Oh, hi. I didn’t see you there. Well, I hope you brought your seatbelt, because this ride is about to get bumpy.
Before I start, see this as more of a way to help 343 make their games better for future reference rather than just a rant.
I’m here to talk about Theatre Mode. Throughout the Halo series, I feel like the Theater Mode has not had many drastic changes. In all fairness, it never really had changes, and the ones that came about were minor and easy to get around. It all seemed to be looking good for machinima directors and montage creators for a while. You could manipulate a camera angle wherever you wanted (pretty much), and you could also scrub back in time fairly easily (COUGH COUGH HALO 3 COUGH COUGH).
But then, disaster struck. Halo 5 arrived, and the Theater Mode had an entirely new look. Let’s go over what they screwed up, shall we?
Timeline - Why this feature was removed is beyond my comprehension. It lets you know where you are in the clip. This has a big effect on Time Scrubbing. Time Scrubbing just feels… different and isn’t as simple as it used to be, especially because you have no clue where you are in the damn clip. It’s a domino effect. Once one core feature is removed, it knocks onto something else which you relied on. Now, I understand Time scrubbing was annoying at points. When it went from 10 seconds to 30 seconds to 1 minute to 2/3 minutes back in time. Man, that was time consuming. Adding on to this, though…
Rewind - It skips way to far back. Rather than the standard 10 seconds it used to be (5 seconds for Halo 2 Anniversary). It’s really time consuming.
The Play Feature - You can’t play the clip without having the interface up. It’s frustrating. Like, seriously infuriating. If you’re a machinima director, like myself, you have to go back in time by however many seconds, click play, remove the interface (which, by the way, takes short of 2 seconds to disappear), Start your capture card rolling if you haven’t already (In all fairness, you should already have it rolling), and then you do your thing with the camera. It would be a bit easier if that process was… cut down, so to speak.
Damage Indicator - When you press B to get rid of the Spartan outlines, It suddenly appears IN FREE CAMERA if the Spartan gets damaged.
Jolty Spartan Movements - As the camera gets further away from a Spartan, the fps of the Spartan decreases severely. Want to get awesome shots now? Too bad.
Film Loss - If you disconnect from Xbox Live and connect back, your recents films cannot be found, meaning you have to Dashboard and restart the game. Ok, with the new Xbox update it doesn’t take too long, but, Christ, that doesn’t mean it’s not annoying.
The Zoom “Bug” - Instead of clicking just the right thumbstick to zoom like you should do, you have to click both the sticks. I said that it’s a “bug” because if it was, it should have been fairly easy to fix, meaning that I’m waiting for yet another update to see that fixed as well as the THIRD PERSON ALERT CARRY ANIMATION. Was this game tested?
Record button - It saves time. I don’t know why this was removed in all fairness.
Rename clips - It’s helps machinima directors find the clips that they need to use in the future.
I’m sure there are a few things I missed off, but for now, that is all I have. If you guys have any queries about what I’ve said, please feel free to drop a comment.
Alright. I’m off to make a machinima.
See you guys in the next post/video I make!