So far, i havnt seen anything regarding the shade turret in H4. I guess its safe to assume that it may not make a return to halo 4 (multiplayer wise)? if it is, i hope its considerably better than the HR shade. I was pretty happy to have it in multiplayer until i figured out it was probably more useful asthetically than it was in a fight. Thoughts? Opinions?
I think it’s safe to say they will return.
Think of a tank. It’s big, powerful, and very very slow. That (the speed) is more or less how it’s balanced out. Now think of a shade. It has no speed. Thefore in order to be worth using (in light of snipers, rockets, tanks, lasers, rail guns, banshees, ect.) it needs considerable firepower. Tank like firepower (not in the big-boom sense but in the DPS sense) but in Halo you don’t have the precident for that in multiplayer turrets.
So unless 343 breaks with convention I really don’t think it’s likely that shades will be back in any meaningful way in Halo 4. I’d hate that too, but just for the fact that they haven’t been useful I don’t think it’ll occur to them that they may be useful in what they’re building as a true Halo game. With that title comes certain standards, but also certain assumptions and certain blind spots that unfortunately cover just this sort of innocuous bit of game design that doesn’t immediately draw attention to itself but none-the-less cries for some sort of change.
The shade turret needs to be more powerful if it is to return. Also, it might only be in campaign and possibly in forge.
Maybe they will have their return. But even if they don’t, it will be okay. Halo’s shades went through a lot. The shade from Halo: Combat Evolved is much different from the shades of the other games. In Halo Reach, you even got three different kinds of shades (which per se didn’t make much sense cause they used the Halo 3 shade design. And Halo Reach was before Halo: Combat Evolved, so it would have been smarter to use the Halo: CE shade turret. I hoped they would reskin it for Halo: CEA, at least.)
It is likely that the Shade turret can be in the campaign. There was a massive Covenant fleet around Requiem’s location. And we saw Phantoms. They could carry them around.
I think it should be faster in movement but weaker in firepower.