i fuckin love this guy’s videos lol. every single video is titled like “next halo game reveal” and i click it knowing it’s not gonna be a halo reveal and it’s 40 minutes of him ranting about how 343 sorry hAlO tUdIoS is not gonna reveal a new halo game and if they did it would be bad. and he’s right!! quality stuff
I have finally laid down my battle rifle in Halo Infinite after a particularly rough string of weeks where it literally could not find enough people to put together a game, most games. Not a great sign.
Largely enjoyed Infinite quite a bit. Firefight, Ranked Tactical, the community-made maps like the ring ATV race… lots to love here. The new plasma carbine is nice, though incredibly late to the party.
Infinite just never really had the greatest maps. They were good enough though!
I’m incredibly charmed by how the Ravager never, ever received anything approaching a damage buff to address the fact that it is far an away the worst gun ever to grace the franchise, lightly warming any who are caught in its gentle wisps of energy. My headcannon is that everyone uses the gun as a joke that 343 are in on, a true gag weapon. I know I never miss an opportunity to dig a sniper rifle or Spankr for a Ravager.
This gun confused me so much. I assumed that in single player you could level it up, or it had a stronger variant held by bosses, or maybe it had a damage modifier against specific vehicle types. Something! Something to make it make sense!
the mongoose was i think my biggest triumph in that when I started working on it playtesters would use it once a match to get to the power weapons fastest and then never drive it again. i spent hours tuning the thing to work in small spaces and suddenly it was being used a lot more by the sweatier playtesters for combat advantage, so i figured i did the job pretty well
I mean it feels like a dream. There’s a reason people like Halo and it is mostly how fucking fun it is to drive that jeep and that ATV around.
True perverts will never, ever pass up the opportunity to try to hit someone with the AVT, perhaps the most satisfying kill in the game.
I think the most effective and fun AVT strat is getting someone who is halfway decent with the sniper rifle on the back seat and just piercing your enemies like some kind of modern lance.
I was able to find the somewhat recent mode I absolutely fell in love with, “Goose Hunt”:
This gun confused me so much. I assumed that in single player you could level it up, or it had a stronger variant held by bosses, or maybe it had a damage modifier against specific vehicle types. Something! Something to make it make sense!
It is uproariously funny to me that the super version of the Ravager, the white one, is significantly worse than even the base version, removing the ability for you to possibly use the alt fire effectively by not only making the fire bulb bounce off the wall but CONTINUE TO BOUNCE THREE TO FOUR TIMES, ensuring it could never land where you want it without the very grace of the Prophets at your back.
Many of 343’s decisions were baffling, but in particular, just the complete disinterest in adding new content beyond what the community cooks up. I really have to hand it to them for including community stuff, because it was new content, sometimes very great. But so little official additions.
Just off the top of the dome, I liked having the AI voice as the narrator of the match, but they only ever included 6 of them from launch, never adding new ones. It just seems super easy to get someone in the booth to record a new character.
I never changed off of the excitable, insane female AI that I headcannoned to be in the throes of Rampancy. The notion of her helping your cromagnon ass effectively wage war and you giving her purpose as she frays into the sunset was a juicy bit of drama that of course is nowhere near what they actually intended.
I never understood why they would temporarily introduce new maps to firefight but never expand the list permanently beyond the 6 or 8 maps it already has which the game already took no issue with repeating multiple times in a row. At one point we got the same bad map three matches in a row and that was the end of halo infinite for us. Also making the battle passes no longer permanent AGAIN to increase fomo shit after you’ve made efforts to reduce it is so bizarre and stupid.
Infinite is one of those games where it’s almost good but the developers have absurdly fucked up priorities. There was a period where they kept nerfing the bandit for no good reason except to seemingly infuriate firefight players
A lot of the old timers burned out before Infinite shipped and left, and a lot of the youngblood enthusiasm was churned out because they were contractors. One of them did the camera systems for God Of War, another one put the grappling hook into Infinite. I remember the week it got put in too. One of them is at Meta now doing god knows what.
MSFT’s contractor system ensures that it will never seriously make anything creative or good because there’s no security or stability. Until they get serious about staffing “Halo Studios” with FTEs the same problems will persist
Ahhhhh the voices are all wrong!
remembering that they couldn’t open up headcount to hire the guy who put the grappling hook in but would have endless multi-day off site “retreats” for the leads where they would try to figure out what Halo’s “DNA” is
Now that they have the tech for it, Cortana should appear in full 60,000 voxel Halo 5 sex doll mode and then every time the Pillar of Autumn takes another hit from the filthy Covvies, more systems go offline and the processing power drops and she looks increasingly more low-poly, until she ends up in her original XBox form
>sprint
>hitmarkers
>moving reticules
lol
gotta pay that guy the big bux
what an amazing waste of everyone’s time
The Library is a perfect example to demonstrate how the team is thoughtfully enhancing existing spaces in an authentic way. Halo: Combat Evolved’s seventh campaign mission is a key example of where it felt right to make tweaks to several areas to create a new experience that balances nostalgia with the expectations of today’s gamers.
In Halo: Campaign Evolved , you’ll be able to wield nine additional iconic weapons from across the Halo series inside the Halo: Combat Evolved campaign, including the Energy Sword, Battle Rifle and Needle Rifle, giving you more ways to approach every encounter.
This could have been a mod.
the worst thing i can say about what this company has done to halo is that i don’t even really care anymore. halo’s been bad for longer than it was good in the first place.
ok just one thing, cortana’s new voice acting is annoying. it’s like they told her to “punch it up” or something, everything has this frisson of new attitude. symbolic of 343 halo dudios’ ability to blunder through attempted critiques of the original work in game design form.
credit where due tho, the UI is slick, the little “hold x to” icons are a thoughtful improvement, and the opening of the shafted cutscene was cool - the transition between rushing down the corridor and slowing down in surprise of this vast underground structure.
tho (of course!) they couldn’t resist a lingering glance of this doohickey to show you what exactly chief kicks into the chasm
thanks guys makes me feel a lot better, i always thought it was a rock but now i know it’s an advanced piece of forerunner technology that just looked like a rock.
again, just perfectly encapsulates their whole bullshit.
I’m sure people will expend years of effort shitting on this game but really all you have to point to is the assault rifle having a 32 round magazine now. It betrays that they have literally no knowledge of why the game is the way it is at all, which Jed has alluded to several times with inside info on Infinite’s development. I don’t know. This is rage bait lol. Purely designed for negative attention
again tho, given they are literally copying off of bungie’s homework, i would be shocked if they can fuck it up bad enough to make it not 343 halo studios’ best game to date. it’s just a really solid narrative structure, level designs, just really hard to fuck it up that bad that it becomes worse than… what is their best game to date? infinite? which is a solid 6/10 imo.
I think you may be underestimating how badly fucking with the balance of halo 1 the way they’ve decided could go wrong. Though SPV3 mod completely ruined the game and halo fans love it so perhaps it will work out for 343
halo 4 got a nudity rating because of Cortana when first submitted to the esrb and I wish I had asked to see the old design
i think it’s funny that one of the coolest things about halo 1 to me is only 10 weapons and 9 of them are usable in multiplayer vs to them immediately adding 9 more weapons lol.
