Spartan Ops sounds great to me. If I'm right you get multiple small missions and you can unlock stuff. reminds me of MW3's Spec Ops Survival and missions together; Little missions(missions) and unlocking stuff(survival). Not bad at all in my opinion.
Anyone care to explain the quicktime thing? And Spartan Ops seems like it'll be wonderful, cheesy name or not.
Ever played Resident Evil, God of War or any games like that? You know in the middle of cutscenes where it tells you to press/mash a certain button/button comination? That's a Quicktime Event. I guess it adds some sort of interactivity to cutscenes and keeps players on their toes, or something.
I think what they mean by Quicktime events is when your character does stuff in first person that he normally wouldnt (ex. Prying open a door, dodging debris) while possibly pressing buttons to do so (ex mashing X as fast as you can to open a door). Edit: Neo beat me to it.
They should just sprinkle it in every few missions or so. I hate when they have those in EVERY SINGLE MISSION in some games.
Well, maybe they tried but they mostly failed. Complaints about netcode and random spread aside, the game still had a pretty far separation between good players and casuals. Knowing map set ups, weapon spawn times (although not quite as good in regular Halo 3), being good with the BR, working as a team; all of this combined so that new players would never beat, or even half the time kill experienced players (new accounts, 50-0 slayer games). That's the way it should be. I don't get this whole undervaluing of experience. "Oh, you've played our game for a year and bought all the map packs? No biggie, we'll just make the game suck for you so some guy who buys it on a whim will play for a week". It's stupid. If I put time into something I should automatically have an advantage over new players. That's not to say they won't still be able to do some damage, especially if they're good. Any new player that jumps into a game and expects to go 20-2 is just stupid. Yet they cater to that person anyway. I'll say this for Epic: even after casualizing Gears a bit they still made it pretty unforgiving for noobs. They added TDM to help noobs hating the one death you're done in Execution/Warzone and that was a good choice. However, unless I **** up a noob is never gonna kill me in Gears. That's what 343 should have done. Taken all this new ****, touted it around at trade shows and then stuck it in one or two playlists with 80% of the game being a fixed version Halo 3. Noobs don't need 10 playlists, all they want to do is kill **** and hit x to respawn.
How did noone notice this? On the top left there are 4 grenades. Oneof which looks like some type of radar.
No there are only three and it was noticed a while back, it's buried in here somewhere. What it looks like they're doing is having 3 grenade types, and which ever grenade you have equipped disappears from the 3 small icons and shows up as larger to the right.
tbh, I think Halo has always been nicer to new players ANYWAY by having everybody start on an equal level, and only though map control and other tactics and skill can you win. Games like BF and COD where you unlock weapons, giving newbies an impossible frustrating way of getting into the game is awful. Halo promotes skill and equality. Except theres still a way of gaining what you put in. Knowing the maps.
Lol you sound like half of the MLG forums, and just the same as they sounded about H3 during its time on the circuit. The problem with closing the skill gap is what it's in comparison to. Much as I agree about AAs changing the nature of the game significantly, the way Bungie took such a determined approach to reducing the precision of utility weapons since CE may trump it. The H2 BR was atrocious compared to the CE Pistol, especially pre-patch, and the H3 BR put a near absolute cap on ranged combat with the basic precision weapon. Whilst Reach's AAs added a whole new aspect to the game, at least they brought back the potential for real cross mapping. Idk, I don't totally disagree, I just think we'll likely be hearing the same things about Reach a year or two down the line. "At least it didn't have an equipment-focused levelling system" "I know it had things wrong with it but at least is still felt like Halo" etc. etc. H3 has just always seemed a really odd point to draw the line in the sand to me.
