Halo 5: Guardians Discussion

[Moa]

 

I can't wait for someone to complain about this.

[Vetoed]

 

I can't wait for someone to complain about this.

I don't celebrate Christmas. I'm triggered.

[Moa]

I don't celebrate Christmas. I'm triggered.

Starbucks must be your favourite coffee shop. 

[EagleBurn]

 

I can't wait for someone to complain about this.

 

I'll save you the wait then. If they really wanted people to come back to their game based on holiday cheer, they should have made it snow on their maps, or added some lights on trees, or santa hats on Spartans. Something that people actually care about, not two emblems that someone spent their lunch break on.

[Alex Gurren]

 

Along with @@Batchford, this is how I feel when IcePrincess posts something..........

[Moa]

I'll save you the wait then. If they really wanted people to come back to their game based on holiday cheer, they should have made it snow on their maps, or added some lights on trees, or santa hats on Spartans. Something that people actually care about, not two emblems that someone spent their lunch break on.

At least they didn't change team colours in some playlists across the game. God, that was awful.

[Pyroteq]

OT but i've never seen gameplay of Quake or know anything about the game. That is actually the first time i've ever seen a game with movement speed that fast before. The first arena shooter i've ever played I guess you could say is Halo and i couldn't imagine holding my own in a game like Quake. I don't know if you can explain to me how something that fast is considered balanced if you don't mind or if Halo should be heading somewhere in that direction too?

 

Do I have a treat for you:

 

 

Every time someone asks about Quake I HAVE to show them this video.

 

If you're too lazy to watch the entire thing at least check out the insane twitch rail shot at 12:40. I warn you though, after seeing this every Halo montage you ever see will be "meh" at best.

 

Anyway, I don't really understand the question. It's balanced because the game is built around speed and strafe jumping. Strafe jumping was a glitch in Quake 1 that was so popular the developers included it on purpose in future Quake games. You basically jump whilst holding forward and left/right and time your jumps properly to build up speed. You can also do things like rocket jump or even shoot the wall behind you if you want to build up speed faster at the cost of your health.

 

The original Halo is pretty much based on Quake. You'll notice the mega health ticking back down to 100 just like the OS in Halo degenerates over time and the red armour pick up is basically an over shield.

 

Halo is designed for console which means certain aspects needed to be slowed down for console. The 2 weapon limitation was introduced because cycling through 10 different weapons on your controller was tedious and things like strafe jumping would be incredibly difficult with a joystick.

 

I don't want to see Halo end up like Quake, after all, if I want to play Quake I'd just play Quake. Halo plays team games way better IMO. In Quake you can just have someone grab the flag and run around the map getting killing sprees, however Halo requires that you escort your carrier because they're defenceless (mostly). I'd definitely like to see Halo take more inspiration from arena shooters than modern military shooters though...

 

 

Games cost more as people buy more. Its a two way street.

 

Pisses me off so damn much that people love to exclude that information.

 

Like seriously, when I was younger you were considered a loser if you played games after school. Nowadays it's hard to find someone without a console. You mean to tell me game developers and publishers are making less profits than they were 10 years ago?

 

Ha, give me a fucking break.

[Lux]

Also, just a thought on "aesthetics" (in the widest sense of the word, i.e., how we perceive the world and how we link thought to thought, stimulus to stimulus etc.). This post is going to be a complete mess but it's the only way I know how to put into words how I feel about H4 and 5.

 

Games, like all stimuli, are mentally-housed within "frames" (genre, groups of "linkable" games [similar, aesthetically or otherwise], entertainment content in general) and house "frames" within themselves (groups of characters, customizable elements, types of maps [4v4, BTB]

 

A game's "framiness", its ability to act as a good "mental collection of things" (which controls how "big" and psychologically-important it and the frames/items housed within it are) depends on it having aesthetic agency over itself, meaning it doesn't link itself too much or too little to other games.

 

Too much individuality and it's an outlier, in with the indie games and whatnot. Too little and it becomes not so much a game as a "segment" of the greater "AAA ADS twitch shooter" mega-game which contains all such games, almost making it a gametype rather than its own thing - the game, and everything within it, becomes smaller, less psychologically-ingrained in players' minds, and sort of an underdog along with the rest of them. In such a game, just due to the smallness of its frame in comparison to the larger frame of the "AAA shooter mega-game", there's no possibility of anything in it becoming iconic to gamers.

