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Having just played 1 2 and 3 back to back, I feel as though the campaigns ramp up over all three games in a satisfying way, the vehicle battles getting bigger and more awesome, and a wider variety of guns. One thing the halo 3 campaign doesn't have as much of is the crazy 4-way battles you got in the earlier titles where you have your allies, flood, covenant and sentinels all fighting each other. That part in quarantine zone where the flood are using everyone's vehicles gets pretty nuts. 3 definitely makes up for it with the scarab battles though. Looking forward to ODST as I've never played it before, and to a lesser extent 4 although I'm not expecting much I hope there will at least be some pretty skyboxes and a fun battle or two.
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Jul 22, 2020 01:13
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Arcsquad12 posted:Halo CE was a rushed development that was quickly revamped into an FPS after Bungie was bought by Microsoft and told to make an Xbox launch title. So rushed that parts of the development were scrapped four months before release and rebuilt from scratch. 'Scrapping most/everything and starting over mere months from launch' is just a Bungie Thing(tm), I swear to god. Destiny 1 and 2 had some of the same poo poo going on.
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Jul 22, 2020 01:32
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ODST has a great, if short, campaign, the absolute best atmosphere of any Bungie Halo, the best soundtrack, and it's built around a lackluster story with characters pulled right from a Joss Whedon show, complete with the lack of depth beyond face value characteristics typical of Whedon's writing. Alpha Nine isn't bad as far as a squad dynamic goes but theres nothing new about them if you're at all familiar with Firefly, and they're held up entirely by the actors' performances rather than by the mediocre script. You don't care about Buck because he's a compelling character, you are just watching a good Nathan Fillion performance doing his best with what little he has to work with. The Rookie exploration segments are fun the first time around but the map isn't big enough or detailed enough to really make it engaging on a second playthrough, so it can hamper the pacing of the story missions. Its unfortunate because pacing is one place Halo 3 absolutely crushes Halo 1 and 2 by keeping up the intensity and flow for the entire game (except Cortana). Playing the ODST missions in order is really fun but the Rookie sections drag the pace down. That being said, Sadie's Story is quite a compelling look into civilian life during a Covenant attack. Arc Hammer fucked around with this message at 01:38 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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Jul 22, 2020 01:34
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Yeah I feel like both halo 1 and 2 campaigns are a bit front loaded, they start to drag a bit after the halfway mark, especially the library/two betrayals. Since I never played the anniversary versions, seeing the terminal videos was a really nice addition and helps flesh out the story a bit. Made me feel bad for the grunts learning that they're essentially hostages fighting under threat of their world being fully genocided. Cross game play lists should be fun, will you be able to make your own?
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Jul 22, 2020 01:54
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Arcsquad12 posted:ODST has a great, if short, campaign, the absolute best atmosphere of any Bungie Halo, the best soundtrack, and it's built around a lackluster story with characters pulled right from a Joss Whedon show, complete with the lack of depth beyond face value characteristics typical of Whedon's writing. I remember absolutely loving ODST's atmosphere back in the day. Wandering around New Mombasa at dark alone, soft jazz music in the background, and then stumbling on a squad of Brutes made for a hell of an experience. Also yea it was basically Firefly but in the Halo universe, along with Number 6 from BSG. Other than that, I actually don't remember the plot, like at all. Still, I'm excited to see how the campaign holds up. I remember thinking it had the best soundtrack of any Halo game. Also, Firefight! Good god my roommates and I in college had so many nights staying up practically all night just playing Firefight.
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Jul 22, 2020 02:03
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The plot is extremely basic. Dare redirects Alpha Nine from the planned drop onto Regret's Carrier to secure Mombasa's Superintendent AI after ONI caught wind that a Covenant Huragok Engineer had linked with it. Regret jumps, plan goes sideways and most of the game missions are about the squad linking up, defending the city and then deciding to make a break for it before Jerk with a Heart of Gold Edward Buck decides to go back and save his ex girlfriend and finish the mission. As far as mysteries go its a pretty routine one because the answer to the mystery is already known to the player if they've played Halo 2 or 3. The Engineer gives the UNSC info on the Covenant Battlenet (which is easy to break according to CE) and tells them that they're digging for something. That's it. It's big information for the squad but it has no revelations about the covenant apart from the Engineers being an unwilling slave species.
