Halo Infinite Discussion

[Boyo]

17 minutes ago, ShmaltzyLatkes said:

I'd say calling the AR inherently less skillful and lower effort is wrong, but there hasn't been a practical implementation of the AR in Halo that has proven otherwise. Burst firing is one mechanism that kinda sorta makes it more skillful than just spraying and praying, but it isn't that far removed. I'd be all for putting a recoil pattern on the AR if it was a really aggressive one, I'm just not sure how well that ports over to console aiming mechanics.

The way I would design the AR, the skill wouldn’t necessarily be in using it so much as knowing when to drop or keep it.  
 

The Assault Carbine primary fires an AR and alt fires a Railgun but players don’t spawn with ammo for it; railgun ammo is found as an on map pick up.  
 

Say you are picking up a power weapon, do you drop the AC and keep the utility as a reliable secondary, or do you drop the utility and use the power weapon to fight your way to the incoming Railgun ammo spawn in order to keep your spree going?  Make the wrong decision and you’re getting lit up at range with no way to return fire because you dropped your utility or you are standing on Railgun ammo with no way to pick it up because you dropped your AC.  
 

 

[Apoll0]

Projectile weapons can be perfectly accurate. Not sure why people equate projectile with being inaccurate.  Adding  time of flight doesn't have to affect accuracy.  All weapons should be projectile.  Obv. speed of projectile is a balancing mechanic, so some may have near instantaneous impact.  But true hitscan is just lazy.

 

I see people link time of flight, bullet drop, RNG, netcode and hit detection like they're intrinsically linked when they're not.  Bad experiences with RNG and shit netcode/hit detection have turned people off of projectile which is a damn shame.

[Reamis25]

18 minutes ago, Apoll0 said:

Projectile weapons can be perfectly accurate. Not sure why people equate projectile with being inaccurate.  Adding  time of flight doesn't have to affect accuracy.  All weapons should be projectile.  Obv. speed of projectile is a balancing mechanic, so some may have near instantaneous impact.  But true hitscan is just lazy.

 

I see people link time of flight, bullet drop, RNG, netcode and hit detection like they're intrinsically linked when they're not.  Bad experiences with RNG and shit netcode/hit detection have turned people off of projectile which is a damn shame.

Oh please, that’s the only the casein halo. Any other game today that’s projectile has basically perfect hit reg. Apex legends, battle field, Star Wars battlefront 2, etc. honestly halos autos should have some recoil. Y’all gotta stop acting as if recoil control is some difficult ass shit on controller. The 3 I listed have recoil and controlling them with a controller isn’t hard. Halos had recoil before on the SMG. It isn’t difficult is it? 

[RatherSilentMr]

444

[Xandrith]

the corkscrew gravity cannon is a utility starting weapon that

[Meek Meek Meek]

After a very long hiatus, I ultimately return with a nitpick. There is much I can say about the Jul 23 reveal in general but at this point there's not much others haven't brought up. Most of my disappointment had to do with the technical prowess (or lack of) of the showing - what an embarrassment.

Anyways, back to the petty nitpick. I could ignore this before but now it's more noticeable than ever. Why does the warthog have audible gear shifts when its equipped with a CVT? Sure you can hear these shifts in H5 too but now it just sounds like a tuned 4 banger with a snappy transmission. So much for attention to detail from the 'lore' masters themselves.

[Hully]

6 hours ago, Apoll0 said:

Projectile weapons can be perfectly accurate. Not sure why people equate projectile with being inaccurate.  Adding  time of flight doesn't have to affect accuracy.  All weapons should be projectile.  Obv. speed of projectile is a balancing mechanic, so some may have near instantaneous impact.  But true hitscan is just lazy.

 

I see people link time of flight, bullet drop, RNG, netcode and hit detection like they're intrinsically linked when they're not.  Bad experiences with RNG and shit netcode/hit detection have turned people off of projectile which is a damn shame.

