Spoiler Halo Mega Thread

Once in a while I go on a binge and surf MM and customs for a bit, and man, I just can't do Reach no matter how hard I try. Like, it seems like the game's mechanics and weapon sandbox are a perfectly bad combo of sweatlord and self punishment.

I can play Halo CE cause its old physics and wack maps are fun, and perfect 3 shots with the pistol is easy to understand even though the reticule doesn't represent what the bloom does when you hold the trigger rather than quickly tap it. Halo 2's a nostalgia glitchfest and easy going, Halo 3's mechanics have been altered from OG Halo 3 and are a bit frustrating alongside the workable, yet unbalanced sandbox.

And then there's Reach. If you're using any covenant weapon and competing against its counterpart, its automatic loss unless the other player is a potato. You want to pace your shots so bloom doesn't fuck you? Get dicked up the ass by a guy spamming across the map. Tired of the bullshit bloom and go for title update physics? Welcome to DMR fuckfest. You want to play some good old brain cell killing infection? Have fun with pro sword clashers and dead bodies infecting you.

I really want to add Reach to the roster of game modes when I get into a mood for pubstomping or brain cell death in customs, but every time I try it just leaves a sour taste in me because of its bullshit mechanics and the fact that it spawned all the bad trends that still currently plague newer titles.

Once in a while I go on a binge and surf MM and customs for a bit, and man, I just can't do Reach no matter how hard I try. Like, it seems like the game's mechanics and weapon sandbox are a perfectly bad combo of sweatlord and self punishment.

I can play Halo CE cause its old physics and wack maps are fun, and perfect 3 shots with the pistol is easy to understand even though the reticule doesn't represent what the bloom does when you hold the trigger rather than quickly tap it. Halo 2's a nostalgia glitchfest and easy going, Halo 3's mechanics have been altered from OG Halo 3 and are a bit frustrating alongside the workable, yet unbalanced sandbox.

And then there's Reach. If you're using any covenant weapon and competing against its counterpart, its automatic loss unless the other player is a potato. You want to pace your shots so bloom doesn't fuck you? Get dicked up the ass by a guy spamming across the map. Tired of the bullshit bloom and go for title update physics? Welcome to DMR fuckfest. You want to play some good old brain cell killing infection? Have fun with pro sword clashers and dead bodies infecting you.

I really want to add Reach to the roster of game modes when I get into a mood for pubstomping or brain cell death in customs, but every time I try it just leaves a sour taste in me because of its bullshit mechanics and the fact that it spawned all the bad trends that still currently plague newer titles.

i feel the opposite for halo 2 and reach. halo 2 always feels so sweaty and stressful, while reach is usually easygoing

Halo2' hitscan br and button combos was an absolute sweatfest

H3 fixed all of that

HR was a mistake

. You want to pace your shots so bloom doesn't fuck you? Get dicked up the ass by a guy spamming across the map.

The secret to dmr bloom wasn't five evenly spaced shots
It was four spammed body shots then wait for your headshot

. You want to pace your shots so bloom doesn't fuck you? Get dicked up the ass by a guy spamming across the map.

The secret to dmr bloom wasn't five evenly spaced shots
It was four spammed body shots then wait for your headshot

Yeah, I think I remember now. Still. I just hate how the game devolves into pistol and dmr spamfests. And I love how even if you spam body shots RNG can still screw you if you miss. Like I know Halo 3's sandbox isn't super balanced either, but you could at least make most weapons work against an average player if they weren't a tryhard.

Speaking of, I swear there's some fuckery going on in the port of 3. Grav hammer always had a huge knockback range, but it's fucking football field sized in MCC and it can jank warthogs way fucking farther than it should.

I used to be able to snipe with the banshee's and ghost's main guns, but either auto aim or bullet magnetism makes it fucking impossible now. And the scorpion is the absolute worst. I don't know how the reticule works. I used to be able to cross map snipe people jumping in mid air, and non registering bloodshots weren't that bad.

Now bloodshots are so fucking bad that you don't see them just on your screen, you can watch other players land a hit with an explosion on somebody and they take no damage. I wonder if it's because of connection changes. Double beatdowns were really rare in 3, now they happen a lot.