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Jul 22, 2020 02:23
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Arcsquad12 posted:Its surprising how little happens in Halo 2 when possibly the largest battle of the entire war happens in the game... as a brief cutscene at the start of Gravemind. The majority of the covenant fleet was at High Charity and what was left of the Prophet's fleet was at the portal at Voi and then crushed at the Ark. So I'm confused do the covenant races still live on planets or are they all fully spacefaring? Like are the elites, brutes and the other races still hanging out on their homeworlds that are untouched?
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Jul 22, 2020 03:13
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Lawman 0 posted:So I'm confused do the covenant races still live on planets or are they all fully spacefaring? They do have homeworlds and colonies, but the majority of the armed forces of the Covenant are spacefaring since the Covenant Fleet is extremely powerful. They project their might by threatening to glass planets from orbit. Whoever controls space controls the fight, essentially. Covenant troops only go to ground to take out anti-orbital installations or to secure Forerunner artifacts, and that's when they run into trouble because Humans are way stronger on solid ground. The UNSC navy got its rear end kicked in nearly every space battle with the Covenant because human ships are hopelessly outgunned in straight slugging matches.
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Jul 22, 2020 03:21
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Lawman 0 posted:So I'm confused do the covenant races still live on planets or are they all fully spacefaring? High Charity is just their mobile capital they all have their own home worlds. Except the Grunts. Their world was glassed because they rebelled at one point.
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Jul 22, 2020 03:22
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Oh ok thanks 
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Jul 22, 2020 03:40
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Solaris 2.0 posted:Except the Grunts. Their world was glassed because they rebelled at one point. Nah, they just glassed the major population centers. There's plenty of Grunts still living there. Also High Charity is effectively the Prophets' homeworld.
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Jul 22, 2020 04:38
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From my wiki skimming it sounded liked none of the covenant member species actually managed to develop to spaceflight before the prophet race encountered them and brought them into the fold? Also, just finishing my Halo 3 play through I'm got a little mixed up on something from an earlier wikidive. Guilty Spark refers to humans as "Forerunner Children" or something like that, it felt like they almost meant it in the literal sense. But humans are apparently explicitly not forerunner? Did forerunners just pick them as successors? Also, if forerunners were able to preserve humans and the prophet species, how come they didn't preserve any of their kind?
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Jul 22, 2020 04:57
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The Elites were spacefaring, the brutes were a few times but kept nuking themselves to pre-industrial, the hunters and grunts were just chilling, jackals were space pirates, drones were hanging out.
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Jul 22, 2020 05:05
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While we're talking backstory, what is the general gist of the story being told in the Reach data pads? I've been getting them very much out of order and all I can tell is that there are AI's plotting behind either humanity or forerunners' backs.
