High Charity has so much atmosphere and with sword flying it just becomes this wonderful moody sandbox
playing as the Arbiter was so interesting, no one really expected a AAA shooter series like that to make you play as the monster and force you to empathize with a foreign culture (more or less)
Alien civil war is a very cool narrative innovation vs the first game’s “get out of dodge” story
remastered graphics are beautiful but I prefer the original on a CRT if I’m honest, it uses bloom much more sparingly and the blacks are proper black
also Halo 2 legendary is the “dark souls of fps games” to use that tired phrase, it is brutal but so rewarding
here’s an example of what i mean about halo 2 remastered graphics being very bloomy overlit and messing with the art direction. imagine top picture on a CRT and the darks look proper dark
folks ive been playing halo infinite multiplayer with default* settings and… is this game secretly good?? (*default except button layout legacy) im having more fun with it than any halo since 2007.
AESTHETICS - they finally got it right with the armor, yes the lighting can still feel a bit flat, but it clearly draws much more from 90’s military sci fi anime and aliens etc than whatever tron/power ranger stuff theyve been doing, really night and day difference. love to see not only the Mk IV armor from Halo Wars (one of the coolest ones in the series imo) but also some stuff that looks like the original Halo 1 concept art, real 90s feeling.
the fact you can customize different armor cores and keep your changes in your « armor hall » is very cool. it’s a shame about the way it’s monetized but theres a lot of dtuff to unlock without soending much money. i did spend a few bucks to get some silly looking wolf head pauldrons.
movement feels good — they finally got sprint pared down to the point that the maps feel normal sized, the clamber more than makes up for crouch jumping being more inacessible.
gunplay feels good too — there’s still way too many guns (like its been since 2007) but automatics make much more sense in the sandbox since skill floor is a little higher; first game since 04 where the pistol is legit powerful and fun to use. aiming with controller feels v fluid and i was pulling off sniper headshots for the first time in ages.
yeah idk it feels like they kind of locked in finally, it took a couple years maybe but it feels quite good now
we played infinite weekly with a few butts for a good while (firefight only) but they really just throw the same maps at oyu over and over and over and over and over again so i fell off. but it was fun for a while! the weapons feel good the grappling hook is a blast the grunts are still cute
They should have made the grappling hook default equipment. I think the only reason they didn’t is because
they thought halo fans would be mad, which they were.
the force repulsor, which you can use to super jump by force repelling the entire world away from you by looking at your feet when you blast it, is 60% as fun as the hook.
yeah equipment is the one thing i can’t wrap my head around, mostly because the UI is super small and that’s the one thing i actually need to pay attention to on it. otherwise it’s out of sight out of mind, i just forget it’s there
They’ve been converting more MP maps into firefight maps to add to the variety, but unfortunately the AI pathfinding on the recent maps is terrible. One of the bosses in the big city stage always dies because one ship is trying to leave the map while a second is trying to enter, so the boss’s ship gets pulled up to the top of the skybox and he falls to his death when he drops out.
this video is pretty nuts. someone broke nda and dumped all the old/cut content the halo digsite team was given access to. major ramifications for industry labor standards. they were expected to do AAA work without a paycheck?
It has a better wiki because Bungie fans in general just care more. Before wikis there was the Marathon story page at Marathon's Story Page where the users compiled and reviewed all the terminals in the Marathon games so you could read and digest those games’ complex story at your own speed.
Halo also had a lot going on story-wise, at least initially, so there was a similar level of dedication from long time Bungie fans to explore those games’ stories in the same fashion.
also this guy used to be one of the main halo speedrunners until he was exposed for cheating (not cody miller, another guy named slYnki) so he pivoted to trickjump and tricking videos i guess
enjoyed this video from one of the halo 1 multiplayer diehards… the halo 1 weapon sandbox reminds me of fighting games in a way… most of the guns are ‘OP’ by modern standards so it all balances out in a crazy way
