Halo 4

[SiN]

I just concluded an all-day Halo 4-a-thon. We have a solid system: there are three of us, but we play 2p co-op. The spectator subs in when a player gets tired/frustrated, and thus the gaming goes on indefinitely. We got through the campaign on Heroic in around 8 hours, I believe.

Really enjoyed it overall. There's just a solid consistency throughout the campaign, in terms of the level and encounter design. With previous Halo games, there was always a super-backtracky bit, and the eventual introduction/tedium of the Flood. Halo 4 is just consistently good throughout. Especially on encounter design, I feel it lives up to the Bungie games.

But this consistency also means that the game felt a little same-ish the whole way though. Looking back, I can recall some great moments we had ("like that time you finally jacked the Banshee and then immediately crashed it", etc), but in terms of narrative, set piece, and level design, it all blends together. I'd take this over CoD-esque set-pieces obviously, but I don't feel the two have to be mutually exclusive experiences.

343 pulled off some pretty stylish artwork. Requiem (I think? The glowly levels) was particularly memorable. The humans/Covenant/Prometheans are distinct looking and relatively easy to parse, even on a squished split-screen. Similarly, the weapons design packed a lot of character.

The story started out well, but at some point it just got buried in its own lore. There was some interesting themes along the way, but they weren't explored deeply enough. Instead there was more lore related dialogue that failed to keep me interested.

Overall though, an enjoyable way to spend a day.

[Gwardinen]

But this consistency also means that the game felt a little same-ish the whole way though. Looking back, I can recall some great moments we had ("like that time you finally jacked the Banshee and then immediately crashed it", etc), but in terms of narrative, set piece, and level design, it all blends together. I'd take this over CoD-esque set-pieces obviously, but I don't feel the two have to be mutually exclusive experiences.

Yeah, I think I'm with you on that. I also played through the game in more or less one sitting with a friend who needed distraction, and I can scarcely remember any individual chapter apart from the first. It definitely felt like a Halo game, and I don't think anyone who is a fan of Halo and wants more Halo will be disappointed. As you said, the encounter design is just as good, and I think the Prometheans and their weapons slot in neatly. But that's really it, it's just neat. None of the newly introduced content changes or adds very much to the formula, either story-wise or in terms of the feel of the game, it just slots into the existing setup.

Overall I think this is fine for the first Halo game made by another company, and I think their success in recreating the experience of Halo is a success and is enough for now. However, I truly hope there are more risks taken with the second and third games in this trilogy, because I think the basic framework of a Halo game and a Halo story could still play host to something more than it has so far.

[Korax]

Lots of game site people were talking about how it seemed like 343 took to heart the whole "Heroic difficulty is how it's meant to be played" and rebalanced it so everything was harder. It took me about 6 hours soloing Normal, and about 8 soloing Legendary. I found it to be one of the easier games in the series.

Overall, I enjoyed it, but there are a few things that have bothered me.

343 seems to be so entrenched in the Halo lore that they sometimes forget when they have or haven't explained something. When the Didact shows up, he says something menacingly ambiguous and then takes off. Nobody gives any sort of explanation, but in the next level, everyone knows who he is and just starts referring to him by name. Similarly, during one of the more Covenant-focused levels, a new Covenant ship is introduced and referred to as "unidentified," but a couple parts later, characters just start calling it a "Lich" without any sort of prompting.

The addition of the Lich also sort of sums up my perception of 343's work on the game. Most of the other Covenant vehicles have names that are ghost-related: Ghost, Banshee, Spirit, Shade, Revenant, Wraith, Shadow, Spectre, Phantom. A lich is sort of a returned undead spirit, but it's not quite as ghost-y as all the others. It's like they recognized the pattern, but didn't pay quite enough attention to it to get it completely right.

And the ending:

FUCK QUICKTIME EVENTS. A lame boss fight or another driving-away-from-the-explody-thing sequence might have been a bit of a letdown, but it would have been infinitely better than "PRESS LEFT TRIGGER TO WIN." What irritates me even more is that there isn't anything else like it in the entire game, except for a brief QTE during the tutorial sequence. It's like they had the ending all planned out, realized that nothing else in the game (or franchise) was like it, and instead of figuring out that maybe it didn't fit, they said, "Oh, just add a bit into the tutorial so that players know what to do." You can also just hang from the edge of the light bridge or sit and stare at the primed nuke for an eternity because the only actual fail state for that sequence is missing the prompt to stick the Didact with a grenade.