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Jul 22, 2020 05:24
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Oxyclean posted:From my wiki skimming it sounded liked none of the covenant member species actually managed to develop to spaceflight before the prophet race encountered them and brought them into the fold? I don't know about the new canon (343 onward stuff) but I think in terms of the Halo trilogy the Forerunners were obsessed with the idea of 'the mantle'. The dominant species in the galaxy had a duty to hold everything up and take responsibility for everything. They apparently inherited this mantle and its ideals from another civilization that came before them. When they started to lose their war with the flood, they realised they had lost the ability to maintain the mantle and thus the underpinnings of their society, so it wasn't really worth saving. I think this is why Mendicant Bias (the AI whose story is told in the terminals), who was created to stop the gravemind/flood instead sided with them- he saw the forerunners were incapable of upholding order in the galaxy and by their own principals, programmed into him, should be destroyed. That said the idea was to preserve what life they could. The prophet race was primitive- they wanted to protect species that had primitive innocence from a war they had no part in. Hence in the terminals in H3 they talk about cataloging species for survival and portals and shield worlds and stuff. The mass extinction caused by the Halo array had a few caveats. Here's where things get murky. Originally it was the Forerunners as a failed civilisation would wipe themselves out to stop the flood. They would retreat to the Ark then make it to earth (hence the portal) to start over. There are hints about a human-forerunner connection in CE and 2 in background dialogue but in short form: AIs call humans things like "reclaimer", gravemind calls you "child of my enemy" and then it culminates with Spark directly saying "you are forerunner" to you at the end of 3. This also explains why humans are the only ones who can operate the technology. Still, given some of the text in the terminals talks about the Forerunners passing the mantle and some ambiguity about just where and who everybody was at the time, there was always still a little wriggle room in the narrative for argument about whether humans are direct ancestors of Forerunners or just the chosen inheritors. At the end of 3 most people, I think, took it that yes, forerunner = human. But then the franchise changed hands. 343 of course came up with a totally different backstory involving ancient humans being more powerful than forerunners and genetic back dating of the Master Chief and blah blah blah blah. Also Forerunner soldiers are digitised human souls in robots or something because whatever. edit: http://halostory.bungie.org/resources.html This page was big on connecting the dots and LOTS OF SPECULATION back in the day. Its a fun little read for nostalgia and seeing people predict stuff for Halo 3 and beyond. Animal Friend fucked around with this message at 05:42 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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Jul 22, 2020 05:29
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Oxyclean posted:From my wiki skimming it sounded liked none of the covenant member species actually managed to develop to spaceflight before the prophet race encountered them and brought them into the fold? There's some notions in the EU stuff that I'm sort of paraphrasing a paraphrase of, since I never got into it, that forerunners and ancient humans* were actually both offshoots of the same primogenitor race and that the librarian was working on reunifying them, or something? so from a certain point of view, modern day humans are both not forerunner, but also are related to/descendants of... I don't know. alternatively, the name 'forerunner' was a title that they took up, having lost/given up their original species name. they had the notion that they would pass on their legacy/stewardship of the galaxy/Mantle of ResponsibilityTM to others (the Didact changed his mind). so now Spark has declared that modern humans have taken up that title and position and are thus 'forerunners' who will eventually pass on their legacy to some other race... but that seems, I don't know, pithy. Well, my understanding of things at bungie and now 343 is that they didn't even know. Individual people has their own ideas about stuff, but no one sat down and lined it all up. Until Halo 3 got a lot of them arguing and they kind of went with a middle way that everyone mostly tolerated but no one got everything they wanted. But now there's different people at the helm and a different philosophy, but even still the newest expanded universe stuff is still kind of straddling the line of "spiritual successors" vs "some sort of shared genetic history" at least as I understand it. *I'll just say that the whole ancient humans thing... maybe could have been neat, but a de-evolution ray and then humans evolving to be exactly the same and encoding stuff in genetic memory or whatever the gently caress is stupid as all hell I do actually sort of like the origin of the flood. I mean it's peak space fantasy but it's... I dunno fitting, in a way that ancient humans turned back into monkeys turned back into humans is not. oh yeah there's also some notions that the "Great Journey" may actually have been a literal thing and one of the few things the prophets got right- that on the Ark there is a means of travel to somewhere else (and/or a higher state of being) that some amount of Forerunner took, and may still be in existence somewhere (beyond the didact) Mazerunner fucked around with this message at 05:43 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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Jul 22, 2020 05:40