 

Even as a sci-fi shooter set in the 26th century, there's not that much separating Halo 5 from being engulfed into that AAA shooter mega-game. The focus is on "epic" (Bonnie Ross' favourite word) like just about every other piece of popular fictional entertainment media right now, so that not only mentally links it to other games, but cinema and TV trends as well. Not a good idea. You're supposed to leech off enough of big entertainment's "flashiness juice" to make your game stimulating to a certain baseline, but not so much that it becomes faceless, soulless and devoid of longevity.

 

So how much of Halo 4/5 is unlinked to other media? The weapon design, maybe? The holographic smart-link has a slight trendy RGB split which, due to it also being found throughout them, can be mentally-linked to modern sci-fi, cinema, and (most notably) modern computing (traces of which were not present AT ALL in previous games), and also the hologram itself has been a trope of shitty Vimeo sci-fi shorts since forever.

 

The weapons are all dull blocks with coloured trapezoids on them, as if they recognized how cool and unique the AR looked and decided to make everything else look like it. They all look too much the same, meaning no individual weapon could become iconic, since the common visual elements adds weight to the frame (and therefore iconicness) of "Halo weapons" in general but unnecessarily removes weight (and therefore psychological importance and iconicness) from the individual weapons themselves.

 

Further adding to that effect is waaaaay excessive type-grouping of weapons. The Forerunner weapons all have exactly the same look, as do the Covenant weapons, as do the human weapons. That's three frames that suck all the individuality and weight out of their constituent parts. That's just fucking ridiculous. In terms of gameplay, it goes even further, with groups/tiers of like six weapons doing exactly the same thing and being equally powerful. When game assets link to each other too much, they form a gestalt unit within which they have no mental importance whatsoever. To exaggerate, you now have a single neuron for "human weapons" instead of individual neurons for "Assault Rifle", "Magnum", "Railgun", etc.

 

Since H2, weapons have had physical scopes, which automatically links them to literally everything else in the world with scoped weapons even though marines with the green eyepiece in CE could have presumably zoomed in without them. H2 generally, quite frankly, leeched off the post-9/11 positive association with military, and it shows. Everything about that game is modern military, modern military, modern military. And so is/was everything else since then. More importantly, it set Halo down a road of doing what everyone else is doing, further removing from its "framiness" and potential to create iconic assets within gaming.

 

Armour permutations are now unlocked by REQs. One of the primary factors, if not the primary factor of H3's armour variants' identity, was how they were unlocked. Being varied and separate, the methods for unlocking them were, mentally, complete units unto themselves, unconnected to one another - now the method for unlocking is the same, inadvertently creating a huge gestalt unit of "Halo 5 armour variants" between which you have much less mental ease in differentiating.

 

One positive thing they did, however, was group the types of body armour pieces together. If they hadn't, those pieces would have had too much individuality and no importance within the (purely visual) anti-gestalt of the mishmash of like 100 variants. Grouped together, they reinforce each others' identity, allowing them to fit within various niches of "skeletal", "heavy", "agile," "simple", "complex", etc.

 

The campaign levels are also too categorized. You have your Blue Team missions, Osiris missions, Sanghelios missions, Meridian missions, Genesis missions and your hub missions. In a group of 15 of anything, there is absolutely no need to categorize anything. Missions should have individuality and importance unto themselves. H2 had the same problem. You can avoid falling into that trap simply by keeping all the missions in one place, like a Halo or Requiem in H4's case.

 

You can apply all of what I've said to the characters, the visual aesthetics, the music - everything. If you choose to visualize gaming as a whole as a series of Russian dolls stacking into each other, the problems become apparent. Some dolls (which are both frames and assets at the same time) will be more important than others. If you have too many dolls, none of them are important except the ones that contain the most dolls (kind of twisting the analogy here). Too little dolls and no importance is established in the first place.

 

How about that for abstract.

[Foe]

 

I can't wait for someone to complain about this.

You want some complaining?   

 

*Releases a pointless Req pack containing 2 emblems and Warzone stuff

*Doesn't release important and needed updates to Halo: MCC for the large amount of people that play it.

 

:bravo: Logic

[MATCLAN]

Locus hype train HAS NO BRAKES.

 

 

That helmet looks rather similar to the Flood model's head from H4's Flood mode.

[Moa]

That helmet looks rather similar to the Flood model's head from H4's Flood mode.

[Moa]

 

Yeah, that didn't take long. Real charmer, @@Zeus The Dino.

[Dysphoria]

 

 

I always loved this one.

[Nokterne]

We're posting our favorite Quake videos?

