Alright so I just bought the newest Game Informer on my iPad and no I’m not going to ruin anything or say something that gets this thread locked! I heavily recommend that you guys spend the $5 if you can’t wait to see more.
Alright so now I’ll talk about what won’t get the thread locked.
I’m very impressed that 343 has shown they are serious about the multiplayer community by making the 15 DLC maps free. This is a huge deal especially seeing as it would have been totally accepted by most people to have to buy it because that’s just a norm in the industry now. Even if these maps are mostly remixes or forge maps, that’s still nice, but I doubt they all are. I’m assuming that the maps will be evenly spread out though between Breakout, Arena and their unannounced BTB. This makes me wonder what the actual paid DLC will be. The most likely is cosmetics but I’d love to see some add-ons for Campaign or Spartan Ops if it returns too.
As for Campaign, I’m so excited to play it and just see everything. This has me way more pumped than I was for Halo 4 and trust me, I was pretty pumped. We can order the AI to do stuff! This has me incredibly excited even if it’s not a major game changer. For the longest time I’ve always wanted to see the Chief actually order someone around, he’s only like the highest ranking combat unit ever and the most legendary person in the military, if not the whole world. Now we can do it! I’m glad that 343 didn’t treat squad gameplay as just you being one guy fighting alongside a few other guys with no real way to interact with each other. We can revive each other too. How’s that gonna work?? Is it going to be like Gears of War where you wretch on the ground? Or are we going to just go ragdoll until someone comes up to us and presses X? I’m really interested to see how it’s handled and I think it’s a neat idea and preferable to having to wait 7 years while my teammate has to kill all the enemies or when I don’t respawn even though the coast is clear.
Another thing to note with reviving fallen teammates is that this means we no longer have invincible NPC characters, at least not our squad mates. I really hope this means the AI has been improved so that we don’t have to babysit our squad too much.
Can we expect to see squad commands making an appearance in multiplayer? Maybe the new BTB will have NPC’s like Marines for us to order around. It would make sense right? Can we also expect to see the Revive mechanic work it’s way into a few MP modes as well? I’m curious to see how easy the Campaign will be on Legendary when you have someone that can spawn with a Sniper or a Shotgun. LASO is probably going to be made much easier with 4 player as Blue Team. Fireteam Osiris looks good but underpowered in comparison, although they have superior tech for finding paths to compensate and one of the squad members even starts with a Plasma Pistol, very unorthodox for a Spartan.
Each character is also said to have their own unique HUD just like Master Chief did in Halo 4. This is awesome and I really hope one day they can apply this to multiplayer. How cool would that be if every Helmet gave a different HUD? It would be extremely challenging to balance it for MP but just imagine how cool it would be if they did it right.
I’m so relieved to hear that the Campaign is not nearly as linear. Multiple pathways, some not even accessible without using Spartan Abilities, different ways of completing an objective. They really sound like they’re going all out to make the Campaign enjoyable to actually play more than just once.
Normally, CoD is on my radar every year as a game to just pick up because of it’s multiplayer. This year, I don’t even want the game for three reasons.
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The biggest reason that consumes 75% of all reasons, Halo 5. Between Campaign, Arena Multiplayer, BTB multiplayer and possibly Spartan Ops, this game will have my attention for a long time. Not to mention getting all the achievements!
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Gears of War remake. Gears 1 was literally my first online shooter and I’ll never forget it. I’ll be sure to play this whenever I’m not playing Halo 5.
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Black Ops 3 no longer being next-gen only. This might not bother some people but it really bothers me. This isn’t a huge deal breaker for me but it is the last bit of information I needed to make a decision on it. I thought Advanced Warfare was supposed to be the last cross-gen CoD but that’s not the case. I don’t want to play a game that’s been dumbed down to work on inferior hardware just to sell more copies.
I can’t wait for Halo 5 and I hope to see some of you guys there!