Prometheans are missing....stuff

Games Other Halo
1

I know everyons mostly hating on multiplayer right now. I’ve never been an online gamer, the longest I’ve played is the free month i got with Reach’s legendary edition. Honestly, I dont care too much about the online stuff, cause halo’s always been a game I play with my friend’s in person.

That all being said, the Prometheans feel as if they are missing stuff. And quite a bit of stuff. It is this stuff that is preventing them from nicely fitting into halo’s sandbox.

They have no vehicles. Its no surprise the prometheans were no match for the flood when the majority of them have no way to mass clear flood. The few vehicle bits that include promeatheans just feel…weird, because they have nothing to counter you with (most noticibly the first mantis bit). The flood made up for lacking this part of the sandbox by having rocket launcher flood in 1, by stealing vehicles in halo 2, and simply not being involved in vehicle bits in 3 to avoid this weirdness. All this talk of War Sphinxes in the novels and we dont even get to see one in the whole game? The didact seems to depend on covenant to protect him because he has no other large flying units to do so.

Their weapons likewise, feel kind of like reskins with tweeks. The covenant brought interesting and unique weapons to the fight like the EMP’s on pistols and the super combine on needlers. The brutes had their dual-wieldable shotgun pistols, and the crazy bouncing of the brute shot. The only forerunner weapon that feels unique is the bolt shot, and the AI never uses its overcharge, and its just a glorified shotgun mode. The incinerator cannon is kind of cool to see, but is just a beefier rocket launcher. It was nice facing weapons that did new and interesting things, its also why I liked the Needle and Focus rifle over the Carbine and Beam rifle.

Lastly, the prometheans dont have a “super” unit. In previous halo games, zealots, ultras, chieftains, and hunters were all difficult, or at the very least, gimmicky fights that helped mix up the gameplay simply by being on the battlefield. Halo 2, and more so 3, even had the scarab as a vehicle super unit. Halo 4 seems to have lost this with all but hunters, as gold elites now die really fast even on legendary. The random ‘stealthy’ sword guys who seem to wait till you hit them to decloak and charge in a straight line at you are jokes. The “lich” which was effectively a spaceship scarab, misses just about everything that made fighting a scarab fun. The prometheans never warp in anything that really concerns me beyond what gun they have and beyond the lancer’s charge, the other knights dont really have any special abilities, and feel like slight re-models. The watchers and the crawlers feel solid though. A more offensive watcher varient would be nice, however.

The prometheans seem unfinished, and sure, the covenant in halo 1 didnt have all the stuff they got in later games either, but the prometheans just feel as if they are missing fundamental elements of the halo sandbox.

2

You really have no idea what the Prometheans even are, so of course you’d think they were missing stuff.

3

I agree with you that they require some fleshing out, but, as you said, it took time for the Covenant to be elaborated upon, and since Halo 4 constitutes the Promethean’s first appearance, I don’t think it’s an oversight. There are, however, two things that I wish were different about them in Halo 4.

  1. In contrast to the Elites–who often required the use of more than one weapon to take them down, given their shields–the Knights Promethean Knights seem to function merely as damage sponges. I’m still not quite sure whether they have “shields”, per se (they certainly have some sort of visible reaction when their health gets low), but it would have been nice to have to do something other than pepper them with ammunition in order to take them down. I realise that the Watchers were intended to facilitate the Knights in combat, but since the former are absurdly easy to destroy from a distance, I’ve never really seen what the two units can do in tandem.

  2. I think the different Knight ranks (and this goes for the Elites as well) should be more clearly distinguishable; the presence of a few spikes on their backs or some flames swirling around them doesn’t really permit distinction at a glance or at a distance. It would have been nice to have them vary in size and perhaps in the colour of their glowing parts as well.

4

Prometheans as bullet sponges. Seems to fill the void of missing the Brutes.

(Which, FYI, would have been an awesome Halo 3.5 (like ODST). Revenge of the Brutes. They couldn’t care about the Prophets. They just wanted to kill humans. I still think Brutes have a place in this universe.)

I think they missed the step with not adding a Promethean vehicle. Definitely something like in the Ghosts of Onyx.

“From outside Onyx, the surviving UNSC prowler Dusk watches on as the planet’s surface rips apart, to reveal that the entire world is constructed of literally trillions of Sentinels, all connected together to provide an impenetrable defence around the Dyson Sphere at the heart of the planet.”

Have a Sentinel ship, something to control, small enough to be associated with a Banshee size but a Hornet flight style. All theories but it could have been a great addition.

Edit: I find the Linchs explosion to be weak and rushed. No one saw that explosion from orbit.