Here we get to see some early gameplay of Halo 4 in a tourney.
Good things I saw:
The game looks beautiful. Give the artists a raise.
Great job keeping the FPS up (it doesn’t seem to ever have any freezing up going on).
Weapons seem to work well. BR and DMR don’t suffer much from the little bit of bloom and recoil they’ve incorporated.
Promethean vision looks awesome!
Flag carrying in tandem with the pistol could turn out being pretty cool.
Bad things I saw:
Strafe speed (and overall game speed) seem to be really slow. This will be nice for casuals trying to figure out how to aim properly, but I can see the competitive types griping (myself included).
Overall map design seems poor by competitive merit providing little in the way of
lines of sight which will inhibit a teams ability to focus fire and interact.
Bad things I’ve heard from people with early copies:
You cannot enable flag dropping.
You cannot disable bloom.
You cannot disable sprint.
Why I think these are a problem:
Flag juggling was a nice element in Halo CTF. For those unfamiliar, flag juggling allowed you to bypass the usual speed reduction in the flag carrier by juggling the flag. You could toss it ahead of you, up to teammates, etc. By removing the ability to drop the flag you also cut a lot of the decision making that went into, well, picking up and dropping the flag. It was always nice to drop the flag to shoot with your team or block a spawn while keeping a mental check on the return time etc. Bottom line, by removing this mechanic you take away a lot of the decision making that went into CTF. Maybe the whole pistol/flag thing will turn out well, but why not give us the option?
Bloom. Love it or hate it it’s now here to stay. Again, it didn’t seem to be much of a game changer on the settings in the video (compared to release Reach) but why not give us the option knowing what happened with Reach?
Sprint. I don’t mind it, really, but when you have such slow default settings you’re pretty much removing the whole possibility of strafing in a fire fight. Unfortunately, when you increase player movement, sprint is increased with this. It’ll be hard to find a good balance between the whole strafing speed and not having sprint wayyyy too fast. That’s why I (and many others) would just prefer there was an option to remove it.
Those are my only complaints based on the information I currently have. I just don’t see why those options weren’t implemented.
Check out the video please, it’s pretty cool!
