i should give it a shot… and destiny 2 while im at it
halo piece is up to 3800 words lmao
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The Forsaken campaign and the 30th anniversary event (with the Halo guns) are free now fyi
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I think this has been development for like fifteen years now hasn’t it.
I know there’s probably been a lot of different TV projects but it always felt like there was one.
Playing Infinite some more and I’m liking it a lot. It’s like they took the second level of the original game, where you explore the box canyon and rescue a few squads of marines in whatever order, and just turned that premise into a whole game. I really like going around and saving squads of marines. I hope they show up later on or get worked into the flow of the rest of the game, like maybe they become recruitable or something. edit-They follow you around! Of course they would do that it’s Halo. I think they even die like in the original game but they seem pretty hardy. I just cleared one of the Banished outpost camp things and went in with like four marines but now I think I’m down to two. Going to try and keep as many alive as I can.
Legendary might be a little too easy or maybe I’m just too used to playing Halo on Legendary. But I also haven’t found any of the skulls yet so I’m not too worried about it. It’s still an enjoyable, well-balanced level of difficulty. Absolutely wild that there is not co-op out the gate. How does that happen.
Also grenades no longer explode when another grenade goes off next to them, meaning no more chain explosions. When did that stop being a thing? That was always an important ingredient in the Halo juice for making battles just the right amount of chaotic.
edit-Okay I just read in the menu that at least one marine will spawn at any liberated FOBs. That’s fine and all but it would be more special if there were only a certain number of marines you could rescue and if they all die you’re just out of luck.
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Gotta have a gunner for the warthog you summon only to hop out of when you remember it’s faster to just grapple up hills.
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Marines seem less squishy in this game too, so loading up the turret-less Warthog with 5 of them really lets you get into some mayhem. Especially when you take advantage of that trick of giving them RPGs with unlimited ammo. I was taking them to those squad rescue missions and they were just blowing the dropships out of the sky.
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I’ve softened somewhat on Infinite having played a bit more of the core storyline, the interior segments feel a lot more coherent and fun to me, so I guess my approach will be to try and ignore the open world trappings and just push forward, and cross my fingers I don’t end up screwed due to lack of ability unlocks(?)
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yeah i kinda regret starting on heroic but wondered if it was perhaps tuned a bit easier while coop isn’t a thing yet
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Interestingly, I was previously unaware of this. It’s a coherent line of reasoning, I don’t think this series has been balanced around Normal since the first two games.
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I like how in the campaign intro, the big bad manhandles Master Chief like a 5-year-old playing with a toy soldier
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I’m using this strategy for the assassination missions. One of the targets grants you a homing rocket launcher, so now I roll with a truck full of those. I hope we can do this x4 when they add co-op.
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Well. I finished the campaign. On grueling Heroic, perhaps not as intended. It exhausted even me, who placed eighth at MLG Providence 2011 (kidding). The final boss took me two hours and left my nervous system in tatters.
Anyway, I finished the main story, or the Rise of Skywalker-esque memorabilia purgatory that passes for one in this game, and, I don’t know. Every game is phantompainpunk, baby, what’s the deal. These are the only stories we can tell in a society facing down the barrel of extinction. There is no present tense, only the wastewanderer listening to cassette tapes of the great collapse. Museums of now-distant conflicts and crises, character arcs and plots resolvable not through action but Nolany contemplation and revelation, and communion with ghosts. A story experienced forward and backward. Continuous. Infinite. It is a playground in your drawer, which I guess is all anyone wants from a videogame. I don’t dislike it.
It’s just wild that they raised stakes the way they did in Halo 5, and made this game be a direct sequel to that, only to have saturday morning cartoon villains being bossed around by Rita Repulsa on a piece of rubble at the end of the universe. One of the first things you learn is that they destroyed the Infinity, which was a symbol of the desire to take the series to any place in the universe, glimpsed only briefly in Halo 5 (glassed planets, Elite homeworld, etc.), but now we’ve tossed all that possibility on a pyre to have a toy soldier run around an alpine forest forever, with the audacity to call it Infinite.