With the exception of Halo 3, we've always had the illusion of hitscan, or hirscan itself. The only instance in the franchise where people associate Halo with actual projectiles is Halo 3, and that game was a mess in terms of its netcode, the speed of the projectiles themselves, hit registration, and bullet spread. Though I would prefer a well functioning projectile system to hitscan, I can't really blame people. Especially with 343's track record. Imagine a poorly functioning projectile system with sprint and abilities...

[MultiLockOn]

10 hours ago, Knighty Knight said:

What about Quake, Call of Duty, RainbowSix and Counterstrike? 

Those are good despite being htiscan, not because they are hitscan.  There are many bad attributes about every great game out there. 

 

Counterstrike has slow, very slow, controlled movement with lightning fast kill times.  The one thing keeping the game in check is spray patterns, which is a decent solution except it basically completely invalidates the game to ever be played on console. So right off the bat you're using a solution to implement difficulty in your game that only works with 1 input method. You can't do precise spray patterns on a thumbstick.  There's also no reason to think the game wouldn't be better if it had spray patterns, AND projectile.  And then perhaps it wouldn't have to rely on spray patterns (and actually some RNG in the current version of CSGO) so heavily. This same thing goes for Rainbow Six, although the ranges are very short in all those maps so any weapon that had projectiles move slow enough would disturb realism a bit.  But, to be honest half the heroes in that game are already pretty bombastic and unrealistic so it might not be out of place.

Quake has more or less the fastest movement we've ever seen in a video game bar tribes, no aim assist, and even the best players in the world who do everything to evade the enemy and rocket jump over a door and only have their feet exposed for 2 frames will still get tagged by the other player using a railgun.  That is the perfect example of players hitting their head against the skill ceiling.  We've all seen clips of good players with a mouse like Shroud or Rapha.  At some point, putting your cursor over the enemy is not an impossible goal to reach for many PC players and there's no where left to go except a point and click adventure.  There's nowhere to improve, those players are already immediately bonking their head on the aiming skill for every shooter to ever reach the PC market.  If the LG, Railgun, and MachineGun all had travel time Quake would probably be a better game.  The same goes for Siege and CSGO but chances are if you mention that to people who play those games they'd laugh or vehemently scoff at you because "What, you think you know better?".  People just defend what they know and would rather not think about how to improve things.

10 hours ago, Ugug said:

What's the problem with my shots going exactly where I aim them? Am I misunderstanding something with hitscan?

Your shots still go where you're pointed with projectile, you might be conflating it with RNG spread.

10 hours ago, _Synapse said:

I don't think it's inherently bad, just poorly done.

The problem with hitscan is that for the sake of slight convenience and network consistency, you have to radically change a lot of other things about your utility to make it a skillful weapon. 

At the same time, I don't think it's unusable. 

Tack it onto a few other weapons in the sandbox, give each of them their own unique caveats to using, their own unique strengths, and you have made it useful.

Unless of course hitscan intrinsically violates some fundamental principle that I'm not aware of

 

8 hours ago, Reamis25 said:

Lol I was joking man I just wanted to see what you’d as a developer would say and I do agree. But isn’t there some non truth to that though? I mean look at CS. That game is hitscan and it obviously has other mechanics that help balance the guns. Recoil, spread patterns. Now I know you don’t like recoil as a balancing tool(although I can’t fathom why completely) 

 

Let me throw you guys a hypothetical.

 

I want you to imagine playing a fighting game where the moment the other player starts executing a combo on you, there is no way to break out.  There is no input for you to match, no well timed parry or fast fall or invincibility frame to trigger.  All they need to do, is not screw up their own combo timing.  So the moment you get hit once and are stunned, you are now at the mercy of the other player to screw up. Which, they won't.  Because entering combos in just about every fighting game is really not that difficult of a thing to do timing wise.

 

This is actually not too far from a reality when you look at some of the MK games.  They technically do have an input that can give you some invincibility frames to exit a combo but it's on a cooldown (stupid decision) so many times; you get hit once, and then because you were hit once, you are now being hit 12 more times as the other players just enters their inputs.  This is stupid.

