy, but they still weren't actual characters. By the time of the E3 demo it looks like they had decided to make the supersoldier more special, but he was named "The Cyborg" and was way more robotic and less of an actual person. It wasn't until after they were bought by Microsoft and they were trying to fill out the story that he became an actual guy with a name, except Bungie still didn't want to call him by name, so he's only referred to by rank in the game.
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Feb 13, 2021 19:05
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The control room level was when I started to notice the levels repeating, even as a starry eyed 2000's video game player. Though it didn't really hit me until another level later on.
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Feb 13, 2021 21:26
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 06 - 343 Guilty Spark We investigate a spooky swamp, the last known location of Captain Keyes.
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Feb 19, 2021 23:19
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So is that level next? I'm interested to see how it has been remastered.
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Feb 20, 2021 00:17
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I have a confession to make. I get lost on this level way more than the Library. I don't know why, I just cannot navigate this loving place.
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Feb 20, 2021 15:37
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I don't recall if it was mentioned previously in other vids, but you can see a few times here where if you use the assault rifle on the jackal shields at close range, the bullets will reflect into yourself and do damage. I don't know if the same thing happens with the pistol. I know you can swap between remastered and normal graphics on the fly, can you do it in the middle of cut scenes as well?
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Feb 20, 2021 15:52
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I really love this level. There's a real feeling of suspense as you go deep underground into an alien base while slowly realising you're in there with something really awful, then you find the flood and realise you're surrounded and have to escape and it becomes a frantic, desperate escape, as you push deeper hoping to find another way out. Then when you finally do get out, you see the sentinels using the same colours and shapes as all the forerunner buildings, and realise the ring isn't quite as dead as before, and then it caps off by thwarting your escape at the final second and teleporting you somewhere presumably even worse.Ablative posted:I have a confession to make. This level has a bunch of large arena rooms that are very similar, so it's really easy to get turned around and then not notice you're running through somewhere you've already been. AotCR's rooms are the closest comparison, but there's an obvious path through most of the rooms, and arrows on the floor in case you do lose your way. I'd say it adds to the "escape" feeling I mentioned but it's probably just another example of CE's many level design issues.
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Feb 20, 2021 16:40
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CzarChasm posted:I know you can swap between remastered and normal graphics on the fly, can you do it in the middle of cut scenes as well? You cannot in Halo 1, but you can in Halo 2. No, I don't know why either.
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Feb 20, 2021 17:16
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