It’s a nice mixtape. I like seeing the satellite dish from Ascension just scattered here and there on distant hills. A monitor climbs in a King Sentinel, like, oh, was he always supposed to fit in there? Oh, it’s the Halo 2 gondolas! I like the combat, even if on Heroic it skewed a little too long-range, when I was firing on all cylinders, it often felt exhilarating. I like putting a sniper rifle in the trunk of the razorback for safekeeping, and loading up the party bus to do drivebys on screaming children and their big simian stepbrothers.
Something just feels hollow. The promotional material basically depicted it as competent entertainment software without the pretense of bombast or transcendence, and they delivered as advertised.
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Yeah, it’s kind of a dud. 343 have this pathological habit of just dropping plot threads or ideas the moment it seems like people don’t respond to them as expected. They felt they had somehow written themselves into a corner, so a time jump was in order.
Not that this, thankfully, prevented them from making Cortana even more egregiously murderous all whilst trying to write in some closure of a kind with Chief, because of course a monster would desperately want to vindicate themselves somehow in the eyes of their closest intimate connection. I was worried they were going to attempt a redemption or 180. Really, Cortana as a reflection on Halsey’s moral rancidness was done a great deal of justice here, and I thought her connection to the Ring made for some interesting weirdness. I genuinely love the notion of this artificial habitat/prison/suicide pact being a living, clotting thing.
As long as they managed to do right by my favourite video game emotionally stunted and brutalised space marine, I was going to be on board, and his palpable discomfort with the Weapon bringing out a prickliness that goes beyond his usual dry reserve made for a good throughline, especially since she can’t understand why he’s treating her this way. I felt Escharum made for a good foil to him as well, this burnt out warrior dissatisfied by the revolution, and seeing a grand energising opportunity at mythmaking.
The real problem I had with the structure of the story, aside from the absolutely pat ending, was the Endless, who we’re repeatedly told are somehow a bigger threat than the Flood, but by all accounts sound like they got done real nasty by the antediluvian eugenicist space cop species. All you see of them are little goofy cherubs who love to play with guns, and it was only looking them up on Halopedia because I wondered if I had missed some lore somewhere that I found apparently their big crime was being immune to the mass extinction hoola hoops? I must have missed an audio log somewhere. It makes for a particular weak, low-stakes cliffhanger in a franchise notorious for them and I do hope they have something lined up real quick. They should actually commit to a storyline for once.
On a first run, I found it pretty easy, frankly. The AI aren’t that aggressive even compared to some of the older titles and because of the nature of the design they opted for, you can keep your distance fairly consistently. I do not think there was much, if anything, gained by the open world format, especially not one where, predictably, all the granular aspects of it are canonised as checklists to tick off. Saving survivors, wrecking supply and battle lines and rebuilding something close to a military structure is one thing, but it’s ludicrous having Chief worry about Grunt radio loud speakers and chase incremental upgrades to salvaged armour equipment, let alone caring about fucking clothes lockers.
This does mean I am kind of looking forward to playing on Legendary, but I think I’ll try a run of Normal that’s purely level-focused, just to see how well it feels paced to me and see how the actual designed combat areas work. All this really translated to was two instances of hours long downtime going to map markers and fast-travelling, in a story about preventing a targeted cull of the entire human species. I’d hope they’d drop it after one experiment, because any notion of refining open world structures in an AAA space is going to just mean further content creep. ODST’s New Mombasa still undefeated.
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I really don’t like these boss fights.
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So I killed the boss just now as I usually do after saying something public about it.
But now it’s not counting him as being killed? It’s the boss for The Tower. He’s dead and the flavor text recognizes him as dead but the boss guy icon for the location is still unchecked. Is there another boss guy who needs killing at this place or what?
In fact I’ve killed both boss character for the overall location but their icons are still showing them as needing to be killed. What am I missing?
Oh wait that’s not a boss guy icon that’s a skull for the skull collectible for the difficulty modifiers. Never mind.
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what a journey
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so far my experience with halo infinite is exactly what i expected, which is a lot of very well-executed fine details that barely coheres because of the indecision at the heart of the development cycle plot. lots of fun character writing and dialogue, and a finely-tuned combat sandbox, that feels in service to a fundamentally hollow enterprise.
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