 

The actual underlying issue with this is that while you might have deserved the first hit, you don't deserve the next 12.  The game is punishing you for things and not offering you any way to use your own skill to counter or mitigate it.  This is the same problem I have with hitscan. The first time Beast and Ice Princess brought up this topic some year ago this was the analogy in my head but i just didn't care enough to bring it up, but their argument was "if I put my reticle in the right spot and pull the trigger, why should they be able to simply walk out of the way of my bullet.  I did the right thing."  Which is true.  But just because you did the right thing, does not mean the enemy player did the wrong thing.  Hitscan doesn't ask that question, it doesn't matter how good you move or strafe or dodge or duck, if the other players has enough skill to put their cursor over you, you're dead.  Your skill is completely irrelevant, and as we've all seen in some of the great PC players, putting a cursor over someone is not that much to ask for a mouse player.  The correct relationship is "I did something right, AND they did something wrong, now I am rewarded with damage", aka I shot correctly, they did not dodge correctly, now my bullet hits them.  If you did something correct (being shooting accurately), and they dodge, then you both did the right thing.  They shouldn't take damage for that.

 

This is akin to Killer Instincts combo breaker where every single hit that they execute in their combo, the game gives you the chance to match the input and if you can pull it off in the right time it combo breaks.  That is good design.  Same reason I like projectile, it's not needlessly punishing you for things that are never asked.  You actually have control over yourself provided the projectiles move slowly enough, you're not at the mercy of the other player.

 

It's also worth noting that making difficult hitscan shooting on console means dropping the aim assist a LOT, increase the strafe accel a lot, which if we're being real, is just never going to feel comfortable with thumbsticks.  it's not what they're good at, anyone who's played Halo 5 at 120% strafe accel and the game's shitty aiming knows exactly how mental it is to try and shoot someone moving like that, and that's in a game with a lot of AA as well.  You can't tune hitscan the same way between console and PC and get relatively similar average kill times, it just doesn't work. This is why devs resort to either doing separate tuning between platforms, or some stupid damage dropoff.... or most commonly RNG spread. Or you do spray patterns. 

 

Or, you can say screw hitscan and do projectiles with decent sized bullet width that is equally difficult on both console and PC, protects long range combat, and more proportionately rewards and punishes players for how they move.  And if you're dead set on having a weapon deliver pressure long range you could still just do the really fast moving projectiles that we see in H3 / CE that you can't actually see travel but still require some small reticle adjustments.

 

 

 

 

One of these two requires compromising a million other aspects of the game and coming up with a handful of different solutions, doesn't even work between platforms, has a palpable and visible skill ceiling, and to be honest is just boring.

The other is projectile.  Tell me which of these two is objectively better game design.

 

[SpitFlame]

27 minutes ago, MultiLockOn said:

Quake has more or less the fastest movement we've ever seen in a video game bar tribes

no this is the fastest game

[MultiLockOn]

38 minutes ago, SpitFlame said:

no this is the fastest game

The covenant jiggalo is a vehicle-human hybrid that when activated makes

[_Synapse]

Hmm, I didn't think about skill symmetry. 

 

Though, it does call into question whether shooting allows for much skill symmetry in the first place. If we wanted to preserve skill symmetry even with projectile weapons, we need perfect strafe acceleration. 

[aa_Pregnant_Nun]

6 hours ago, SpitFlame said:

no this is the fastest game

Careful their Chad, they could add sprint to sonic when you're not looking

[JordanB]

On 8/8/2020 at 11:25 AM, Sitri said:

No, but does the super duper controller let you map things per-game? I thought it just had a switch between different presets.

 

You create profiles, but you can create as many profiles as you want. You can create a profile for each Halo game with their own button mappings - you just might have to go into settings first (since the controller can only toggle between 2-3 profiles at a time), which takes like 10 seconds.