[Patters]

Thisa game is so fucking good, it might be the best halo game there is. 343 have make up for the appalling multiplayer of Reach by making 4 so good, while there are issues relating to using a domestic host the hit recognition is generally great. The only problem is that the initial maps are pretty crap, only Haven and Adrift are good. But the new forge is pretty great. Slayer pro has been great to play.

This is my favourite game of the year and I haven't really touched the single player.

[Sno]

343 pulled off some pretty stylish artwork. Requiem (I think? The glowly levels) was particularly memorable.

The game has some really wonky scale on display in a few spots where it's trying to establish the concept of requiem, it makes requiem seem tiny. (Relatively speaking, of course. It's supposed to be a planet-sized dyson sphere-like construct, but it comes off seeming smaller than a Halo.)

The artificial sky in the "daylight" levels is a pretty cool effect though. (Looking up and seeing the other interior surfaces of Requiem, i guess.)

Edit: Playing through again on Legendary, i feel like i might have been massively misunderstanding the geography of Requiem, the game isn't really ever clear about any of it.

Lots of game site people were talking about how it seemed like 343 took to heart the whole "Heroic difficulty is how it's meant to be played" and rebalanced it so everything was harder. It took me about 6 hours soloing Normal, and about 8 soloing Legendary. I found it to be one of the easier games in the series.

343 specifically talked about "re-centering" the difficulty, and not blanketly making everything more difficult. I found heroic a bit easier than i was used to it being, and i'm not entirely sure about legendary yet, but i feel like i'm getting away with things that simply would not have flown in Reach. It seems like they have a different approach to balance, too. Enemies are constantly throwing grenades and dodging, but their weapon resistances don't seem to be tilted as much as they would be in one of the Bungie games. As a result, i feel like i'm hanging back more with the precision rifles, instead of making risky moves with a plasma pistol to try and drop an Elite's shields.

Edit: Again on Legendary, i'm noticing that this game doesn't do any smart checkpointing like the Bungie games did, It won't pop in an extra checkpoint during a lull in a battle.

343 seems to be so entrenched in the Halo lore that they sometimes forget when they have or haven't explained something. When the Didact shows up, he says something menacingly ambiguous and then takes off. Nobody gives any sort of explanation, but in the next level, everyone knows who he is and just starts referring to him by name. Similarly, during one of the more Covenant-focused levels, a new Covenant ship is introduced and referred to as "unidentified," but a couple parts later, characters just start calling it a "Lich" without any sort of prompting.

The game repeatedly jumps the gun on trying to introduce proper names for things and ends up implying familiarity where there is none. I've seen some people get angry about the fact that Chief and Cortana seem to know more than the player about what is going on regarding the Didact, and... I mean, I know that universe pretty well, and Chief and Cortana do not know who the Didact is. (Unless we are to believe that Chief and Cortana actually wandered around Halo 3 reading all those Forerunner terminals, which do talk about the Didact.)

Further confusing things is that there are all these (really, really ugly) motion comic things that just burn through the insanely convoluted Forerunner history that has been built up in the novels. It's an important gesture the game makes, but you first have to unlock them by finding terminals in the game - fair enough, but then you have to exit the damn game and go to waypoint to watch them.

I think their universe is big enough that they need a built-in Mass Effect-like codex or something. (Which exists, in a manner, but again only on Waypoint.)

The addition of the Lich also sort of sums up my perception of 343's work on the game. Most of the other Covenant vehicles have names that are ghost-related: Ghost, Banshee, Spirit, Shade, Revenant, Wraith, Shadow, Spectre, Phantom. A lich is sort of a returned undead spirit, but it's not quite as ghost-y as all the others. It's like they recognized the pattern, but didn't pay quite enough attention to it to get it completely right.

Some past UNSC ship names: Pillar of Autumn, Aegis Fate, Forward unto Dawn, Spirit of Fire, Heart of Midlothian, and the wryly named "Say my Name".

