game awards
20 characters
Specifically, which?
According to Wikipedia, Infinite only has one and 5 has four.
2 Likes
I feel like Iâm going to be staring at my xbox for 10 years thinkingâŠâwhat ifââŠ
What if h5s gameplay and vision of multiplayer got expanded uponâŠ
I tried so hard to like infiniteâŠbut it feels like the only reason I played it was because itâs the new halo. Iâm not in love with playing the game like i was with 5. I ended up coming back to 5 the other nightâŠand the experience of fun was just night and day. A friend(s) tagged along with me and we just had some chaotic crazy fun. Werenât taking it super seriously like we did when we grinded the game, and it was still really fun. I wish 5 got the optimizations manâŠ
Itâs hard for me to even say if Iâll go back to halo infinite even after this dumb update. Whatâs realistically there for me? I donât see it at all changing the experience overall. Itâs likeâŠI already got all the mileage i could out of the the gameâŠand the basic combat and movement just arenât as fun, satisfying, dynamic or unique. So itâs stale as hellâŠfrustrating with some of the crap i deal with on even great connection (from what the game is telling)âŠi guess improving the bs that happens can help, but it only goes so farâŠ
6 Likes
I donât think that was wise, despite the inherent faults in the story, handwaving an explanation in the sequel is not favourable when despite Halo 5âs issues, a direction can still be done.
The question is what are they reviewing as good and bad.
Halo 5âs campaign was utter garbage.
The multiplayer however was solid, balanced, and offered a lot at release plus updates over the next year and a half of content.
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I wanted to love Halo Infinite. I wanted to explore Zeta Haloâs secrets. I wanted to have those satisfying wins and losses in multiplayer. I wanted to have a competent, competitive multiplayer. I wanted my spartan to reflect my personality and style.
But it never happened.
On the multiplayer front, customization comes down to which color combo did you unlock from the battlepass, and which geometric grey object is superglued to your player model. At least the Reach armor throwbacks look good, but do little to offer new ideas to customization.
Weapons rely too heavily on utility, rather than just damage output. This puts player in the weird situation where they have to think about whether ot not thier equipped weapon is viable in the next situation. In a tactical shooter it makes sense, but in Haloâs arena shooter styleâŠnot so much. Thus players resort to only using the same 4 weapons, and makes other weapons redundant.
Equipment is just that as well. Redundant. With so many of them just Uno reverse cards, theyre reduced to pure gimmicks. The grapple takes far too long to employ and it feel inconsistent when and where it functions. The repulsor is just a cheap super shotgun, the dropwall is a poor mans bubble shield, the thruster is ok, but feels more static and uni-directional, more akin to Advanced Warfare, than Halo. Cloak is the only truly good pick up, but it also feels super cheap.
Vehicles feel even less relevant that then they did in Halo 5. Fans argues over the âadvanced movementâ hindered vehicle use, but now, the paper mache quality of vehicles reduces the want to use them. So again, theyre redundant.
I really wanted to like this game, but it just doesnt have a real advantage in terms of choosing it over Halo 5. I dont have the same drive to spend time playing countless hours in it. In dont have the same feeling of fun or memorable moments as i do with Halo 5, which is why is still return to Guardians almost everyday.
2 Likes
Hey, your post is a giant wall of text, but I saw you mention Achilles so I thought Iâd comment that Iâm also very unhappy that they removed Spartan Companies from Waypoint. Or rather they didnât port them to the new Waypoint.
We had regular updates from the Waypoint team prior to Infiniteâs launch - and since then silence.
I worry the studio is just going dark and doing things without even consulting on what their fans want.
3 Likes
This is where other players opinions will differ. I see most of complaints about the campaign are usually focused on the fact you donât play chief much in the game. So? You donât play him in Reach or ODST but somehow thatâs totally ok. Granted they seperate games from the chief story but still.
I donât remember people moaning they couldnât play as chief in reach or odst, simply because they werenât meant to.
For me halo 5 was a bit like odst more than one story in the one game and thatâs what it played likeâŠit wasnât garbage.
iv already accepted that 343 have buried it an moved on its up to us the fans to create content for it⊠id like to try recapturing that magic i felt during the beta
The Golden Rule of Game Design :
âDirect Sequels should play like the title that came before, feeling more like an expansion pack that adds an upgraded experience. Spinoffs however are allowed to drastically change and be different than the rest of the franchise, keeping only the core soul intact and allowing gameplay and art design to vary from the established norm.â
Spin-Offs are allowed to be different.