Tell me I ain't crazy here. The port of Halo 3's had some changes made to physics and registry.

Season 3 armor all looks like shit and I am not going to be buying tbh.

They finally put out Security Helmet and it's Halo 4 looking horseshit.

Imagine still playing Infinite ROFLMAO

>Can finally play Infinite on my new PC
>All my settings are either High or Ultra/Max
>Everything plays fine even if the menu is a bit buggy
>Season 3 comes out
>Game keeps crashing even in the menus
>Frame rate drops when customizing my Spartan
>Game freezes and then crashes when I somehow get into a game
>Had to "optimize" the game with GeForce Experience to get it to not crash (as much)
>Lower settings now
>Customization still has frame rate drops
>Check Reddit, this apparently has been commonly reported among others

Guess I'll go back to MCC and Final Fantasy XIV until 343 decides if they want to fix this or not.

I should uninstall infinite tbh
I haven't touched it since halfway through s1

Fucking sick dude, Cursed Halo got an update.

me when i wont ever be able to experience cursed halo because i dont play on pc

unless they decide to bring mods to console

Cursed halo update was pretty sick. Glad the thanos is censored by default now LOL that shit was wack

Minecraft shit was kinda fun but the star of the show is still the D20 grenade and Blunderbuss imo

or is there a new new update since cursed halo again first dropped

Dude named Zonda1995 popped into a custom game last night, threw me for a loop for a bit.

If that was you Zonda, I have only one thing to say about you quitting from the brainrot in less than 60 seconds.

Halo is dead at this point.

Halo is dead at this point.

I legit started Halo Infinite and just never finished it. It was just ... not interesting to me anymore and that is so sad, because Halo was a big part of my teen years growing up.

Halo is dead at this point.

I legit started Halo Infinite and just never finished it. It was just ... not interesting to me anymore and that is so sad, because Halo was a big part of my teen years growing up.

I beat the campaign in one sitting and never touched the game after. It felt so stagnant.

Halo died for me when I got the Limited Edition H4 for '360 for Christmas in the release year.

Blitzed the campaign in like 4 hours, moved to online. Wiped the floor in the game for like 5 matches, then ejected it.

I don't remember what the campaign was about and I didn't have any fun.

MCC got my interest back, but only in playing CE/2/3/Reach.

I liked it, overall.
I still need to complete it solo Legendary.
If its wasn't for my backlog, I would be on that right now.

Campaign hit a weird spot for me. On one hand from just gameplay feel, I liked how streamlined it was. Fast paced and a lot of options with enemy types that had their variety of strengths and weaknesses, pretty solid.

I liked and didn't like the story. Can't really place it. It's like, yeah, here's a more personalized story with a bit of nuance, but it just kind of happens to be in the Haloverse, a time skipped Haloverse that feels like it doesn't want to talk about previous events, but it does.

Reach started a really hard sweatfest trend and I feel like every game after was the same thing in multiplayer. Way too sweaty for me and no room for fun.

Which really blows for me because infinite has hands down the best forge in the series and a stupid amount of potential, but I just can't play customs because it feels like the asscrack sweat of multiplayer just bleeds into the gameplay everywhere, which is probably why I just can't dig Reach customs either.

It sounds like nostalgia goggles here, but if they were able to add infinite level forge mode to Halo 3 customs, I'd call it a day and be content.

Dude named Zonda1995 popped into a custom game last night, threw me for a loop for a bit.

If that was you Zonda, I have only one thing to say about you quitting from the brainrot in less than 60 seconds.

def an impostor

I went back and started the Halo 4 Campaign.

I can't quite place exactly what it is, but the feeling of it is so radically departed from earlier games. Playing roughly in-game chronological order made a jump from 3/ODST to 4 so massive, and it lost the goofiness to some over the top seriousness in a lot of aspects.

I went back and started the Halo 4 Campaign.

I can't quite place exactly what it is, but the feeling of it is so radically departed from earlier games. Playing roughly in-game chronological order made a jump from 3/ODST to 4 so massive, and it lost the goofiness to some over the top seriousness in a lot of aspects.

