Ahhh the modern day equivalent of the Quake 2 prisoner marines.
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Those enemies have a stun mechanic, yeah. It’s basically like a Jackal or Destiny Centurion lowering their shield.
(warning: boring technical how-done-it musing) huh, must have a specific ‘slam into wall’ animation variant it picks if it’s close by, then, and an inverse kinematic joint on the head? Really impressive that it works on an angled wall with great contact, but there might be a 1 or 2-frame pop in the head after it slams? that could be IK correction.
neat
watching at .25x and it’s Merzbow
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December 8th.
Not sure why you’d want to remind people how much of a dud Spartan Ops was when the last time you showed the single-player you delayed the game by over a year, but what do I know, I’m not 343.
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Feels so jingoistic to replace Master Chief as the cool action figure hero of this series for the past 20 years with a collective We Spartans as the hero. Happens too easily. We can have hope, even when we are hopeless, because there’s a hero in all of us. Now watch this no scope.
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I’m definitely a fan of pushing Spartans to be more faceless, alien, separated; I think pulling it away from individual hero characters is smart - ODST and its faceless trooper made the world larger and scarier.
…but I don’t think 343 is a studio to execute that
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Yeah, I was gonna say, this trailer is a continuation of where Bungie already took the series in ODST and Reach. It’s 343 who decided to bring the series back to Master Chief in Halo 4
It’s also a throwback to the origin of the space marine concept, Starship Troopers. In the first place the troopers maintained a doublethink of being simultaneously everymen in a state of democratic equality, and heroic elites above the chaff.
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Space Marines were around, even in Heinlein stuff, long before Starship Troopers. Hilariously, that book doesn’t even use the term space marine.
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I’d argue Starship troopers is straight up about how killing commies for uncle sam is good? There’s no nuance, the book’s worldbuilding breaks down multiple times because it literally cannot reconcile it’s initially stated worldbuidling with how much Heinlein loves his fantasy of fascist shock troopers murdering an abstracted others. It opens with his main dude ‘heroically’ bombing a church.
And in that sense, yeah, the 343 stuff is a great adaption to it.
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I am not encouraged by this marketing. Halo practically invented the white hot vertical slice demo but they’ve declined to show literally any of the campaign since the cross-gen graphics roast last year.
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gonna pretend thats the donpachi bee for the extra “fucked up supersoldier training program” pull
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especially because in the lore they love sooo much theres multiple things talking about how the child supersoldier program isnt even cool or good for defense reasons because spartans cant be everywhere in the galaxy at once
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also this trailer is awesome because I guess I’m the only one who played halo 5 and remembers that literally nothing they’ve shown seems to actually follow how the last game they made ends at all, cuz I guess it was better to throw away the trite ai rebellion storyline they were heading into so we can shoot more of the same aliens again, as its important for the chief to be as much of a xenophobe as possible. I thought the whole point of cortana being an epic and forerunnerpilled AI now was to bring about galactic peace through uncompromising technofascism?? Halo was always borderline boring but they really have made it so much worse in recent years…no coop at launch either LOL. pathetic…
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The only time a new generation of Spartans has ever worked effectively is when they’re first introduced in Halo 4 as a realisation for Chief that he’s been replaced with fancier cannon fodder. Any effort beyond that has fallen so flat that they canned Spartan Ops after one season, followed through with a comic that lasted two years that no one read, and then had every single plot thread established from there dropped dead (literally, R.I.P. Jul ‘Mdama) in Guardians’ first level. You could almost read the further characterisations of the Spartan-IVs as satire when they start giving them names and voices, but no, it’s just shoddy sub-Whedon shit, all the characters introduced in Spartan Ops are like that, it’s just terrible, obnoxious tedium.
It is funny though that it seems like every other sentient species is doing better with the bluer flavour of techno-fascism, maybe humanity should just get over it, or maybe I’m just disappointed the Covenant didn’t glass this wretched island given the opportunity.
Anyway, Jo Staten has acknowleged the lack of new Campaign footage (which I’m admittedly concerned about since they better have something real special to market pre-ordering as worthwhile), so that’s some reassurance.
Before boarding my flight, I had a chance to read some of the commentary online, and I definitely hear the disappointment about not seeing Campaign gameplay on the broadcast. So, I wanted to take this opportunity to: (1) shed light on why we chose not to show Campaign right now and (2) assuage your concerns about where Campaign is at this point in the production process.
As I mentioned in last week’s Development Update, the whole Halo Infinite team is in shutdown mode. This means we’re done with feature work and focused on crushing high-priority bugs. We’re spending lots of time playing the game, verifying fixes, and generally doing all we can to ensure Campaign (and Multiplayer!) plays great on all platforms—from an original, 8-year-old Xbox One to a brand new, ultra-spec PC. This is a very challenging task, even for a large and experienced team.
In many ways, shutting down a game is like being on final approach to landing an airplane. And if you’ll forgive a bit of aviation-geekery, the entirety of the team is essentially in a “sterile cockpit,” which is to say: we’re at a critical phase in the flight that is Halo Infinite , so it’s extremely important to avoid distractions and stay focused on mission-critical tasks only. For Campaign, that means putting maximum effort into ensuring the wide-open, adventure-filled experience you’ll all get to play on December 8th is a great as it can possibly be. And gameplay demos and trailers not only take a huge amount of effort to do well, they also take cycles away from bugs and other shutdown tasks.
In MCC news, Season 8 involves Flood in Firefight and some more accessibility features.
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Respect for shipping on so many platforms (simultaneously!) instead of holding it back as an upsell
Someone should just leak it via a VHS recording on a beat up CRT in a dark barn, like the good old days.
isn’t that the same week as battlefield
I’ve been pretty tuned out how do we feel about infinite
The technical preview felt great but the campaign quality is anyone’s guess. Bummer that it’s shipping without co-op or forge.
You might be interested to learn that sprint is only ~9% faster than walking normally so basically completely marginal utility and optional.
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