I’ll let you know when my words are broken!
To be fair, the change to back smack from assassination is intended more as an appeal to the younger twitch streamers and competitive players than anything else.
Sadly thats just 343’ MO;
Their games reek of the same bs corporate decision making EA pulled with Battlefield V a few years ago. Nobody was really demanding a TW compliant alternative to suicide in Infinite, but it was done because it looks good to the social media demographics of influencers and journalists they wanted to entice. MCC fans didnt want fractures and retroactive gender removal, but 343 still did it and even tied the ability to disable it to restored legacy content because it looked good in news articles hyping up Infinite, regardless of the fact there were more important things they could have been working on.
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I might be misremembering, but I think it has always been “back smack”, assassinations were introduced in reach with the longer/flashier kill animation.
In H5 you would still get “back smack” if you tapped melee instead of held it, or if you disabled assassinations.
Halo 2 and Halo 3 rewarded an Assassination medal for melees from behind, however starting with Reach and Halo 4, the medal was given for the appropriately named Assassinations, and instead rewarded the Beat Down medal for what used to be an Assassination.
Back-Smack was really only a term I remember being tossed around by CE players on PC occasionally, and only really started getting used again with the PC port of MCC and the increase in streamers referring to it as such thanks to CE.
Basically in short; calling it Back Smack feels like 343 trying to be hip and cool when they should have just kept it consistent and called it a Beat Down.
Meh, I won’t sling crap at them for changing the name of something to what people were calling it anyways. Calling it an assassination would have triggered a lot more people since real assassinations were removed.
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They changed its name for the same reason that 343 updated Halo 3 ODST on the MCC to no longer have Police Lights on the NMPD Cars scattered around the city - politics regarding police.
Special-Weapns-And-Tactics is a division of US Police branches wherein they handle more hostile situations. And so in favor pseudo-politics, they washed any information of the police from Halo 3 ODST that they could.
They couldn’t do it across the entire game of course. NMPD HQ is still a police HQ, and the NMPD SWAT Officers that fight alongside you in one mission are still wearing their patches and uniforms rather than being replaced by stock Marines.
But when it came to the game mode, they instead decided to rename S.W.A.T to “Tactical Slayer”.
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I’m pretty sure everything regarding the story with Vergil and the Superintendent AI and such with the corrupt cops is still in ODST in MCC. And I’m 100% sure that one of the prominent areas in the night map in New Mombasa in Infinite has an NMPD building that is very clearly an NMPD building.
On top of this, changing the name to Tactical Slayer gels with 343i seeming to want all Slayer modes to gave ‘Slayer’ as a suffix for clarification for any new players.
And on top of that, 343i probably wants to distance one of Infinite’s main game modes from the term SWAT when SWATTing streamers and more was/is a harassment tactic among the worst of the gaming community that’s gotten people killed.
So yeah, I’m glad they changed the name.
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Indeed those still exist because that would be neigh impossible to cut from the game.
But if you play Halo 3 ODST on MCC and then compare it to classic H3 ODST in the legacy games; you will notice that there are quite a few less lights in New Mombasa. Red and Blue ones specifically.
They even removed the Police Sirens nameplate in the MCC’s player customization options.
- https://boundingintocomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/2020.08.25-08.18-boundingintocomics-5f457200ad569.png
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Still calling it SWAT no matter the name change
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Hang on. What did 343i do to Halo 3: ODST beyond these two things:
- Remove the Destiny references before the PC port happened.
- There isn’t a number two. What are you talking about?
The issue with the nameplates was about 1 piece of cosmetic content that 343i added for an insider build but then pulled before final release. I saw and watched the whole thing and read every public response 343i put out during that time. One dude on Twitter made one tweet (basically amounted to: “lol does 343i watch the news?”) and 343i suddenly started talking about how they were removing it and had internal feedback too. The entire backlash stemmed from how now 343i suddenly implied they had a political stance on this specific issue and were willing to remove content they made themselves to fit it.
Edit: It is worth saying that this nameplate drama worked in tandem with other political implications from previous nameplates. The Reach gender option change had not happened yet.
Edit2: I said all this stuff about the nameplate because that was the only thing 343i did. Halo 3: ODST is basically unchanged except for the removal of a handful of Destinty references. It’s okay to be wrong. There was a lot of confusion and misinformation that went up during that time. People forget things as time goes by. I just want to correct the record here. I’m not mad, sorry if I’m coming across too strongly.
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Oh noes, no more police lights! The game is ruined! /s
If BiC is one of the regular sources of gaming news that you use, and not just the first link that showed up on a search, then I feel sad for you. Really excited to read what your hot takes will be on any Pride emblems they decide to add in June…
I don’t use BiC. I searched a google-image of someone’s post about the topic. The image just happened to be BiC.
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Well, they also removed Marty O’Donnel’s easter egg in ODST and replaced it with Frank O’Connor mopping.
But that was because of other reasons alltogether.
Mostly Frank O’Connor’s narcissism.
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I forgot about that one, yeah it was a bummer. Wasn’t there some music attached to that? I should check.
Siege of the Madrigal.
The music is likely to have been replaced since 343 loves washing Bungie and Marty from all of the games they had made.
Naw, that music is still in the game. Looks like it’s the same except for the texture itself. (I don’t really want to go into overthinking the joke, but when you see a music composer dancing you can kind of get it. He’s making a silly face too. When you see a lead developer sweeping… it leaves me wondering why he’s sweeping. It’s either an in-joke or a statement by way of an animated gif.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEEqdG4lRXE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8aTw7QQMd0
There was some opening text in ODST that was apparently cut. I still am so bummed that 343i scraped the credits off of the games. Was a real bad move. For some reason I thought the Reach tribute room was removed in MCC until just recently. I finally went and saw it myself again.
https://www.halopedia.org/Halo_3:_ODST#Opening_scroll
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They removed Bungie’s farewell card in the epilogue to Halo Reach when the PIllar of Autumn arrived at Halo Installation 04
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The game just isn’t the same without the credits. It’s like when they broadcast a movie on TV. Sometimes they shrink the credits down and play an ad over the ending soundtrack. I’m more annoyed about Halo 2 and Halo 3 tbh.
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I even had a time where I was annoyed with 343 because of a glitch that occoured in my first playthrough of Halo 3 on MCC.
Frank O’Connor Ret-Conned it so that the Forerunners were no longer ancient humans. And then when I played through Halo 3 at the point where we were about to fight 343 Guilty Spark, he as supposed to say
“You are the child of my makers, inheritors of all they left behind. You ARE Forerunner, but this ring is mine.”
The audio broke and left out the “You ARE Forerunner” part.
Since then the glitch hardly happens.
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Ha! Yeah, I can see why that would have been maddening. The MCC’s original launch was why I completely gave up on Halo as a series. Coming back to it now because of the PC release of MCC… it looks like 343i is still floundering.
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