I don't think the massive art style shift helped the gap either. I didn't mind the story so much, as if you read up on it the lead writers where basing the story of Cort's descent into rampancy on their own life experiences with family who had dementia. So at least there, the story had heart behind it even if there was flaws.

Halo is a pretty dark series if you look at it, and the novels aren't afraid to go there for sure, at least some of the earlier ones. You know what I think was missing about 4? Three key things. Mystery, wonder, and scale.

Look at the og trilogy, odst, and even Reach. In these stories and environments there's a lot of room for exploration, and the gameplay gives you room to do that with environmental storytelling. It gives you room to ask questions you won't have or get all the answers for.

By contrast, 4 has three fucking novels behind it so that you even know who or what the Didact is. Didact as a character only existed in terminals in Halo 3 that you had a maximum of 30 seconds to read. We only got to know that he was Forerunner, and that he was the one who fired the rings at the end. Huge amounts of room for interpretation and questions never answered, which gives off a feel of depth that's always hidden. 343 has this lame tendency to fill in every single nook and cranny with information, and it shows in the art style and everywhere. You start off Halo 4 with a question. What happened to Chief's armor? Nanomachines son.

What was Halo multiplayer before 343 showed up? Nobody knew why a bunch of spartans were killing each other on maps all over the place. That was fine, because multiplayer's purpose was fun. You didn't need to know. And that always gave Halo multiplayer maps in the bungie era a unique quality. Even if they weren't all fun to play on, they were interesting to look at thematically because it was a glimpse of something and not the entire picture.

And scale matters here. CE had scale by introducing you to this big fucking ring that's ancient. 2 and 3 had scale because they were thematically built around a concept while uncovering some of the mystery of Halo. In Halo's world, Chief may as well be jesus. Especially in 3, they dialed this theme up. Chief's a walking legend they'd tell stories about for thousands of years afterwards. You as the player get to play his feats. ODST had scale by throwing you into the middle of a city being decimated while looking for your squadmates. Reach had scale by showing what happens to a planet when the covenant pull up.

What did 4 have that could thematically 1 up the trilogy? Honestly, it didn't have anything. Chief's story at the end of 3 was the end. 4 cracks the coffin open, removes the scale and basically re-introduces you to this thematically legendary person by putting him in a walking simulator, and his first contact with any other human beings isn't "Holy shit it's the chief," it's "I thought you'd be taller" and a ship captain treating chief as an old man even though he was in cryo. The didact, with 3 books of lore buildup and retcon canon, is blown up in qte and never heard from again in the games even though he keeps resurrecting elsewhere in the media.

Get what I mean? Bungie's development mindset with Halo was action, biblical themes to further add to the mystery, a dark tone, and an aura of a legend happening in progress. 4's tone strips the mystery down, dials the dark up but not the stakes, and just leaves you hanging around afterwards with a restarted story that was already previously finished. And that just got worse as the games moved on. The three games that 343 made could be considered an anti-trilogy because they had no themes in mind that linked everything. Just the name of the series and whatever they could try to throw at the board that they thought might stick.

Which sucks because I don't mind 4's story, and although the graphics don't match Halo, they still made some beautiful 3d assets and dumped a lot of effort into detail even if it was misplaced. It just wasn't a fit for Halo. And maybe, that wouldn't have been the case if they'd gone with a different story not involving Chief. But we can probably thank microsoft for that.

YouTube

Big Halo news.
Moving to Unreal Engine 5
343 industries are done. Its now Halo Studios.

with all the stuff shown, the rumors of a ce remake look even more likely

YouTube

Big Halo news.
Moving to Unreal Engine 5
343 industries are done. Its now Halo Studios.

Not sure why people are getting their hopes up so high about that. That studio rebrand is like cutting off somebody's face, putting another over it, and calling them a different person. I don't think it's got good chances of panning out.

YouTube

Big Halo news.
Moving to Unreal Engine 5
343 industries are done. Its now Halo Studios.

Not sure why people are getting their hopes up so high about that. That studio rebrand is like cutting off somebody's face, putting another over it, and calling them a different person. I don't think it's got good chances of panning out.

