I personally didn’t like the design of the pelican in Halo4. I really liked it in reach and 3 but it looked really cartoony in 4. Anyways there was a pelican that would fly by on the map empire and i looked the same as the one from halo 4. Anyone else hoping for a redesign??
Completely agree with you there. Even with a slight modification from 343 to the old one would look great.
Yup.
I like the halo 4 one the most.
There was a difference?
Halo 4’s Pelican design wasn’t too bad.
Although it certainly couldn’t hover very well because of where the thrusters are placed… At least not as well as the older Pelican would.
And take the stupid spartan laser off of it. It was fine with machine guns and rockets like in Halo 3
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> And take the stupid spartan laser off of it. It was fine with machine guns and rockets like in Halo 3
That was the gunship variant of the Pelican, which also had turrets on the side and a large cannon on top. The basic Pelican has a very similar loadout to the Halo 3 and Reach Pelican, with a chin-mounted autocannon.
It’s hard to explain in the lore why a new, better vehicle design went back to the old, worse design.
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> There was a difference?
Haha I was thinking the same thing
Visually I like the new Pelican, its got more of a Hind feel now(though I still feel like the past variant was fine too).
I do think the fact you can’t enter it from the passenger compartment is a little odd design wise for what is primarily a transport vehicle, but its a minor gripe.
I think the new Pelican is fine.
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> It’s hard to explain in the lore why a new, better vehicle design went back to the old, worse design.
Not for 343i, they can say anything and it would work.
I typed this up in the forums sometime last year, and I still feel the same way about it. The Halo 4 design seems inferior to the old design in almost every way, the Halo 3 and Reach designs probably being the pinnacle of the vehicle’s design. The pilot up front with the co-pilot up over their shoulder, with easy access to the passenger area, probably was one of the smartest designs Bungie did with it, and it took 3 games to get to that point. It’s a shame that it was pretty much all scrapped in H4. Anyways, what I typed.
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> I pray that the Halo 5 Pelican looks nothing like the Halo 4 one because it was awful in almost every way.
>
> I’ll start off with what I liked, since it’s a shorter list.
>
> Liked:
> - It felt larger. I don’t know if it actually was, but in the Spartan Ops cutscenes it looked significantly bigger. I could believe there were 30 something kids in there as told in the Fall of Reach book.
>
> - The chin turret. I felt the stubbier-looking chin turret looked better than the longer turret Pelicans had in the past.
>
> - I thought the external weapon storage was a neat touch.
>
> And now for what I disliked, which is pretty much everything else, covering the look, gameplay, and technical side of it. I’ll go into specifics as I can recall them.
>
> Disliked:
> - The new Pelican’s front looks like it was heavily inspired from a Russian Mi-24 helicopter, right down to the swing open bubble canopies, which are dumb for a spacecraft. You’d usually want something more re-enforced in case of decompression, or at least be able to have some kind of emergency shielding cover the canopy. Something that really can’t be done on the new design.
>
> - The pilot, while not completely separated from the rest of the cabin, can only really be accessed through the canopy. If anything were to happen to the pilot, the rest of the Pelican is pretty much screwed. And with this restricted set up, there couldn’t be moments like Noble 6’s last face-to-face with Carver, or even small moments like when Chief looks out at the Ark as they descend.
>
> - The loading ramp, as you can see at the opening cutscene in Spartan Ops is massive, about 15 to 20 feet long it seems. With the Halo 4 Pelican, there is no way there can be a rapid deployment of troops. Moments in past Halo games such as the opening of Silent Cartographer would be impossible. If the ramp was out, it would create so much drag on the Pelican that it would have trouble flying, and if they waited till touching down before opening the ramp, everyone in the Pelican would probably get killed before they could even get out. It would also be impossible for the ramp to open if the Pelican was carrying anything, so the opening cutscene of The Covenant in Halo 3 wouldn’t have been possible either.
>
> - The non-pilot turrets, all of them are terrible from both a technical and gameplay perspective. The co-pilot controls a Scorpion tank cannon, which fires from on top of the Pelican. What’s worse is that cannon can only aim at things above the Pelican, so the pilot has to put themselves below targets for the co-pilot to have a chance of hitting anything, and even then the body of the Pelican blocks the line of site. Why this wasn’t just a swarm of missiles like in Halo 3 is beyond me, it could have even used the same missiles as the Rocket 'hog and it would make more sense. And then there are the terrible turret seats on either side of the loading ramp. These are like a punishment to be in, you can’t shoot at things in front, and you can’t shoot back beyond the side of the Pelican, and the body of the Pelican gets in the way of anything you can aim at anyways. Also, let me remind you that the Pelican is a spacecraft that travels through the atmosphere, and with it’s placement behind the engines you would have to be suicidal to even use them. It’s like a child wanted to strap a bunch of guns to a plane and everyone else thought it was a great idea. And speaking of those engines.
>
> - What is with the engine placements? I have to admit, I like the glowing bar effect on the engines, very Star Wars like. But the placement of them doesn’t seem to make any sense. There are ones added to the side of the cabin, which really don’t need to be there as there were already the four main engines for that. Also, why are the wings connected to those engines? It’s a bad design choice as I doubt it’d be very structurally sound. And why replace the hovering thrusters on the wings with four dinky thrusters that hang off the bottom? It looks bad, and without the underside thruster, the wings have to rotate 90 degrees or more when slowing itself to land, as seen in Spartan Ops. Also there isn’t anything really wrong with the two new ones on the back, but it looks really odd when that was part of the structure to the tail before.
>
> - And finally, why were the wheels removed? Most military aircraft have wheels, even ones that can take off and land like a VTOL, such as a helicopter. One reason for it is so they don’t need a pilot if they need to move the aircraft a few feet or so, or to store it in a hanger. They just attach a cart to it and drive it to where it needs to go. I’m sure not every place in the UNSC has a pedestal for each Pelican like on the Infinity, or crane or pilot always there when they need to be moved.
>
> That’s the end of my rant for now, felt like I was losing my mind there toward the end. Just that I’ve always loved the Pelican’s design, and it has only gotten better in each installment. Then Halo 4 comes with finally a campaign mission to fly it, and it’s an abhorrent abomination in all aspects: Design, gameplay, and UNSC aesthetics. It’s like waiting 11 years for something only to get kicked in the balls in the end.
I’m on the edge, it wasn’t comfortable to use IMO, but it’s not horrible. I did have a lot of fun with it though on shutdown hah.
The new design was of the gun ship variant, the old one is still out there. The new one doesn’t take passengers along for a ride so there is no reason to be able to hold troops.
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> The new design was of the gun ship variant, the old one is still out there. The new one doesn’t take passengers along for a ride so there is no reason to be able to hold troops.
Actually, the Pelicans in Halo 4 came in two variants (one for troop transport, the other as a gunship).
It’s not a huge change, but I like it. Looks bulkier, more like something you send into a war zone.
I would love a new variant that takes visual cues from both the classic and new design. It would be a stealth variant or something.
Not a big fan of the Halo 4 variant. Too many curves. I liked the big, bulky, Halo 1-Reach variant. Now that was a threatening piece of hardware.
Cartoony?
Cartoony?
I mean, I can agree with the Pelican design from older games being superior, but I just can’t get over that word.