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Also the flood is a Precursor race who made the forerunners and who the forerunners beat and the last one turned into a virus that would make life into more precursors except over eons mutated into the flood instead but it's still salty it lost, and that precursors name was Albert Gravemind No, this doesn't matter in any way Also also 343 wasn't paying attention and there's a literal mantle too lol
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Jul 22, 2020 05:43
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I think the Forerunner connection with Humans as a successor has its roots in the Bungie era, but basically here goes. The Precursors were an extremely ancient race who established (or at least were the first species that we know of) the Mantle of Responsibility, as Carnaticum said. The Forerunners were a powerful spacefaring race who had relations with the Precursors and saw themselves as the inheritors of the Mantle. The Precursors were like "actually we were gonna give the Mantle to those humans over there" and then the Forerunners got pissed and waged war against the Precursors. The Forerunners "won" because the Precursors were like "yeah, we're out of here" and converted themselves into space dust so they could hibernate until things calmed down. One of these Precursors either altered itself or was infected by something on the edge of the Galaxy and lay dormant for a long rear end time. Humans and Prophets (San Shayuum in their own language) had a powerful spacefaring society, and an exploration ship found the Precursor dust, not knowing what it was. They found it made their pets more docile, and the dust basically was used as a sedative for their rowdy animals. Over generations, this tainted precursor dust started causing mutations in their pets which then started infecting the Humans and Prophets and oops we created The Flood from snorting space dust. The Flood start ripping through human space, causing humans to abandon their territory and encroach on Forerunner space as they run from the Flood. Forerunners respond to human aggression with overwhelming force, beating the humans into submission before realizing that they were being attacked by the parasite. However the Flood had gotten smart and actively chose not to attack Forerunners, making it look like a human only disease. They retreated, but the Forerunners figured they would be back. The surviving humans were devolved and returned to a pre spacefaring society. Eventually the Forerunners come across a being called the Primordial, the precursor dust thing that caused the Flood, having reconstituted itself into a new shape. The Primordial talks to Mendicant Bias and introduces the Logic Plague to make Bias turn on the Forerunners as the Forerunner Flood Wars started, and poo poo goes to hell. Halo Rings, Arks Shield Worlds and Prometheans are all made or altered to fight the Flood, but it all goes to poo poo and world after world dies. The Greater Ark sees most of the remaining Forerunner society die to the Flood, while the Librarian and a few other Forerunners keep living specimens of all catalogued sentient species on the Lesser Ark. Offensive Bias, Mendicant's replacement, defeats a giant Flood armada long enough for the rings to be fired, and then the Librarian sets about reseeding humanity and the other sentient species across the galaxy. Also 343 Guilty Spark was an ancient human named Chakas who had his consciousness digitized and put into a Monitor frame and also he survived getting spartan lasered and now he rides around on a pirate ship with human scavengers while moonlighting as a cyberman. Arc Hammer fucked around with this message at 05:50 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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Jul 22, 2020 05:48
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Arcsquad12 posted:Also 343 Guilty Spark was an ancient human named Chakas who had his consciousness digitized and put into a Monitor frame and also he survived getting spartan lasered and now he rides around on a pirate ship with human scavengers while moonlighting as a cyberman. Excuse me what the gently caress
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Jul 22, 2020 06:06
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It took me a bit too long to realize that was probably a joke about Guilty Spark's VO. The flood backstory is kinda interesting - I think the bit about it mostly being something that hosed off out of the galaxy, and basically at risk of returning at some point makes the stuff about having flood spores on halo rings for study make a whole lot more sense. (Also wait, aren't there 5 other rings out there that could have flood spores on them "right now"...?) I think in my wiki skimming I saw some stuff about the flood backing off ancient humanity/leaving Forerunners alone to help give the illusion it was something they could cure / cause them to later waste time chasing a cure that never existed. e: Oh, interesting, The Gravemind on 05 was not some gravemind that survived the rings firing, it was just a bi-product of containment failing on 05 and the flood getting big enough. Oxyclean fucked around with this message at 06:11 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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Jul 22, 2020 06:08
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Oh yeah it's strongly implied that the Flood ate a few other galaxies Sorry, rest of universe. Our bad.
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Jul 22, 2020 06:11
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Abroham Lincoln posted:Excuse me what the gently caress  Hello I am 343 Guilty-of-loving-with-the-continuity Spark. Arc Hammer fucked around with this message at 06:20 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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Jul 22, 2020 06:13
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Arcsquad12 posted:
No way
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Jul 22, 2020 06:19
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RBA Starblade posted:No way  Very way.
