Remember this?
http://images.vg247.com/current//2012/09/lolwut.jpg
I also remember an interview with Frankie where he said that the Didact will be in the game, that completely ruined the surprise for me.
I think that the only campaign video that I will watch for Halo XB1/5 will be the E3 trailer because I’m afraid that 343i will spoil the campaign again :S
I hope that they don’t talk too much about the campaign this time around, they also spoiled a lot of the Halo 4 campaign in some magazines.
Imo they shouldn’t say too much about the campaign this time around.
I agree 100%. Just another nice trailer, or 2.
I absolutely HATED how Halo 4’s campaign was spoiled. Yes, there were a few hints that the Didact would be in the game, but that’s all that they should’ve been: small hints.
I won’t be able to resist watching any Halo 5 news, so I really hope that 343 (more specifically, Frank) doesn’t reveal anything major again.
> I absolutely HATED how Halo 4’s campaign was spoiled. Yes, there were a few hints that the Didact would be in the game, but that’s all that they should’ve been: small hints.
>
> I won’t be able to resist watching any Halo 5 news, so I really hope that 343 (more specifically, Frank) doesn’t reveal anything major again.
Same here but I will try my best not to watch anything campaign related after E3, because I will really be pissed if the flood will return and they spoil that too.
I agree completely! 343i, notably Frankie, were absolutely terrible when it came to spoiling Halo 4. Honestly, I don’t think there were any surprises left by the time I played the game, and this was with me going dark a few months in advance too.
Frankie also spoiled the end of the game in an interview a fair amount of time prior to the game’s release. Something about how the ending was going to go, being similar the Star Wars IV : A New Hope, having the battle end, making things look like they’re over, but the battle still going on.
Honestly, I want the campaign to be a surprise without having to stay off of the internet for 6 months before the game’s release. Is that too much to ask for?
Protip: Don’t read interviews, blogs, or other news bits for an unreleased game unless you don’t know yet whether or not you’re going to it. From personal experience, it is NOT hard to avoid spoilers so long as you can keep to a decent filter.
I agree on how we knew so much about the new characters and enemies before the game came out was a bad thing. In my opinion the Prometheans had the potential to be as big as an impact as the Flood were in Halo CE. Nobody knew anything about the Flood until that twist was made known through Playing The Game! Halo 4 didn’t come out yet and we already knew about the Prometheans and how they will fight. This lost some of the shine of the Prometheans in my opinion. That and also they were overpowered. Please 343 don’t tell us the twist to a game before the game even comes out.
> That and also they were overpowered. Please 343 don’t tell us the twist to a game before the game even comes out.
But Halo CE was able to hold onto that twist because it was an unknown game entering into an under populated genre. I think I’m quoting a prominent figure in Bungie in saying this (it was either from an podcast or the Halo CE commentary track), but its simply not possible for anyone in 343’s position, now, to hold onto a flip of that magnitude. Either its going to leak and spoil everything, or its going to be too much of a handicap to PR not to be able to leverage the prospect of a new faction.
> Protip: Don’t read interviews, blogs, or other news bits for an unreleased game unless you don’t know yet whether or not you’re going to it. From personal experience, it is NOT hard to avoid spoilers so long as you can keep to a decent filter.
I will stay away from all of that and interviews where they talk about the story, I will try to not watch much of the campaign stuff after the E3 trailer just to be on the safe side because once something is spoiled somewhere in a few seconds it will be on youtube and forums etc.
If the flood will return or another enemy that we don’t know of they have to keep it a secret.
H2 and H3 managed not to be spoiled, and they were insanely popular before launch.
H4 just failed terribly to hold its secrets.
> H2 and H3 managed not to be spoiled, and they were insanely popular before launch.
>
> H4 just failed terribly to hold its secrets.
There wasn’t that much of an internet when Halo 2 shipped and Halo 3 WAS spoiled by, among other things, leaked copies of the game spewing out of a select few retailers who failed respect the street date in one way or the other. Granted none of that came directly from the devs but then again those games didn’t have to do much to sell themselves anyway. Halo 3 for example just had to be Halo 3, it didn’t have to justify itself to a world wary of a developer switch and which made attracting people to Halo 4 all the more difficult.
Just think of what the game would have looked like if all 343 was promising was the covenant? No Prometheans, no twists, just what we’ve been killing over the last decade. What reason would people have had to buy Halo 4 apart from an unsatisfied need to grind and perhaps vague mentions about other foes, which is just as bad as speaking directly about the Prometheans because telling you “a surprise is coming” defeats the point!
My point is that Halo 4’s open PR was necessary. It may have let you into more than you wanted to know, but that was your choice to read/listen/watch the PR.
> Protip: Don’t read interviews, blogs, or other news bits for an unreleased game unless you don’t know yet whether or not you’re going to it. From personal experience, it is NOT hard to avoid spoilers so long as you can keep to a decent filter.
True, but in the case of Halo 4, things were really crazy… I read far more about Halo 2, 3 and Reach than Halo 4 before they were released, yet I managed to have a hell of a lot more of Halo 4 spoiled for me than any other game. I didn’t watch any video after the E3 trailer, and only read a small handful of interviews before I stopped, several months before the game shipped.
Sometimes, it felt as though they were trying to spoil things for us. I remember another interview with Frankie where the interviewer asked him the behavioural differences between the Covenant and the Prometheans. Do you know what he replied? The first thing that comes out of his mouth is that the Covenant and Prometheans are going to team up, and then tells us that they’ll have unique matchups when they’re together.