Halo CE â Halo 2 â Halo 3 is a gameplay sequence that feels like it is the same game but with some slight tweaks here and there and of course, the upgrade to the graphics. But the majority of the gameplay, sound design, and art style remained intact between the three games.
Halo 3 ODST was a spin-off prequel to Halo 3 whoâs narrative coincided with the events of Halo 2. Fans were expecting far more missions on Earth with Halo 2 but didnât get that in the final draft of the story (thanks for Act III being cut from the game, slightly modified & extended, and being turned into Halo 3). So Bungie went ahead and made what was originally going to be a small DLC into its own stand-alone title showcasing the fight on Earth that everyone wanted to experience.
Halo Wars was a Spin-off that was originally not even a Halo game but was heavily adjusted to become a Halo game. And because of how Bungie had put a dozen restrictions on how Ensemble could make the game work; they had to not involve the Master Chief or have the story take place in the recent events; instead having to take place in the earliest years of the Human-Covenant War.
Halo Reach was another Spin-off that was set to be a prequel to Halo CE. Itâs art style was a more rustic, industrial remix of the classic art style from the first game. And the story did cause some annoyance with fans on how it contradicted Eric Nylundâs books (The Fall of Reach, First Strike, and Ghosts of Onyx). Itâs gameplay was also slightly different from the main series, what with the addition of Armor Abilities and many game-modes offering pre-built loadouts that shared the same weapons but gave you a separate AA to spawn with.
Why do I bring all of this up?
Halo 4 and Halo 5 Guardians arenât built like sequels to Halo 3.
They are instead built like spin-offs that are set-up and marketed to be sequels to Halo 3, even though almost nothing remains of the original design.
Halo 4 - The retcons of Halo Reach were small and annoyed hardcore fans that liked the optional books, but the retcons of Halo 4 was something that severely divided the fanbase. The art style had only like 4% of all assets remain similar to previous versions. The soundtrack was all over the place and hardly resembled Halo whatsoever. The Campaign was extremely short and unfun to play due to how little ammo you carried and how you always had to have the LightRifle in order to survive. 95% of the fanbase disliked the multiplayer which is why the peak population of Halo 4 was Day 2 after launch and why a year later it had around 19,500 players online as the daily peak. (Halo 3âs peak daily population was 1,808,888 players online)
Fans wanted Halo 3âs Sequel. Not a game that was barely at all like Halo but still taking the place of âHalo 4â.
Halo 5 Guardians - 343 Industries decided to listen to only 1/7 of what the fanbase had provided feedback. They doubled down on the terrible art style change. They decided to drop the loadouts but in favor of having Spartans that weigh half-a-ton in armor the ability to always have a thruster pack to boost around with or hover in place while in the air. The soundtrack was now a lot more stable, but full of forgettable pieces that just were repeats of the same set of notes on strings in many sections. And what angered fans the most was the fact that despite being a mainline entry, you play as Master Chief for only 1/5 of the game.
The last time Halo did a split-dual-perspective-narrative was in Halo 2 with Chief and The Arbiter. With the final draft that was intended before they had to cut a few levels and the final act, Chief and Arbiter would be having a near 50/50 split of the narrative; but even post cuts it was 6/14 missions you played as Arbiter. Just two less chapters than Chiefâs 8 chapter narrative.
Have you ever read fan-fiction?
Donât get me wrong, there is good fanfiction out there. But you occasionally get that fan-fic story where it is just a Mary Sue power-fantasy story of âThese are my OCs and they are going to be inserted in the story and save the main characters of the actual story.â
Literally the story of Halo 5 Guardians is one of these novice fanfictions that is typically one of the first drafts that one cringelord kid writes as one of their first assignments for Creative Writing class.
That is what Brian Reed had written to replace the original intended story of Halo 5 Guardians.
âMaster Chiefâs cyber A.I. girlfriend is now EVIL for some reason and he has gone rogue to find her, not knowing it is a trap. My cool Spartan OCs are joined by my favorite character in the franchise, Nathan âEdward Buckâ Fillion, and go kick butt and save Master Chief! Also they kill Jul 'Mdama in just 20 seconds just so show how badass they are and we get to see the Arbiter again, but now in GOLD armor instead of silver armor!â
Like most of Brian Reedâs work, they are stories that have an air of being written by a novice who just wants to write encounters IN SPITE of established means of how a character thinks and acts. Did you know that John and Kelly are really close to one another? Well you wouldnât know that if you played Halo 5, because LINDA acts like she is the one who is really close to John while Kelly remains distant in the narrative. Why are these two characters reversed? BECAUSE BRIAN REED!