 

[Rolf]

I feel like 343's interpretation of Halo is whats fucking up the art, lore, and campaign of their games. 343 is trying to make their own sci-fi universe where humans are the biggest and baddest, when the whole point of the originals was humanity was beaten down and at the breaking point, and the art reflected that.

 

343's is trying to show them as refined and populated when the universe should be the complete opposite. This isn't Star Trek - its Halo.

 

I've always hated this. It's so stupid. Did they ever give a logical explanation for this? It's like Germany ruling the world three years after losing WWII.

[Moa]

I've always hated this. It's so stupid. Did they ever give a logical explanation for this? It's like Germany ruling the world three years after losing WWII.

I've always seen it as the war being over, humanity is rebuilding as best as it can. 

 

Never been a fan of how humanity was fucked in all regards a few years ago but suddenly we still have all this tech and stuff.

[Cooper]

Last night I watched some of the 2v2 tourney.

 

Wow, it was a terrible spectator experience.

 

Nearly every pistol kill was indirect as landing a direct pistol kill seemed practically impossible due to escape mechanics/teammate assistance and the weak pistol.

 

The empahasis on spray weapons was appalling. Its just so boring to watch.

 

HCS is in trouble.

[Pyroteq]

Wow, this game is seriously fucking dead in Australia/NZ. I imagine other regions are even worse off such as South America and Asia.

 

It's 10X's worse than I actually thought.

 

I'm currently doing a test and recording and you guys would not believe this shit.

 

It's honestly at the point where I believe Microsoft should just refund everyone outside NA and Europe. And no, I'm not joking. I think in 6 months from now there will be less Australian's playing Halo 5 then there were playing Halo 4 1 year after launch.

 

Searching started at 12:50 am - 10/12/2015 and it's now 2am. That's too late to find games you say? Well it's not even 11pm in Western Australia and before 1am in Queensland. I'm not ranked Champion or anything either. I'm unranked in FFA and Breakout, Onyx 1500 in SWAT and Platinum in Slayer and Team Arena.

 

Warzone Assault - Cannot find games (I've only ever been able to find 1 or 2 games in this playlist since launch)

 

FFA - Cannot find games (Have played 6/10 placement games, have tried searching peak hours nearly every day)

 

Team Slayer - Cannot find games IN FUCKING SLAYER!?!?!?!

 

Team Arena - Found a game.

 

SWAT - Cannot find games

 

Big Team Battle - Cannot find games

 

Breakout - Believe it or not, I somehow found a game (my very first in the Breakout playlist). I was actually disappointed in this because I wanted to hold onto my Breakout v-card for the remainder of Halo 5... Should have done it on an alt. Ah well, all in the name of science I guess. I believe this was just a fluke though since I tried searching again and found no games. EDIT: Found another game. I believe this may be because I've only played 2 games so it hasn't given me an MMR for this playlist yet.

 

So lets see, I can find games in 1/2 Warzone playlists and 2/5 arena playlists, one of those being Breakout which I wouldn't even classify as playing Halo at that point.

 

I used to play Halo 2 with my team mates until 3am and would find games in nearly any play list.

 

I checked CS:GO and there's currently 13 games with <50ms latency in Australia - only counting servers with 8 or more players in the server browser - That's not including the match making system.

[TheIcePrincess]

That helmet looks rather similar to the Flood model's head from H4's Flood mode.

Really does.

[aKREZZ]

 

Yeah, that didn't take long. Real charmer, @@Zeus The Dino.

[edymont1987]

Wow, this game is seriously fucking dead in Australia/NZ. I imagine other regions are even worse off such as South America and Asia.

 

It's 10X's worse than I actually thought.

 

I'm currently doing a test and recording and you guys would not believe this shit.

 

It's honestly at the point where I believe Microsoft should just refund everyone outside NA and Europe. And no, I'm not joking. I think in 6 months from now there will be less Australian's playing Halo 5 then there were playing Halo 4 1 year after launch.

 

Searching started at 12:50 am - 10/12/2015 and it's now 2am. That's too late to find games you say? Well it's not even 11pm in Western Australia and before 1am in Queensland.

 

Warzone Assault - Cannot find games (I've only ever been able to find 1 or 2 games in this playlist since launch)

 

FFA - Cannot find games (Have played 6/10 placement games, have tried searching peak hours nearly every day)

 

Team Slayer - Cannot find games IN FUCKING SLAYER!?!?!?!

 

Team Arena - Found a game.