Halo 4 gives you: The imaginatively named UNSC Infinity

Though the books were already wildly inconsistent with Bungie's naming scheme.

And the ending:

FUCK QUICKTIME EVENTS. A lame boss fight or another driving-away-from-the-explody-thing sequence might have been a bit of a letdown, but it would have been infinitely better than "PRESS LEFT TRIGGER TO WIN." What irritates me even more is that there isn't anything else like it in the entire game, except for a brief QTE during the tutorial sequence. It's like they had the ending all planned out, realized that nothing else in the game (or franchise) was like it, and instead of figuring out that maybe it didn't fit, they said, "Oh, just add a bit into the tutorial so that players know what to do." You can also just hang from the edge of the light bridge or sit and stare at the primed nuke for an eternity because the only actual fail state for that sequence is missing the prompt to stick the Didact with a grenade.

I'm going to take the stance that at least it wasn't a shitty boss fight, which is definitely something Halo has flirted with disastrously. *Cough*Halo2*Cough*

Thisa game is so fucking good, it might be the best halo game there is. 343 have make up for the appalling multiplayer of Reach by making 4 so good, while there are issues relating to using a domestic host the hit recognition is generally great. The only problem is that the initial maps are pretty crap, only Haven and Adrift are good. But the new forge is pretty great. Slayer pro has been great to play.

This is my favourite game of the year and I haven't really touched the single player.

I've also been putting a ton of time into the multiplayer and have already been talking it over a lot. I would say my current assessment is that it has a lot of problems, but i still like it a lot more than Reach. (I'm not sure how i would compare it to 3, let's wait and see what the map packs provide, how the playlists evolve, and what the patches do.)

The thing that never really sat well with me about Reach is that it played at dramatically longer ranges, it was a much more sniper friendly game than any of the other Halo games have been. (Barring the original, i guess.) The combat triangle is a little more in balance here, grenades are weaker and more about control, melee is more important again, and ranges are more mid to close range at an average. Any fans of the assault rifle would be happy to know that it's quite viable, especially in close quarters dominion matches.

The effect Reach's armor abilities had on its gameplay was also dramatic and unpopular, and Halo 4 is a little more measured about what it does with those. Halo 4's controversial progression system actually ends up being more or less what Reach was already doing, but giving you a choice instead of letting playlists decide the loadouts. Some of the perks are still a little suspect, and some of the armor abilities seem dramatically underpowered relative to the others, but nothing is screaming broken.

Reach also had really terrible on-disc maps, but i think a lot of the maps in here are pretty solid. I really like Abandon, in particular. Not really into some of the larger big team maps though, i think the best one of those is simply the remake of Halo 3's Valhalla.

Some bugs have shown up, some Halo 2 kind of stuff, animation cancelling bugs and the like. I don't imagine those will stand for long, 343 seems to be a much more aggressive patcher than Bungie. (Considering the sweeping changes they brought to Reach when Bungie handed them the keys.)

A lot of gametypes from Halo Reach are missing, and a lot of gametypes that returned have far fewer options in custom gametypes. I've noticed people being particularly unhappy that there is no way to disable instant respawn in custom gametypes. (Instant respawn is pretty bullshit, i don't like it at all, it totally fucks up small slayer games.)

I personally feel that the most dramatic changes in 4 are the numerous ways in which weapon spawns have been changed, of which the most immediate component is that when a power weapon spawns, it will be marked on the hud of anybody nearby. I like this change, i feel it's a positive one. Map control was always a big part of Halo strategy, but In the context of the series shifting towards a broader variety of forge variant maps, it frequently was not feasible to learn spawns on all the maps that were in rotation on Reach. Revealing them is a simple and reasonable accessibility fix. That in addition to the other ways weapon spawns have changed, apparently with some purely random drops in the mix on certain maps, it creates a significantly different feeling game. You can play more with an eye towards improvization than pure memorization, and i like that.

