Halo 4

[Stark]

Yeah, they're easy to kill if you switch weapon. Their teleport (which makes battles more active) and fast recharge (which reduces the window to deliver real damage) just makes it seem like they're tough. A few shotgun blasts or melee hits and they're toast.

I think it's a good way to make basic Halo combat more interesting without having to change everything.

[CaptHawkeye]

Spartan Ops episodes would be more interesting if they weren't trying to just ape the campaign's setpiece battles everytime. Some episodes should be set about and around other elements of Halo's (admittedly narrow) gameplay design. Imagine an episode with a drivable Mammoth? Or a Broadsword fighter level like in Reach?

Some episodes could even feature a "villain of the week" style boss encounter every now and then. These bosses could be attacked more like action-oriented puzzles or devices. Have some total Angel-style bosses who aren't just big Promethean monsters, but bizarre machinations and products of the Forerunner's eons of galactic control and tampering. Hell you could even include some Evangelion style character mindfuckery. Halo 4 took the plot in the direction of exploring the character weaknesses of the SPARTANs. Why stop at the Chief?

[Darksider]

Question, is it actually possible to lose the Spartan Ops missions?

Is there a pool of lives like with Firefight? Or can you just keep respawning until you've Soviet Armied your way through?

[CaptHawkeye]

Regular Firefight mode in Reach actually had unlimited lives and the waves eventually ended. To answer your question though, Spartan Ops are the second part. You basically can't lose.

[Darksider]

oh. Kind of dissapointing really. It just makes it feel like there's no challenge in it.

[Ford Prefect]

Spops is mostly for shooting the shit :v

[CaptHawkeye]

My hopes of a Promethean Ramiel encounter have been dashed. :3

[Manus Celer Dei]

Spoiler

The Greg Bear novels reveal that there are in fact two Didacts. The Didact from the Halo 3 terminals, particularly the one about triggering the array, is actually the consciousness of the Didact inhabiting the body of Bornstellar Makes Forever Lasting, the protagonist of Cryptum. The Didact in Halo 4 is the original, after having been betrayed by the Master Builder and so on.

That's weird.

[aieeegrunt]

The infinite lives thing also encourages really bad gaming habits, like not caring at all if you die, or even "I want more ammo for my DMR, so LERRROOOYYYYYY JENKINNNNNNNS"

[Losonti Tokash]

Beating your friend to death for his ammo has always been part of Halo coop, though.

[Manus Celer Dei]

Spoiler

The Greg Bear novels reveal that there are in fact two Didacts. The Didact from the Halo 3 terminals, particularly the one about triggering the array, is actually the consciousness of the Didact inhabiting the body of Bornstellar Makes Forever Lasting, the protagonist of Cryptum. The Didact in Halo 4 is the original, after having been betrayed by the Master Builder and so on.

That's weird.

Wait, no, that doesn't make sense.
Spoiler

From what I gather on the Halo Wikia the Didact was killed when he was betrayed by the Master Builder. Am I misunderstanding something here? The Didact's timeline seems to be something along the lines of

- Implants own personality into Bornstellar
- Betrayed / Killed by Master Builder
- Bornstellar pretty much becomes wholesale copy of Didact
- Bornstellar-as-Didact triggers Halo array, dies. Librarian dies on Earth.
- Original (??) Didact released from Requiem...somehow.

The Halo 4 Domain videos show the Librarian shooting Didact herself prior to his incarceration in Requiem. I don't get it, I can't see for a way for all this to be reconciled unless there's a third Didact running around fucking things up as well.

Or if the Master Builder didn't actually kill him, I guess, but I haven't read those books and don't know exactly what happened.

Beating your friend to death for his ammo has always been part of Halo coop, though.

Every single Spartan Ops game I've played has turned into EVERYONE PUNCH EVERYONE ELSE at the end.

[CaptHawkeye]

The ammo limits are just counter productive in a game designed inherently to break up monotony by having regenerating health. I don't understand why these things were proposed by Bungie back during Halo 2. It didn't make sense then, it doesn't make sense now.

[aieeegrunt]

It sort of gives you something to do while waiting half an hour for your shield to regenerate on Legendary.

In other news, for absolutely no good reason, you can't fucking play Spartan Ops system link. The fuck is that?

[Stark]

Is your crossover cable useless? :v

[aieeegrunt]

Spartan Ops requires a constant online connection to xbox live. You plug a sys link cable into an xbox, it auto disables your wireless connection.

I had a momentary modem hiccup once and got the "you must have xbox live Gold to play this" and all the menu options for Spartan Ops literally filled with cute little pictures of static no less. I'm not buying a router just for this assholery.

Wargames and Campaign work just fine.

[Phantasee]

But he was obviously a moron, a disconnected manager, bad with responsibility, a negative drive, etc. What military right out of a super war would put him in charge of the ship of kings?

UNSC!

Well I can imagine a career-minded guy with the right political connections would get himself just enough of the right sort of experience in that war to get himself named Captain of a prestigious new command. All the real heroes are already dead, after all.

I want to play this game now. I haven't played Reach, but I just replayed Halo on PC and it was pretty good still.

[CaptHawkeye]

If you already like Halo you basically can't go wrong. It keeps all the improvements from Reach (thus allowing you to skip Reach and never have to play it) while having a better narrative.

[Rekkon]

Perhaps I had the wrong impression of the general state of affairs, but I was kind of annoyed that Infinity even existed. Did not Earth's population get reduced to a few hundred million and most if not all of her colonies glassed? I would expect human infrastructure to be in ruin, but apparently they can still crank out a super ship and send it tooling about the galaxy.

[Stark]

There is a hilariously bombastic propaganda cutscene that attempts to paper over this, but I think the explanation is 'Halo is now Call of Duty'. The game literally tells you that humanity is now the big dog - DON'T FUCK WITH THE BIG DOG etc etc etc etc.

Despite yeah pretty much losing a war of extinction that was called off a few hours early. Four years is a long time, right? :V

[Losonti Tokash]

I am TOLD that the Infinity was under construction before the war even started and that most of its parts are just scavenged forerunner artifacts instead of actually being built by humans.

[Stark]

Building a warship is just like stringing a few forerunner artefacts up inside a box! :V

I mean lets face it, the Infinity's first action is TO CRASH INTO THE FUCKING GROUND SPOILER WARNING so aside from size and possibly speed its not really very impressive. Its just an excuse to change the tone of the series from the maudlin doom to the empowering fascism. Which, arguably, isn't bad... its just pretty poorly handled.

[Phantasee]

Man you have no idea how much I wanted more empowering fascism while playing the trilogy. All the maudlin doom gets depressing after a while, y'know?

Also I kinda liked the backstory of the SPARTANs being anti-insurgent forces who are competent at killing aliens but were really really good at crushing human dissenters before the aliens got in the way. Wouldn't be easy to sell lesser versions of the SPARTANs in a prequel game, but if it's a return to business as usual after the Covenant is broken up, I'm game.

[Stark]

Is 'business as usual' sending a huge spaceship to crash and then blow up the orange space vampire while MC says 'nooooooo'?

And for serious, you could go cross eyed thinking of ways the Halo thing could not suck. People had high hopes for ODST as a non King Arthur power armour combat game, and look how well that turned out.

[Phantasee]

No business as usual would be empowering fascism and suppression of dissent, as the backstory implied.

[Stark]

Well look you can only do that in between cutscenes about Vlad the Impaler being invincible.

It's a shame some of the stronger thematic content didn't really go anywhere; the EF trying to ignore its own character was really interesting but had no payoff.