Naw, it's the perfect place to draw the line. It still was Halo. There weren't any vast sanbox changes and the only things wrong with it are things only the hyper competitive noticed. I, for one, didn't like the nature of the Halo 2 BR. I liked having to lead shots. Hit scan IMO lowers the skill gap, although I understand that in a world of bad connections and subpar netcoding it's entirely necessary. Yes, the spread should have been fixed and not random, I can agree to that. But honestly, you have to take a step back and look at it in the grand scheme of things: did a random spread really make it not Halo? No. I'm not going to get into a debate of single shot vs burst from a competitive standpoint but I will say I felt the DMR made gameplay dull. Something about that repetitive triggerpull, stop, triggerpull, stop nature of the DMR bothered me. Maybe it was the speed cap, even after bloom..because I always liked the Carbine, which just felt altogether faster. I'm getting off track though. Anyway, what I feel separated Reach wasn't simply just armor abilities. I mean you had sprint, which while being an armor ability became the default ability in 90% of gametypes, so rather than feeling like an AA it just felt like a negative change to Halo. You had the initially very slow kill time of the bloom DMR. You had crappy strafe acceleration (or a lack thereof) and default slow movement speed and jump height. You had an awkward sized character model with the camera placed too high. You had a rather poor and unbalanced weapon suit (even worse than the previous games). You had atrocious vehicle combat. You had terrible maps that were in no way built like the classic competitive halo maps of the best. And, of course, you had AAs. I mean you look back at Halo 3 and it still moved roughly the same speed. You still jumped as high. You felt like you could do a better job strafing. The maps were far better. You still had your BR. There was no fall damage or health packs. Apart from some minor changes only really felt by MLG, the game was still entirely Halo. Reach wasn't. So we may look back at Reach and say "man, even that crap wasn't as bad as this" but I doubt we'll be praising it for anything it did. The last true Halo game was certainly 3. On a side note: I generally don't factor too much of CE into my opinions on competitive gameplay. It wasn't live enabled so it was really available to a mass audience and thus never really had the exposure or testing of a mass audience. I think some more complaints would have been raised if it had been played by the same number of people as Halo 3. Personally, I feel a lot of stuff for CE is pretty dated from a MP sense. Fall damage, health packs, a lot fo the map design; this is stuff Reach did actually attempt to mimic and it didn't work. Sure, CE has good long distance precision kill times but I'm not even sure if we'd be praising that if it were the focus of a new Halo game.
Ok, to address these points other than what we went over: people said all these things about H3 in comparison to 2. Did they hate on the strafe acceleration and slippery feeling? Hell yes, one of the biggest complaints. Did they hate on the slower movement speed than H2? Hell yes. Player camera height not so much, but people have been hating on the field of view angle being decreased since CE. Weapon set being poor and unbalanced? Oh hell yes, people bitched about this in H3 no end. It's hard to divorce this from discussions about the DMR, but the fact that it was noticeably nerfed made people hate things like the AR even more. Now H3 did do vehicle combat very well, I'll give it that, but since the discussion I was relating mostly applies to competitive play it never really comes up. For the discussion at large though, fair point. However, maps was one of the main reasons people hated on H3 compared to H2. I actually thought the maps got too much hate in H3, but to a reasonable extent I think the same is true of Reach. I love Zealot, Powerhouse, Boardwalk and Countdown and Asylum from the default pool, with the DLCs being a kinda hit and miss but with some real gems in, and the Anni maps are great by and large. Also, I'd like to point out that H3 introduced aim acceleration to the series, changing the nature of aiming itself is a pretty big deviation imo. Reach still has it, but much less than H3, another way in which I consider Reach to be kinda undoing some of the damage done in H3. Sorry, fall damage and health packs not being classic Halo? Do I really need to address this? Needless to say I disagree. H3 kids, that's all I can really say .
I didn't say it "mattered." I agree that what should matter to us, as players, is whether or not it's fun to play. But if we're allowed to talk about the business side of things and the creative and financial direction of the series, with your gracious permission... then yes, it isn't completely meaningless that they're lifting both ideas and terminology from Call of Duty. You can be for or against that, or completely neutral on it, but I would hope you'd at least admit that it's going on. Like I've said before, I understand why they're doing it. I honestly and truly do. I'm not that happy about it in some respects (perks, weapon-buying and loadouts), although this "spartan ops" thing doesn't trouble me - for one thing, it's just a name; for another, I loved spec ops in MW2 and I'd truthfully be happy if they ripped it off wholesale; and finally, what they've described of spartan ops sounds (like I already said) kind of badass, if they deliver on the idea as they've laid it out so far. All that said, however: somebody mentioned that it sounded a lot like CoD, somebody else countered "No way, that's just the only word in existence they could have used for it" - and I replied to that statement. I didn't even intend a value judgment, I was just pointing out something that seems obvious to me. A major game developer like 343 is surely aware that their biggest competitor prominently used the word "ops" for both a recent game title, and a major mode in two of their other games. So let's just call a spade a spade, regardless of whether it "matters" or not.
eh i still think calling it ops is like both games using the word "grenades" for explosive throwing devices. seems like the logical word to use to me.
CE was *hugely* popular for split screen and LAN play. It may not have been as popular as subsequent Halo multiplayer simply due to being less accessible, but trust me, CE multiplayer was by no means a niche experience. We're in danger of getting badly off topic here, but what exactly is wrong with any of the above in CE? You seem to be implying that fall damage and health packs in particular are objectively bad from a competitive standpoint, and I don't see it.
I don't think that's a great analogy. Thrown explosives are called grenades, that's their name, just like guns being called guns. What would you call them apart from that? A series of story missions can and has been called plenty of things in various games, "ops" isn't an inherent name for it.