I am not a fan of their killstreak mechanic, which is powered by medals you earn in play and carries across lives. With a lot of "comeback" style medals, it's supposed to also help out struggling players, but the actual effect is still just that a dominant team will end up with a ton of power weapons and an insurmountable lead. (Granted, those are likely situations you would lose to regardless.) In all fairness, it's a fairly restrained take on that style of mechanic, but i still don't have to like it.

Also, the Mantis is awesome and feels completely balanced. It kicks ass and is much fun.

The DMR and the BR are pretty redundant, and the DMR is proving to be a superior weapon. (They both kill in five shots, four on the shield and then a headshot, but the DMR fires faster and is better at long range.)

Dominion is rad addition with a lot of weird things going on, that is an entire post in and of itself. CTF also finally addresses some persisting issues, Infection has a cool new atmospheric vibe, and Grifball has effectively supplanted Assault. (Also, you can pass the ball now!) There's another new gametype that i haven't looked at, and isn't in any of the playlists right now. Firefight, Race, Headhunter, Territories, Invasion and a couple others are gone.

Spartan Ops seems very promising, but it's impossible to tell how it will shake out. The first episode, the one that ships with the game, it's all original geometry, they're not just repurposing campaign stuff. There wasn't much narrative at all though, and there's no campaign scoring for it. (It's hard to know if there will end up being any real story to speak of, but campaign scoring was promised as a patch.) Anyways, I guess there's ten free episodes promised, and that will work out to fifty co-op levels by the end.

Forge is also great, Forge is perennially the unsung hero of Halo. It's about the same as it was in Reach, with a few nice additions, but it's still amazing to have such a fantastically accessible and powerful map editor built into the game like that. If you haven't kept up on your Halo and you're under the impression that it's always just hardcore shooting dudes, you might be surprised to see something like Grifball and find that it is effectively Halo rugby.

Edit: And a SWAT playlist just went up.

[Korax]

The game repeatedly jumps the gun on trying to introduce proper names for things and ends up implying familiarity where there is none. I've seen some people get angry about the fact that Chief and Cortana seem to know more than the player about what is going on regarding the Didact, and... I mean, I know that universe pretty well, and Chief and Cortana do not know who the Didact is. (Unless we are to believe that Chief and Cortana actually wandered around Halo 3 reading all those Forerunner terminals, which do talk about the Didact.)

Further confusing things is that there are all these (really, really ugly) motion comic things that just burn through the insanely convoluted Forerunner history that has been built up in the novels. It's an important gesture the game makes, but you first have to unlock them by finding terminals in the game - fair enough, but then you have to exit the damn game and go to waypoint to watch them.

I'd have to go and read the Halo 3 terminal stuff again to be sure, but even if you assume that finding the terminals and learning those tidbits about the Librarian and the Didact are story canon, there's still nothing that explicitly links the pieces together.

And the Halo 4 terminals. Damn it. It was dumb and irritating to not be able to actually access them in-game and watch them without loading up Waypoint, and then it was maddening to see that they were a bunch of shitty motion comic bullshit.

I'm going to take the stance that at least it wasn't a shitty boss fight, which is definitely something Halo has flirted with disastrously. *Cough*Halo2*Cough*

They could have completely re-made the Halo 2 boss fight, shittiness and all, and I would have preferred it to what they actually did.

[Sno]

And the Halo 4 terminals. Damn it. It was dumb and irritating to not be able to actually access them in-game and watch them without loading up Waypoint, and then it was maddening to see that they were a bunch of shitty motion comic bullshit.

They've been doing the motion comic thing since Odious Tea, which had them very well contextualized in the narrative. It was really, really cleverly done. Anniversary did it again, without the context, but they were still handled quite well.

In 4, they're just so incredibly ugly, and they feel so forced, it's just so much mythology to burn through. Personally, i would have dug seeing some Halo 3-style terminals and an updating codex, i think that would have better served the amount of information and history they're trying to convey.

[Sno]

Second episode of Spartan Ops went live and it's almost entirely the exact same maps as the first episode, just in a different order. Uh, so yeah...

If that's going to be what this is, they need to get that campaign scoring stuff patched in quick, and while they're at it they should get rid of the infinite lives and add support for the skulls.

