you are a coward. say that to my face fucker
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i agree but i also dont have an xbox controller and playing with a ds4 doesnt seem right either so m+kb it is
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I think it’s phenomenal that there are games that just don’t feel right without their intended controller.
I’d never played Xbox as a kid so this Halo sensation is completely alien to me. Same with SSB Melee.
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It’s the only FPS game I’d say feels perfect on a controller. Can’t overstate how incredible the scheme was at the time. Two dedicated grenade buttons and an actually useful melee! Aiming and shooting feels fine with a m+kb but grenading is kind of off to me somehow and driving vehicles feels totally perverse.
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The vehicle controls are definitely awful. The right stick should be used for looking, not turning. It’s this weird 1992 control scheme
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Despite how funky Halo’s vehicle controls are (I’m not going to denigrate them because weird solutions should exist and they leaned into it in the best way), shooter devs were completely incapable of delivering basic driving for something like 5 years after that came out. Half-Life 2’s buggy is more drivable than almost any other comparable game until the 360 era and everyone standardized on just importing car game controls.
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The Half Life buggy feels just fine but there’s no real weight to it. I love the goofy fishtailing long ass of the Warthog and how easy it is to flip, part of the charm.
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The Halo vehicle controls own once you get used to them!!
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I have backed up my words with action bitch
Halo physics were definitely like OSX usability from like 2004-2009, just years of “why can’t anyone even get close to this”
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this is honestly so much of the source of all my HL2 issues, you don’t even know.
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In the Reach tank level as I was replaying it last week, my tank happened to be turned backwards at a checkpoint, and it kind of looks and controls the same in both directions, just maybe the thumbstick direction is inverted (which I unconsciously corrected for) and it’s half the speed. So like 20 times in a row I advanced to the next combat area in reverse without realizing it. I kept being annoyed at how long it took to get back to the spot where the shade turret kept blasting me to pieces before I was able to get it in cannon range, and wondering why I was finding this area much harder than in my first playthrough
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I really like playing Halo on both controller and m+kb but i aim so much better with a mouse to be honest. i can also do little things like 180 turn chuck a grenade while running away (something i do a lot). and the swordflying is satisfying too. Halo still might be the best feeling FPS on controller tho? IDK.
I replayed Halo 3 while watching all the cutscenes for the first time since the game launched in 2007. Honestly, there’s so much to admire here…! I honestly think it might be the strongest campaign in the series on the basis of narrative and set pieces.
Like… Halo CE, right? Space muhreen doing space muhreen things when suddenly, crash land on a big alien ring world. Your guy spends most of the first three levels rallying the troops, saving guys from alien clutches. Then you start to go deeper - this thing is a weapon! You can use it in the war, duh! And there’s that sense of mystery, the situations are always a little bit more than what you thought they were. Master Chief spends much of the game following the logical next course of action only to be redirected or realize he was misdirected. But at the end of the day the story was a little underbaked, thin. In some ways looking back there wasn’t enough world around Master Chief - it’s all his adventures on this ring.
Halo 2 is also underbaked but this time with more ambition - Bungie wants to tell this dramatic expansive story, alien politics, lies and double crosses, multiple playable characters, but the hardware isn’t there so all the aliens look like they have Nutella for textures and they didn’t have dev time so half the game got cut prior to release.
Halo 3 feels like the medium between the two, like they wanted to hint at ambition but show off their restraint. So when you watch the cutscenes, if you’re paying attention to the surface level it feels sort of hollow, maybe. Like the plot is mostly there to facilitate you shooting the next thing. You can skip the cutscenes, and even if you don’t, the main dialogue is always, “what does this soldier have to do next to help win this war?”
But there’s layers. Humanity is actually preeeetty fucked, the Lunar fleet is blown to hell (they mention offhandedly), Covenant are openly bombarding vast parts of the planet, you’re constantly running past guys with head bandages on. You have these hints at the effects of Halo 2’s political schisms, but it’s not the main focus, just something that happens alongside the shooting. The Shipmaster (aka “Half-Jaw” from Halo 2) is just fighting alongside humanity and so is the entirety of the Elites. Likewise, Arbiter is your (playable) buddy throughout the campaign, but they don’t make big bones of it - just a “he’s on our side now”, but you listen to the scripted ways he taunts the Brutes and talks to the Marines and you get the sense there’s something bigger than you going on. Similar with the Cortana and Gravemind moments (unremarked upon in any of the cutscenes). You get to go to completely unnatural Forerunner installations, look up at our Milky Way galaxy in the sky, and stumble upon Terminals telling the story of long-ago AI. But you actually don’t need to pay attention to that, because in the same levels you get to bomb around hills in Warthogs and Mongooses with an idiot marine on the back shooting a rocket launcher.
And unlike Halo 1 (which feels more like Myst than Battlefield) and Halo 2 (which just feels… I dunno isolating, for large stretches) - Halo 3 really does feel like a war - you have plenty of people around you, who are counting on you to make sure they don’t take a purple needle through the head, and you have these big big set-pieces with spaceships in atmosphere and the sky filled with dogfighting and TWO SCARABS, I REPEAT TWO SCARABS. It feels like there’s a lot of World around the gameplay.
I dunno, just really impressed at the balance of the thing.
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Destiny is so very good, beautiful amounts of head-seeking and they balance really well between a feeling of precision (with ADS and the natural fidelity of modern thumbsticks) and forgiveness through their auto-aim. And the great movement abilities on top of that. And the only properly-tuned implementation of menu cursors.
I know someone will jump in to preach the motion controls + sticks gospel…
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On my last replay of Reach I felt the aim stickiness was too aggressive. Sometimes that felt cheap, as though I were cheating with an aimbot, a few times it caught onto an Elite and tracked it when that was not my target at all. It was still OK, most of the time I didn’t notice anything off, but Destiny and Splatoon definitely improved on it.
ok so I am actually interested in halo 3 now and if I’m playing reach with @vodselbt, who am I playing 3 with
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can we play on legendary with iron or
Ok
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I’m also down to coop legendary!
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I know what the buttons are now from playing reach so I think I should be basically legendary-tier
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