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Jul 22, 2020 06:21
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Arcsquad12 posted:
I don't know if this is the stupidest poo poo I've ever seen but it's pretty far up there
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Jul 22, 2020 06:21
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Lol that's Forge from Halo Wars' daughter apparently What in the hell 343
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Jul 22, 2020 06:25
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Wait that wasn't a joke about voice actors? e: Further wikidiving also reminds me of how much I lovehate the names Bungie came up with stuff, (or anyone imitating what they went fro) particularly the ships and monitors. I'm slightly upset there doesn't seem to be a named monitor for every ring, but "000 Tragic Solitude" is good. Oxyclean fucked around with this message at 06:31 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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Jul 22, 2020 06:26
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Arcsquad12 posted:
I'm the ace of spades. e: oh of course that's actually the name of the ship, i just thought it looked so dumb and glaring in the picture up there. Animal Friend fucked around with this message at 06:35 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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Jul 22, 2020 06:31
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I'm very excited to see Halo Infinite on Thursday lol Let's see how much dumber things can get
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Jul 22, 2020 06:31
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Carnaticum posted:I'm the ace of spades. Guess what the ship is called. Oxyclean posted:Wait that wasn't a joke about voice actors? Lol you thought I was joking. Arc Hammer fucked around with this message at 06:43 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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Jul 22, 2020 06:32
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quote is not edit.
Arc Hammer fucked around with this message at 06:56 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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Jul 22, 2020 06:43
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The flood ship should be called Space of AIDS (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Jul 22, 2020 06:43
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You know, over the last few days I was kind of disappointed that despite the poor taste in my mouth left by the story of Halo 4 I never got to at least run through 5 once. This last page has made me kind of glad that I didn't.
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Jul 22, 2020 07:11
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Yea the Halo story goes from “interesting if a bit derivative pop-sci fi that works for the universe/story that Bungie created” and then 343 takes over and the Halo story /EU....well it just goes places  Seriously it becomes old Star Wars EU levels of bloated, silly, and over-explained. And then the new games (Halo 4/5) expect you to both know all of this poo poo and care about it lol.
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Jul 22, 2020 13:17
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Solaris 2.0 posted:Yea the Halo story goes from “interesting if a bit derivative pop-sci fi that works for the universe/story that Bungie created” and then 343 takes over and the Halo story /EU....well it just goes places Honestly Halo has always had a problem with relying on EU stuff as a crutch, even before Halo 2 released. If you were actually a big enough nerd to have actually read the books (me), (is this even worth spoilers) then you understood why chief was on earth, and how Johnson survived the ring exploding (he's immune to the flood which is kind of a big deal???). If not, all you got was "that's classified  ", and they did the same thing again with Halo 3. To this day I have no idea why chief falls out of the sky or how Arby Johnson and Miranda get back to earth before him. I think it was explained in some graphic novel or something??? And you were still expected to know all this otherwise unimportant background lore about AI creation and rampancy inherited from marathon, and who Hallsey was, and so on... The saving grace was that you didn't actually need to know any of it to understand the actual plot of the games, which is where 4 and 5 fail. Like it didn't matter that the UNSC were lunatic fascists because it never has any impact on the game or story.Imo you can really see Bungie grasping for a plot if you look at it solely as delivered by the first 3 games. In CE the rings destroy all life with sufficient biomass to sustain the flood (as a kid I assumed it was implying the rings killed the dinosaurs since there's no reference to sentience), and the only references to humans being special is in Spark calling Chief a reclaimer and his offhand comment about "combat skins", neither of which imply any old elite couldn't have used the index instead. The only thing Spark says is that he personally can't use the index for obvious reasons. In 2 all of this is retconned: only humans can fire the rings, the delta halo gravemind somehow survived the first firing and has control over several of its systems, and there's an ark which following the biblical themes presumably kept humanity safe from the rings? they could either be descendants from the ark or chosen by the forerunners as reclaimers, but Halo 3 bizarrely goes with both at once??? 3 is where it really goes off the rails imo, since it requires you to take everything the game says at face value and do absolutely no thinking or analysis, which is very difficult given all the lore terminals which directly contradict the 3 or 4 times the game literally just says "HUMANS ARE FORERUNNERS" which of course 4 and 5 just ignore. Like why is the ark empty. why did they bury it in the ground preventing anyone from getting in or out, earth is apparently devoid of sentient life according to the terminals so humans were either pre-sentient and missed the rings, or they're forerunners from the ark, but why and how did they leave it. Sorry this has been annoying me for a decade feel free to ignore.