Ok, not only did that not answer the interviewer’s question, it also spoiled something rather significant in the game’s plot… It’s as though Bungie would have came and told us “Yeah, so the Elites break away from the Covenant and then join sides when humanity” if an interviewer asked them how playing as an Elite would differ from playing as Master Chief in Halo 2.
And what about Installation 03? You could say that it was a surprise that nobody knew about beforehand. Oh… Wait… The background for the main menu for the playable builds at E3 and all those other events had Installation 03 in it rather than Requiem. Well then, no surprise there…
None of these things had to be spoiled. None at all. They could have shown us one or two Promethean variants to get people interested, to keep some things a surprise. There definitely was no need to go this far with it.
Just please, 343i, please… Shut your mouths regarding the story! Don’t tell us crucial plot points
Simple announcement trailer: Done
Follow up trailer with more detail: Impending
Vidocs: Impending
Launch trailer: Impending
That’s it. They don’t need to show us all the weapons, mp levels and the whole story. Going into a Halo game has always been about mystery, they showed EVERYTHING with 4. Up till after 3 Bungie had it spot on, 1 announcement trailer then 7 months of silence to create hype.
Seriously 343i, please keep a majority of stuff as a surprise. All we need is “chief is stuck on planet X” or something along those lines, not “chief has teamed up with superman to save cortana from the evil lex luthor and in order to do so he has to make emotional sacrifices like shooting arbiter in the face with batman’s death star” LEAVE STUFF AS A SURPRISE!
But you know they won’t, there will be a vidoc with the new announcment with someone like Josh Holmes or Frankie talking about the troubles they had to overcome with 4 and how they learned, then here are all the new features they are putting in, here is a third of the story summed up and this is what the chief will feel.
Give the fans something to discuss, and expand on, just like the 2/3 days with all the secret codes and obviously ilovebees! Seriously that was the best way to generate a buzz (excuse the pun)
The story is the only thing that’s keeping me interested in 5 now.
> Protip: Don’t read interviews, blogs, or other news bits for an unreleased game unless you don’t know yet whether or not you’re going to it. From personal experience, it is NOT hard to avoid spoilers so long as you can keep to a decent filter.
Also block communication from anyone other than you friends/buddies on forums, Xbox LIVE, and any messaging client.
Personally, I don’t read most of the interviews/blogs, so none of it was really spoiled for me. Mostly because I didn’t know which didact it was going to be, and there was a few trailers that showed a forerunner in armor, and the -Yoink!- icon showing up every now and again gave him away.
> Sometimes, it felt as though they were trying to spoil things for us. I remember another interview with Frankie where the interviewer asked him the behavioural differences between the Covenant and the Prometheans. Do you know what he replied? The first thing that comes out of his mouth is that the Covenant and Prometheans are going to team up, and then tells us that they’ll have unique matchups when they’re together.
That’s a gameplay feature. If you take the covenant or the prometheans independently you might feel a little underwhelmed. Yah, there’s a few new units but its nothing we haven’t seen before except for maybe one or two brief points in the whole series. Allied factions has the potential to open a huge new realm of Ai interactions (though 343 didn’t go quite as far as they could have) and its a major selling point for the new campaign (“hey, here’s something Bungie never really tried!”) even though it tells you what might happen mid-way through the campaign (but certainly not why.)
> None of these things had to be spoiled. None at all. They could have shown us one or two Promethean variants to get people interested, to keep some things a surprise. There definitely was no need to go this far with it.
>
> Just please, 343i, please… Shut your mouths regarding the story! Don’t tell us crucial plot points
Crucial plot points? 343 didn’t go into any detail as far as I know about the Librarian’s relationship with the chief, his turning away from the UNSC (for a bit), or Cortana dying which are by far some of the most crucial plot points in Halo 4. Have a sense of proportion, new Ai relationships and a backdrop are not the only aspects of the campaign nor even that bad to have spoiled.
> Protip: Don’t read interviews, blogs, or other news bits for an unreleased game unless you don’t know yet whether or not you’re going to it. From personal experience, it is NOT hard to avoid spoilers so long as you can keep to a decent filter.
True, but I always want to know more about multiplayer and forge so I do keep up to date with info, but sometimes they get mixed or a few days from launch (maybe i should’ve just gone dark at that point) some -YOINK!- on the forums (now banned, thankfully) made several threads titled cortana dies… etc.
But like i said, forge and multiplayer are the reasons i keep up with info.
> > Protip: Don’t read interviews, blogs, or other news bits for an unreleased game unless you don’t know yet whether or not you’re going to it. From personal experience, it is NOT hard to avoid spoilers so long as you can keep to a decent filter.
>
> True, but I always want to know more about multiplayer and forge so I do keep up to date with info, but sometimes they get mixed or a few days from launch (maybe i should’ve just gone dark at that point) some -YOINK!- on the forums (now banned, thankfully) made several threads titled cortana dies… etc.
> But like i said, forge and multiplayer are the reasons i keep up with info.
I can see that, but I can see the benefit of having an unspoiled multiplayer experience too. New weapons, gametypes, and maps I think are best experienced without having it all explained to you first (new weapons especially.) That’s why, regardless of what I’m interested in a game, I’ll always minimize my info intake once I know for sure that I’m going to buy it.
For example, I’m getting an Xbox One and with it Forza 5. All I know about that game is that it has cars, drivatars, and a virtual Stig and I’m keeping it that way. 