I mean, there's some fun enemy composition in there, just huge hordes on a scale you never see anywhere in the main campaign. (They come across as pretty messy scenarios, which is expected.) I mean, but if that's going to be what it ends up being about, the above things are very important and need to be there.

[melmer]

I just completed the campaign

Didact is a funny word

[Sno]

Bungie does have a great fondness for peculiarly named things.

[Dogface]

I miss when Halo was funny, bright and colourful. I think it made a great foil for the drama and scope of the story. Yeah, the humans were big damned heroes, and the aliens were threatening and mysterious, but they were painted in gigantically broad strokes and the game was never less than cheerful about it. Even the 'serious' characters like Cpt Keyes in Halo 1 were pastiches of absurdly unlikely badassness. Only towards the end did this slowly give way to a more genuine sense of dread and emergency.

In Halo 2 they clearly wanted to go for greater scope and detail, and I'm apparently relatively alone in thinking they actually did a pretty good job of it. Sure, the game had its weak points and was difficult, but I think they really succeeded in making everything bigger, richer and more developed -- not more profound, but more epic. Specifically, it managed to deliver on one of Halo's core design ideas by making the environments and the journey through each mission feel like part of something massive and important: saving a city, dropping a space-station into freefall, fighting through a massive space battle, etc. The foray into the alien story took away some of their mystique, but it was still a lot of fun to explore things from the other side.

But by the time Halo 3 came around, I think things had gone too far in making things grim, gritty and serious. Especially because (is it just me?) the writing, acting, direction and animation in 3 were basically terrible and didn't sell the new tone well at all. Sure, the environments were more spectacular, the definition higher, the tools more varied, but I just don't think it was worth what they lost.

Halo 4 does the 'serious military grah' thing much more competently I think, and they've developed a hell of a lot of atmosphere and backstory to back up the 'Spartans as Ubermenschen' approach. But it just doesn't really do anything for me. Because everything has been reduced to a straight-ahead heroic narrative with all the usual dramatic tricks we've seen played to death in Mass Effect, Gears of War and similar stories, there's no longer this wild, crazy, ridiculous element adding spice to the environments and the fights. It's just a series of cage-fights with some reskinned enemies and guns. The characters and storyline are flat and uninteresting. The only thing that saves it is the relationship between the Chief and Cortana, which I thought was pretty touching, and would have been a good fit for Halo 3 as the end of the original trilogy.

But like I said, what they've done, they've definitely done well, and I daresay the tightened-up gameplay would be good in multiplayer.

[protocraig]

Edit: Again on Legendary, i'm noticing that this game doesn't do any smart checkpointing like the Bungie games did, It won't pop in an extra checkpoint during a lull in a battle.

I miss this so much.

I'm enjoying the campaign, but the new enemies don't have half the character as the old ones. I also find the new weapons pretty bland and redundant.

[Sno]

I always had the impression that a lot of the tonal peculiarities of the first game were a product of the insanely tight deadlines and resources that game was developed under. (Well, and Bungie being at a time when it was still just its core team.) I also can't say i ever even saw the sequels as being that dramatic of a departure from that original tone. Chief still got all of his wry one-liners, Johnson was still a badass, the games were still vibrantly colorful, the grunts were still wacky. (I also think ODST most feels like the original in that it's a small and focused adventure with exaggerated characters.)

4 is definitely going for a much more serious tone, but i'd say Reach was actually the big point of departure.

As for the Didact, I think they fumbled that. From a lot of the background fluff in previous games and the stories in the novels, he's potentially one of the more interesting characters in that universe. He has a lot of potential as a villain for the new series, but they don't really exploit it at all, they don't even properly introduce him. He shows up, monologues twice, kills a bunch of people, and then dies. (Definitely not dead.)

I'm enjoying the campaign, but the new enemies don't have half the character as the old ones. I also find the new weapons pretty bland and redundant.

So i've been thinking about this stuff a bit. (Just a bit.)

People love the Elites, but not so much the Brutes and definitely not the Flood. (Personally, i don't have any problem with the latter two, but the Elites are definitely the most fun to fight.)

So... I think the trick is that the Elites will retreat into cover to let their shields recharge, while the Brutes and the Flood tend to just charge at you mindlessly. The Elites are pulling you into the battle instead of pushing you back, right? You're being tugged into dangerous close-quarters battles where you're faced with risky choices, instead of just doing your best to hang back and keep your distance.