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Jul 22, 2020 14:44
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Arcsquad12 posted:I think the Forerunner connection with Humans as a successor has its roots in the Bungie era, but basically here goes. (Quick content warning: I strongly dislike and mentally disregard the incoherent 343i continuity.) Based just on the Trilogy and especially the H3 terminals, I always thought the mention of the Precursors was almost a sort of... cute tongue-in-cheek reference, given that the terms "Forerunners" and "Precursors" are synonymous. I read that brief reference to the Mantle of Responsibility as saying that in the same way that humans/Covenant look at the Forerunners as these incredible ancient beings worthy of respect and worship, the Forerunners had the same dynamic with something else who came even earlier. The Forerunners had Forerunners. My impression was also that they had never met, and it was a self-assigned role - not dissimilar to the Great Journey.
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Jul 22, 2020 14:47
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The first three Halo games were a lot more concerned with the themes and tone than the actual literal plot and it shows in a lot of places (like, it takes a lot to set up that John 1:17 uses the power of the Galilean to destroy the divine spark and reject his own godhood, then shatters the proof of divinity to blow up the ark of the covenant while also holding back God's flood), then ODST was telling a mostly unrelated side story, and Reach was a love letter but one that went harder into the military sci-fi aesthetic than the religious ones because it's a prequel and sequel (you know, like a  ) and shows that while it's a losing fight before the savior arrives there's still worth in fighting it. The books are there to fill in the holes for whoever was concerned but 343 took those more seriously than what the games were saying and doing and it led us to that picture at the top of the page lmao. The datapads in Reach are fun and tweak the story, but they don't really retcon things the way 343 did, and mostly exist to make the connections to Marathon's themes more obvious (and to make the rest of the games seem less hopeless after the fact I think). There's also a direct throughline from Pathways Into Darkness and Marathon to Halo that got dropped very hard because it's a different dev team that I think comprises a lot of what Halo lost. Halo under Bungie was this weird mishmash of Marathon, Aliens, religion (specifically the rejection of evangelism and Christian fundamentalism), and goofy cartoony aliens and designs. It's pretty unique in western media. Halo under 343 isn't. Though, Bungie's has more of a huge, unwavering boner for the military lol
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Jul 22, 2020 15:04
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What level 4 is of the campaign in Halo: CE is a huge unfun slog. That is all.
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Jul 22, 2020 15:52
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Yea that's the great thing about Halo 1- Reach the Lore is there if you want to dive into it but you can ignore it and still get the gist of the story and still enjoy the tone, atmosphere, setting, and gameplay. And I say this as someone who was really into the wider Halo "universe" up until 3 when things started to get a little whacky. I read all the Eric Nylund novels and even the Dietz "The Flood". As a teenager, I thought they were fun Mil-pop Sci-Fi novels. Once you get to Halo 4 and 5 you are not only expected to know and care about allllllllll of the lore, but it becomes required to even remotely understand the plot. Though I'll be honest I never actually played Halo 5 but watched the cutscenes on youtube. chaosapiant posted:What level 4 is of the campaign in Halo: CE is a huge unfun slog. That is all. Wait are you talking about "Silent Cartographer"?? Because that is considered one of the best levels in the game and if you thought that was a slog oh boy are you in for a rough time going forward.
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Jul 22, 2020 16:11
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The Library is a slog, which remains true to this day.
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Jul 22, 2020 16:20
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