Man, I usually stay away from complaining about reddit or twitter (mostly because I do browse reddit and just stay out of my way from the dumb-dumbs) but I had a guy go on a rant about how new Halo isn't any different than old Halo and that Halo 4 plays exactly the same as Halo 2 with the exception of sprint. The world is a strange place

[Sitri]

18 minutes ago, aa_Pregnant_Nun said:

Careful their Chad, they could add sprint to sonic when you're not looking

To be fair, Sonic did go to even worse shit when they gave you a one-button forward speed boost.

[Boyo]

45 minutes ago, Sitri said:

To be fair, Sonic did go to even worse shit when they gave you a one-button forward speed boost.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 was shit?  

[Sitri]

28 minutes ago, Boyo said:

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 was shit?  

I was talking about the modern incarnation where you press a single button for instant fast.

[JordanB]

"Halo Infinite isn't fully open world, but you can explore previous areas"

https://www.windowscentral.com/halo-infinite-isnt-fully-open-world-you-can-explore-previous-areas

Not sure if this has been discussed yet but I think this is really great news for the campaign. 

[Cursed Lemon]

17 minutes ago, JordanB said:

"Halo Infinite isn't fully open world, but you can explore previous areas"

https://www.windowscentral.com/halo-infinite-isnt-fully-open-world-you-can-explore-previous-areas

Not sure if this has been discussed yet but I think this is really great news for the campaign. 

I don't know if backtracking is what people had in mind when they heard "open world".

[Reamis25]

2 minutes ago, Cursed Lemon said:

I don't know if backtracking is what people had in mind when they heard "open world".

It’s basically open world in the sense you can do side quest and shit, it’s not a straight forward path like h2-5. H1 had elements like this but the side quest were sort of pointless.

[RatherSilentMr]

13 hours ago, Meek Meek Meek said:

After a very long hiatus, I ultimately return with a nitpick. There is much I can say about the Jul 23 reveal in general but at this point there's not much others haven't brought up. Most of my disappointment had to do with the technical prowess (or lack of) of the showing - what an embarrassment.

Anyways, back to the petty nitpick. I could ignore this before but now it's more noticeable than ever. Why does the warthog have audible gear shifts when its equipped with a CVT? Sure you can hear these shifts in H5 too but now it just sounds like a tuned 4 banger with a snappy transmission. So much for attention to detail from the 'lore' masters themselves.

They just wanted to use the word infinitely. Marketing immerion

[RatherSilentMr]

2 hours ago, Cursed Lemon said:

I don't know if backtracking is what people had in mind when they heard "open world".

Maybe it's backtracking akin to Assault on The Control Room / Two Betrayals ? ?  

Given this 343 it has me nervous. 

[Crimson]

@Boyo I appreciate your brainstorming but I'm low-key waiting for the day 343 takes one of your ideas and gives you no credit for it. 

[Reamis25]

I’m sure hoping we get AI in custom games. Something like Gary’s mod or Cod style. 

[JordanB]

4 hours ago, Cursed Lemon said:

I don't know if backtracking is what people had in mind when they heard "open world".

It sounds like less back tracking and more unlocking side quests. Take the mission Halo in CE, but there was only 1 group of marines you were supposed to save. You get to them and complete the level. Now you can go back and find out there are more marines you can save.

I'd much rather this than some imaginative open world campaign. Open world sounds nice in imagination but I really don't think it fits the Halo campaign very well, and I really don't trust 343 to deliver with that type of gameplay/story.

[Cursed Lemon]

10 minutes ago, JordanB said:

It sounds like less back tracking and more unlocking side quests. Take the mission Halo in CE, but there was only 1 group of marines you were supposed to save. You get to them and complete the level. Now you can go back and find out there are more marines you can save.

I'd much rather this than some imaginative open world campaign. Open world sounds nice in imagination but I really don't think it fits the Halo campaign very well, and I really don't trust 343 to deliver with that type of gameplay/story.

I'm just quietly amused at how 343 is doing nothing to quell the "open world" marketing magic that Infinite is leaning on. I'm sure everyone who's paying even the slightest amount of critical attention understands that a Halo game could never be The Witcher 3, but it's still funny to watch 343 basically like, "hmm? Oh yeah, yeah open world. Yeah totally. Open. Yep."