With that dyanmic in mind, i think the Promethean enemies work really, really well. The tools 343 has given these new enemies are basically all about letting them retreat and regroup, and fighting with them is a terrible grind if you aren't willing to take risks. I think they're awesome, though I do not think the knights should be able to teleport multiple times in rapid succession, that seems pretty bullshit when it happens.

Additionally, whenever one of them has the binary rifle, things aren't quite so nice. (The binary rifle being a sniper rifle that does not require a headshot, anywhere on the body is an instant kill.) Knights and Crawlers equipped with it display a small circular holographic sighting thing on their character model, but it's not as obvious as the gigantic red laser sight the binary gives off in the MP. Deaths caused by the binary rifle in the campaign and in Spartan Ops often come off as completely untelegraphed.

I dig the Prometheans though, i feel they're a successful addition. (I think their designs are pretty cool too! The disintegration effect on the knights is also a great visual, and so is the way the watchers and crawlers burst into debris.)

As for the Forerunner guns, i was initially extremely disappointed to see that they were not more inventive, and that they particularly adhere quite closely to the UNSC weapon archetypes. (Rather than the more dynamic covenant and brute catagories of weapons.)

The more i think about it though, the more i like them. The monstrously overpowered binary rifle, in particular, creates some incredibly fun dynamics in the competitive modes. Scoping in with it casts a hugely obvious laser sight across the map that people fear and respect. You can effectively paralyze an opponent, cause them to be completely afraid to make a move. The boltshot and the light rifle also create some pretty interesting dynamics.

Even so, Halo 4 has ended up with a ton of weapons fulfilling extremely similar roles. With only one of the brute's weapons left in the game, and some of the more distinctive covenant weapons being awol, it suggests that 343 was playing it quite safe with weapon balance. (The important oddballs are there, of course. The plasma pistol and the sword are essential weapons, and fans would probably riot if the needler was omitted.)

I've also actually just realized that Halo 4 has culled back the roster of vehicles to quite a small selection, just the standard ones that have always worked very well. (Plus the Mantis.)

Further multiplayer-related thoughts -

I think the DMR is overpowered. It excels in every role and at all ranges, the other precision rifles tend to be more specialized. I've definitely had matches where i've seen more than 80% of the other players using it. The DMR even has a beefy anti-armor effect, concentrated group fire against vehicles is very effective.

People are sleeping on the automatic rifles, they're awesome in this game. (In close quarters fights, they'll always beat the precision rifles. 4 has the best plasma rifle since CE, and the AR is stronger than ever.)

Have a precision loadout and an automatic loadout and choose between them based on the gameplay type and the map. For example: Dominion matches tend to be very close quarters despite occuring on very large maps, but if you're playing anything on Ragnarok, always choose a precision rifle loadout. (Haven is a tricky one. Despite being the smallest map in the game, it tends to favor precision rifles with all of its long hallways.)

The thruster pack is useless, its potential advantages are such edge cases that they're not convincing arguments. The auto sentry also seems underpowered, and i'm not sure about the hardlight shield either. (Its recovery is too slow to be valuable defending against melee and other close-range attacks, and while it can deflect explosives, it doesn't protect against splash damage. The best argument in its favor is defense against long-range precision weapons.)

Complex currently has a geometry bug that is making it hugely exploitable in Infection and Oddball matches. It should be easy for 343 to use kill volumes to fix this, they just haven't yet.

Waypoint's stat tracking isn't nearly as comprehensive as Bungie.net's was, and a lot of the peripheral features like fileshare aren't working yet.

Specializations seem crazy and rather game-changing, it's a third group of perks that start unlocking at rank fifty. Very few people have any of them thus far, it's hard to tell how they'll affect things.

I think the Halo community doesn't deserve a lot of the flak it's been getting, i can count on one hand the amount of actual griefing i've run into while playing 4. The resurgence of "X-box Live is a cesspool" nonsense online following the release of Halo 4 is, i feel, unwarranted.