You know that whole concept of setting a villain up on the âback-burnerâ and occasionally focusing on them during the narrative in order to set them up for a climactic finish? Well, the Didact was killed off in a comic book so Jul 'Mdama could become the main villain of the narrative until Halo 5 decided to kill him off in the first 10 minutes just so he could replace the villain with someone who didnât have any right to be the villain. Why did this happen? BECAUSE BRIAN REED!!
Why was Cortana randomly brought back to life again, but only to be evil and suddenly go from the sassy companion we all know and love to instantly becoming an inter-galactic version of Skynet? Why for the trope that âall A.I.s will betray their creatorsâ, and you know, BECAUSE BRIAN REED!!!
Why did most of the cast feel like they were portrayed not be actual people, but instead by soaked cardboard cutouts in the shape of people? BECAUSE BRIAN REED!!!
Halo 5âs story wouldâve been MUCH better if Brian Reed was not the main writer nor promoted to be the Narrative Director of the Franchise. Do you want to know what Brian Reed is known for? Before his time working with 343, he was a comic book writer for Marvel Comics⊠and during his tenure with Marvel, his comics had the poorest reception. He was then brought on to co-write Halo Spartan-Ops⊠which failed due to a multitude of reasons. You would think that with a track record like that, 343 Industries would choose someone else to be the one to write the next major sequel right?
NOPE
343 Industriesâ â300 I.Q. Moveâ was to promote this guy who doesnât know the difference between writing whatever the heck you want vs. actually being an author. Instead of leading with human curiosity wanting to follow a proper narrative thread, Brian Reed decided that the best way to make the narrative go forward was to tie a noose of confusion around the reader/playerâs neck and tug them in random directions for $20 books and comics and a $60 âgameâ.
Do you want to know what Halo 5 COULDâVE been if Brian Reed wasnât on the project?
Here is a good example of what Halo 5âs original narrative most likely was prior to him replacing it with his unrestrained pen of fanfiction :
- https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SgMQ0hbk3BFofkeWSE7zv5TAJiz4phZfYQGuhP3DsCQ/edit?usp=sharing
3 Likes
Usually an argument is concise and easy to digest.
Usually yes.
But I like to be thorough when I cover a topic so I make sure to develop enough sub-points to my main-point to show my standpoint effectively.
If you call a drivulous rant thorough, okay.
You do you, boo.
Pointing out what problems we faced and why each of 343âs previous Halo titles have been alienating to the core audience (which is a terrible business decision as you make less money when you have a massive dedicated following to begin with) is ranting?
Ranting has far more tangents in my opinion.
I mean, when you have little tact in addressing those points, theyâre not as persuasive, so yeah.
Eh. As long as I have more tact than 343 Industries; I call that a win because it means I can save effort while beating my true opponent.
Like you would know.
What does your response even mean? Like my statements had plenty of context points but this has nothing in terms of direction.
Aw geez, here we goâŠ
Be sure to proofread this time, unlike your creative writing.
My main concern with Brian Reed is the fact that the man committed multiple writing taboos and NO ONE stopped to say âhey um⊠this doesnât seem rightâ. He was made the Narrative Director of the Franchise but it seems that no one was checking his script to see if it had appeal.
It frustrates me that he broke characters into something else that they should never have been (Michael J. Crespo betraying his team and joining the Insurrection, Cortana suddenly going from friend to fascist galactic dictator, Kelly and Linda swapping their roles in Blue Teamâs party dynamics, and the entirety of Blue Team becoming gullible instead of smart and calculating.)
It angers me that he spent so much time setting up a villain ONLY to replace them at the start of the next story arc (Didact was killed in a comic book because Brian Reed decided to put forth Jul 'Mdama as the new series antagonist⊠only to kill him off in the first ten minutes of Halo 5 to shoe-horn in another antagonist immediately).