 

SWAT - Cannot find games

 

Big Team Battle - Cannot find games

 

Breakout - Believe it or not, I somehow found a game (my very first in the Breakout playlist). I was actually disappointed in this because I wanted to hold onto my Breakout v-card for the remainder of Halo 5... Should have done it on an alt. Ah well, all in the name of science I guess. I believe this was just a fluke though since I tried searching again and found no games. EDIT: Found another game. I believe this may be because I've only played 2 games so it hasn't given me an MMR for this playlist yet.

 

I used to play Halo 2 with my team mates until 3am and would find games in nearly any play list.

Yeah, but that's not really a population issue. That is a known problem since launch. It's nearly impossible to find games in Warzone, FFA and now BTB outside of US and EU. Even in peak times, with a full team. There is some broken shit with the matchmaking system outside of US and EU. It keeps looking for players forever until eventually you get an error message. There are a lot of threads on Waypoint complaining about this issue. This one has over 90 pages! And now, with a smaller population than before, should only worsen the situation even more.

They acknowledged the problem, made some changes to the matchmaking system about 2 or 3 weeks after the release which improved the situation, but people in Europe started to complain about constant lag and then they reversed the changes and are "investigating the problem" since then.

Team Arena and Breakout seem to work fine.

[Rippendeil]

Not that you should consider Dice as a superb developer but they have added a snowball fight game mode to the CTE servers of BF4 with players wearing santa and reindeer masks. In the December update 343i could add a community playlist similar to this, grenades as snowballs or something? Just for laughs you know? Or maybe a Indiana Jones inspired capture the gifts - game mode where you have to steal a gift and run with it to mommy. Like anything innovative and fun stuff for the holidays? *Insert the imagination song from South Park here* 

[Spartan0S36]

Yeah, that didn't take long. Real charmer, @@Zeus The Dino.

 

This will certainly help our situation at all, really.

 

Like ever. For real.

[Pyroteq]

 

Yeah, but that's not really a population issue. That is a known problem since launch. It's nearly impossible to find games in Warzone, FFA and now BTB outside of US and EU. Even in peak times, with a full team. There is some broken shit with the matchmaking system outside of US and EU. It keeps looking for players forever until eventually you get an error message. There are a lot of threads on Waypoint complaining about this issue. This one has over 90 pages! And now, with a smaller population than before, should only worsen the situation even more

Team Arena and Breakout seem to work fine.

 

 

Ummm, WTF dude?

 

Of course it's a population issue.

 

The game keeps on searching for games because it's trying to find enough players at your skill level.

 

The issue is:

 

1. The game won't allow you to find players outside your region. Even if I WANT to play FFA on laggy American servers the game won't let me because for some reason EVEN THOUGH 343 PROMISED US they released the game without a region filter option for players to turn on and off.

 

2. The game is way too restrictive on player skill. The game is probably looking for players ranked Diamond or Platinum instead of expanding out to Gold, Diamond, Platinum and Silver and increasing until it finally finds a game.

 

Tight match making restrictions only work when you have a large enough population.

 

It's like 343 just copied the system from LoL without even realising the reason it works in LoL is because the game literally has 100X's the player population so they can do whatever the hell they want and still find you a game.

 

Even if 343 fixed this problem in the next 5 minutes the damage is done.

 

Half the players have probably returned their copies for Fallout 4 when the game didn't ship with the content you'd expect in a Halo game and then the inability to find matches reliably would have been the final nail in the coffin.

 

The Aussies that still actually play Halo will never touch the FFA playlist again since they've given up after they tried searching 50 times for game without any luck.

 

Any fix 343 brings out now is too little and WAY too late.

 

The game has been out for a month and a half now and this has been an issue for us since week 1.

[TheCelticDragon]

The following things are what Reach improved from Halo 3 multiplayer:

 

• Better forge
• Better custom games
• More/Better gametypes
• Better UI/Lobby
• Pro-Pipe

Funnily enough, 343 undid ALL of those when they released Halo 4, and continue to do so. Like, those were the things people were unanimously happy with in Halo Reach, and 343 took a huge step back on all of them.

Halo 5 would be a substantially better game right now if it had Reach tier forge at launch, Reach style custom games, Reache's gametypes, Reaches UI, and one of imo the best weapons to grace Halo both competitively and casually, and was the one redeeming quality of it's v1 comp settings, the Pro-Pipe.

 

Bask in it's wundrous glory

 

i would heavily argue custom games, it may of been unintentional but the h3 custom game experience was the pinnacle custom game experience of the franchise.