Right, here’s a topic that isn’t one of the millions that says ‘sprint needs to go’ or ‘343 ruined Halo.’ Because 343 has done some absolutely fantastic things with Halo that I think we, as a community, may have overlooked. Don’t get me wrong, Halo 4 was far from perfect and Halo 5 multiplayer needs tweaking, but let’s ignore those things for the moment and focus on what 343 needs to keep doing.
- GraphicsYou cannot deny that for a last-gen game, Halo 4 was stunning. Beautiful. Breathtaking. That scene where you leave the Dawn’s crash site and come across the Forerunner towers made me stop my Warthog and stare. Who can deny that the aesthetics of the final part of the mission Midnight where you’re splitting Cortana into the system weren’t magnificent? Or how detailed Halsey’s face looked in that opening animation and the Spartan Ops videos? And that’s before we even get into what a job they did on Halo 2 Anniversary. Admit it, Bungie’s Gravemind looked like a dead rose had developed speech and a particularly bad cold. 343’s Gravemind looks like it’s actually made of corpses, the way its mouth is structured looks almost painful, which is exactly what you want with an enemy made from necrotic flesh. Halo 5’s graphics look like they’re measuring up to be the same.
- Story
Cortana. Is. Dead. And they played it wonderfully. They took a perfectly valid plot point, Rampancy, and a perfectly structured problem, imminent composition of the human race, and created a perfectly reasonable solution: Overload the gun with a load of insane half naked blue ladies. No, that’s not sarcasm. If you’ve played the mission you’ll know it sounds better than I can put into words. Halo Nightfall was great and it gives us a really good insight into Locke’s character. Forward Unto Dawn was… eh, I’ll admit that it dragged a little but after the space elevator collapsed you know you were hooked.
- Halo 5: Guardians Multiplayer
Please don’t shoot me, but if you remove the part of your brain that says ‘It’s turning into Call Of Duty’ the Beta was actually pretty fun. I had a blast using ground pound and clambering up walls. I don’t like COD, so don’t accuse me of being a fanboy, but though I think that the killtimes are a little too fast I much preferred the fast paced gameplay. The sprint limit works in my opinion, and the thruster pack adds a plethora of new features that because they’re standard on all Spartans we can react to. Yes, the ability to sprint-and-Spartan-charge or sprint-stop-shoot does add elements of twitch gameplay, but to be honest don’t the different grenade types do that? Everybody loves the incineration and spike grenades from Halo 3 and yet the four different grenades types made gameplay very twitchy. You could get stuck with two different blast radii, set on fire and have to deal with burn damage, or have to dodge a plain explosion. In terms of things that deviate Halo from a tactical shooter, there’s no difference with thruster pack. Well, there is, but it’s a metaphor.
- Halo Waypoint
The very fact that you’re on this forum means that you must use this. It’s cleaner, newer, fresher, and has an ever expanding Universe section. The terminals aren’t designed to be viewed halfway through a game session, they’re designed for when you want to do something Haloish but not play the game at that moment. The website has had a huge workover and these forums work so much smoother. The aesthetics are brilliant too. You can follow Halo on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Twitch, Instagram; there’s so many ways to integrate social media and the game I don’t know what they’re going to do next. Carrier pigeon, maybe?
That would be kinda cool.