It aggravates me that I watched Halo Nightfall in order to see how Jameson Locke was, only for the way Brian Reed wrote his character in Halo 5 to make him out to be a generic protagonist. His character in Nightfall (written by Paul T. Scheuring) is more likable and less static than his character portrayal in Halo 5 Guardians.
Nathan Fillion reprised his role as Edward Buck, but he is hardly as sarcastic or charming this go around; instead only having a half-as-many witty moments in a story that is twice as long as Halo 3 ODST.
Holly Tanaka just reminds me of that one kid we all knew in high-school that thought of himself/herself as a philosopher, but only ended up sounding obnoxious and pretentious as they spouted platitudes while trying to impress you.
Olympia Vale is literally the only new character that I found interesting and a valued member of the team.
Players who read the books already knew who the members of Blue Team were. John is the leader, Frederic is the heavy-hitter, Kelly is the blitz scout, and Linda was the perfect sniper.
Fireteam Osirisâ makeup is just⊠strange.
- Locke is the ONI Operative and leader of the team. That makes sense.
- Tanaka is⊠a person with guns. I honestly cannot figure out her actual role in the team. She wears TechnicianâClass MJOLNIR Gen-2 armor, but she doesnât provide any technical support in the game.
- Vale makes sense as the team is performing operations in Sangheili controlled areas, so a cultural and linguistics specialist makes sense.
- Buck⊠they actually only brought Buck in because Gabriel Thorneâs actor (Ethan Peck) was busy with another production at the time so 343 contacted Nathan Fillion and asked him to reprise his role as Eddie Buck. And for what reason is he part of Fireteam Osiris? Honestly, he is there just to be a fourth member and was put in only for fanservice value. âLook fans, one of your favorite characters is back!â
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Not all fanfiction is great. Some fanfiction exists solely because someone wants to write a self-insert power fantasy or create âcool OCsâ that undermine the roles and power levels of the actual series main cast, though have done little-to-nothing to earn it. Take a look at âThe Legend of Korraâ. One can look at Korra and see her as a fan-fiction created character since unlike Aang and every Avatar before her had to train to earn mastery of the four elements. Meanwhile her at the age of 5 already has a pretty capable understanding of three of these elements and mastery of the four by the end of the season + the Avatar state. Sometimes it seems the most novice of fanfiction enters actual professional writing on occasion and it often leads to divided fan bases and discourse. And from how Fireteam Osiris was portrayed, they are the âCool OCsâ that are somehow better than the series protagonist with little-to-no introduction.
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I cannot wait until the day comes when Microsoft chooses to reboot the later games and undo the damage that has been done. Have you noticed that it was a strange trend in the 2010s to take beloved things that have deep roots in fandom sub-cultures⊠and then completely alter them to be something that they are not? Mass Effect did this with MA Andromeda. Dead Space did this with DS3. Ghostbusters did this with Ghostbusters Rule 63. Star Wars did this with the Sequel Trilogy. Devil May Cry has done this with D.M.C. Halo has done this with H4 and H5G. And that is just naming a few. You would think after at least two failures of this type of thinking; the entertainment industry would begin to collectively think to themselves âwelp⊠add that to the âdonât do thisâ list.â
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Better to have clichés that actually stack well together than to have a narrative filled with tropes and filler chapters (3 Guns Down Missions in place of just lengthened cutscenes)
Sack him?
Nah.
I would just give him an award for Failing Upwards.
I am in the process of writing a book series.
I aspire to be a writer.
What sickens me is that even though some stories become mangled, not everyone who trashes a franchise gets to lose their job. Some, for some reason, receive a promotion.
âHalo 4 Spartan-Ops was not well received⊠so we are promoting you in spite of this for some reason.â
Ah how cute.
The plot synopsis of how I would perform my Halo 5 is just that, a plot synopsis. Sorry if my proofreading somehow made the story deteriorate in some way.
I mean, at least I provide a proper dual-perspective-narrative structure and had the characters actually have a brain on their heads instead of âwe go this way because the script says soâ
EXAMPLE
Chief sees a vision of Cortana after blacking out.
Chief : âCortana! Sheâs on Meridian!â
- When did she say she was on Meridian in that cutscene?
- Why did Blue Team not say âyou bonked your head Chief and havenât had R&R since she was lost. You must be losing it. Letâs finish this mission and get you checked out.â only then at the end of the mission UNSC Comms lets it slip that Cortana is actually alive and ONLY THEN should Blue Team realize that Chief is telling the truth.
1 Like