Also, god dammit, i want a team doubles playlist. Grifball too, it's insane to not have that up yet when their evolved Grifball mode was part of the marketing push.

[Noyb]

Random plot/lore question: (spoilers for Halo 3+4, not that I fully followed the plot of either)

Why is the Master Chief indiscriminately killing Covenant again? Didn't that civil war end with the survivors on humanity's side in Halo 3? How "feral" can they be if they're still communicating and flying complicated starships? Aren't they trying to take down the very same communication-blocking towers as MC during the first act? I get that they're the interesting enemies of the franchise, but man does MC seem even more sociopathic than usual in this one.

And the ending:

FUCK QUICKTIME EVENTS. A lame boss fight or another driving-away-from-the-explody-thing sequence might have been a bit of a letdown, but it would have been infinitely better than "PRESS LEFT TRIGGER TO WIN." What irritates me even more is that there isn't anything else like it in the entire game, except for a brief QTE during the tutorial sequence. It's like they had the ending all planned out, realized that nothing else in the game (or franchise) was like it, and instead of figuring out that maybe it didn't fit, they said, "Oh, just add a bit into the tutorial so that players know what to do." You can also just hang from the edge of the light bridge or sit and stare at the primed nuke for an eternity because the only actual fail state for that sequence is missing the prompt to stick the Didact with a grenade.

It's even funnier in the co-op campaign. Only one player gets to control it, leaving everyone else stuck watching him beat the boss in a QTE.

[Sno]

Random plot/lore question: (spoilers for Halo 3+4, not that I fully followed the plot of either)

Why is the Master Chief indiscriminately killing Covenant again? Didn't that civil war end with the survivors on humanity's side in Halo 3? How "feral" can they be if they're still communicating and flying complicated starships? Aren't they trying to take down the very same communication-blocking towers as MC during the first act? I get that they're the interesting enemies of the franchise, but man does MC seem even more sociopathic than usual in this one.

It started out with him defending himself because an elite came at him with a sword unprovoked, and i don't know where you're getting "feral" from. I also don't think Halo 3 ever really offered any definitive end to the civil war in the covenant. I mean, 4 does an incredibly poor job setting it up, but the Covenant you're fighting in 4 are simply the side that isn't pro-humanity. Further on from that, they had been studying Requiem fruitlessly for several years prior to the wreckage of the Dawn drifting along and finally causing it to open up. (This makes sense, but it's several paragraphs of explanation that nobody cares about.)

I'm getting to the end of a solo legendary run that i've been intermittently making progress on. I am feeling that Halo 4 is, by quite a wide margin, the easiest game in the series. I'm not buying into the common criticism of Knights being horrible damage sponges. Those things will go down very easily if you're using the right weapons, which is honestly just about anything other than the precision rifles. I mean, just don't use weapons balanced around headshots if you're fighting enemies with resistance to headshots.

[Noyb]

It started out with him defending himself because an elite came at him with a sword unprovoked, and i don't know where you're getting "feral" from. I also don't think Halo 3 ever really offered any definitive end to the civil war in the covenant. I mean, 4 does an incredibly poor job setting it up, but the Covenant you're fighting in 4 are simply the side that isn't pro-humanity. Further on from that, they've apparently been studying Requiem fruitlessly for several years prior to the wreckage of the Dawn drifting along and finally causing it to open up. (This makes sense, but it's several paragraphs of explanation that nobody cares about.)

Ah, okay.

One of Cortana's early lines (sometime before the Didact was freed) is that the Covenant on Requiem seemed more "feral" than normal, which felt like 343 trying to explain away formerly sentient beings, made an impact on my co-op group.

[Salacious Snake]

I want the next Halo to put the player in the role of a college-age Gravemind, skipping out on poetry courses and trying to score hot dates.

[Gwardinen]

Ah, okay.

One of Cortana's early lines (sometime before the Didact was freed) is that the Covenant on Requiem seemed more "feral" than normal, which felt like 343 trying to explain away formerly sentient beings, made an impact on my co-op group.

Did she say feral? I thought they said zealous or something like that? For whatever reason I was inferring throughout the game that these Covenant were effectively fundamentalists who didn't give a crap about the progressive peace effort.