Pure hopium at this point. Though they did do a 180 with MCC so they are capable of  making something good.
The switch to UE is positively received because new hires won't need to spend a lot of time understanding the legacy engine.

YouTube

Big Halo news.
Moving to Unreal Engine 5
343 industries are done. Its now Halo Studios.

Not sure why people are getting their hopes up so high about that. That studio rebrand is like cutting off somebody's face, putting another over it, and calling them a different person. I don't think it's got good chances of panning out.

Pure hopium at this point. Though they did do a 180 with MCC so they are capable of  making something good.
The switch to UE is positively received because new hires won't need to spend a lot of time understanding the legacy engine.

I am betting you the MCC is going to get shut down at some point. Maybe not on PC, but I feel like as time goes on, the likelyhood of servers getting canned on consoles goes up. That only makes more sense if we take a muh profit approach. So you've got the rebrand of the studio conning some people, you've got the switch to unreal to attract graphics coomers, and I'd be willing to bet in order to make a couple extra bucks, pull the plug on the MCC to shove what's left of the Halo fanbase onto the new launch because there won't be anywhere else to go unless they divert over to PC.

Or, god help us, they remaster MCC for unreal engine and sell it again as MCC:R, simultaneously chopping the legs off the old games with the plug pull and leaving them to the dustbin while funnelling everybody into the new games, which can now be as bad as a port/remaster as they want. (Which to be fair at the beginning MCC had all those issues and still has some)

Want to go double or nothing on this? They're gonna shove identity politics and diversity into the remastered content.

YouTube

Big Halo news.
Moving to Unreal Engine 5
343 industries are done. Its now Halo Studios.

Not sure why people are getting their hopes up so high about that. That studio rebrand is like cutting off somebody's face, putting another over it, and calling them a different person. I don't think it's got good chances of panning out.

Pure hopium at this point. Though they did do a 180 with MCC so they are capable of  making something good.
The switch to UE is positively received because new hires won't need to spend a lot of time understanding the legacy engine.

I am betting you the MCC is going to get shut down at some point. Maybe not on PC, but I feel like as time goes on, the likelyhood of servers getting canned on consoles goes up. That only makes more sense if we take a muh profit approach. So you've got the rebrand of the studio conning some people, you've got the switch to unreal to attract graphics coomers, and I'd be willing to bet in order to make a couple extra bucks, pull the plug on the MCC to shove what's left of the Halo fanbase onto the new launch because there won't be anywhere else to go unless they divert over to PC.

Or, god help us, they remaster MCC for unreal engine and sell it again as MCC:R, simultaneously chopping the legs off the old games with the plug pull and leaving them to the dustbin while funnelling everybody into the new games, which can now be as bad as a port/remaster as they want. (Which to be fair at the beginning MCC had all those issues and still has some)

Killing console servers is an inevitability, that's part of the push that made me get into PC gaming. I think a lot of console producers (except Nintendo) have realised this since publishing and re-releasing games out on Steam or on their own PC Launch Platforms.

MCC on PC kicked up because of the Halo Online ms23 piracy that was going on that released Halo 3 MP for PC before MCC was even out. I wouldn't put it past Microsoft to re-release MCC in UE eventually, but not for another few years, possibly a decade. Maybe by then they'll add a microtransaction thing to buy all the Spartan Points you need to unlock all the MCC Catalog content.

YouTube

Big Halo news.
Moving to Unreal Engine 5
343 industries are done. Its now Halo Studios.

Not sure why people are getting their hopes up so high about that. That studio rebrand is like cutting off somebody's face, putting another over it, and calling them a different person. I don't think it's got good chances of panning out.

Pure hopium at this point. Though they did do a 180 with MCC so they are capable of  making something good.
The switch to UE is positively received because new hires won't need to spend a lot of time understanding the legacy engine.

the switch to unreal to attract graphics coomers

Graphics aside, there is an important positive - new hires will not have to spend a lot of time learning some proprietary engine and instead be ready to begin productive work much sooner. This should help speed up development. Easier to experiment with, quicker to prototype features. This combined with changes in management gives me some hope.