Official Xbox Thread - Price drop | Xbox Series X now $399

[MajinZuub]

Watching the Games Showcase right now. Hades looks dope.

I have it on Switch and it's fun as hell. Definitely a must play

 

[RustyShackleford]

Do you want the long or short version?

 

[antidope]

I was SUMMONED to the thread. I am only here to give the people what they want.

 

[1995]

I was SUMMONED to the thread. I am only here to give the people what they want.

How is Halo 3 these days?

 

[antidope]

How is Halo 3 these days?

Ranked is on its last legs. Just not enough people playing it.

 

[rbk93]

Do you want the long or short version?

Long.

Felt it has the 2nd best MP in the series behind H3.

 

[Beruseruku Desu]

Can't wait for Starfield. Fingers crossed it's good.

 

[Beruseruku Desu]

Atomic Heart too

 

[antidope]

Long.

Felt it has the 2nd best MP in the series behind H3.

Glad you like it, but I couldn't disagree more. Spoilering it cause no ones actually gonna want to read it.

It's as simple as this: 343 is sacrificing Halo's unique qualities & gameplay in order to try to capture as many potential players as possible.

There are a litany of things I can go into as to why this game is terrible, but it all really starts and ends with Sprint. Sprint is easily the single worst thing that happened to Halo. It doesn't belong and its broken the game on a fundamental level from what it used to be.

The addition of sprint in Halo sounded great in theory, but the installment of sprint actually caused negative consequences to the overall health and gameplay of halo. We feel that the negative consequences of sprint outweigh the positives. Our research has found the negative consequences to be:

Spoiler: Spint Is Bad Because

1. Disables attackers- Due to sprints nature, it disables a player’s ability to shoot and sprint at the same time. This makes sprint a defensive tool by nature which leads to the next problem

2. Slower gameplay- Because everyone uses sprint as a defensive tool, it causes lengthy cat and mouse chases dragging out kills when a player should have died. This leads to the next problem

3. Destroys scale- Scale refers to the dimensions of a map, in relation to the dimensions and abilities of a spartan. Here are some examples:

• Distance between cover vs. spartan speed. (this one is very important; too much distance between cover and you can’t move without dying, too little and you can’t kill anything, which is equally as bad)
• Box height vs. spartan & jump height.
• Hallway width vs. grenade explosion radius.
• Average encounter distance vs. melee & average weapon effectiveness range.
• Map & line of sight distance vs. grenade throw distance & weapon range.

By adding sprint, maps must be created different, making the entire scale of the game distorted. This then leads to the next problem

4. Destroys strategic map movement- Smart movement is encouraged with no sprint because every move counts. Players can not sprint out of bad decisions made with poor and unaware map movement.

I will be referencing The Pit (https://halo.fandom.com/wiki/The_Pit) a lot as its the only map that I know of that has a true Sprint remake (it technically has 2) as to why it doesn't work. First and foremost go look at the size of H3 Pit vs the Reach/Halo 4 ones. The size discrepancy is enormous. The latter two maps are huge in comparison, and why is that? Sprint. The inclusion of Sprint makes it so every map has to be enormous being that you can just cover ground in a much faster and quite frankly unnatural manner when referencing how the map was designed. I shouldn't be able to make it from Green Box to the opposite Training in three seconds, that's ridiculous. It creates a lack of penalty for dying because I can just run back to where I died and its like it never happened.

It also affects the spawns in a detrimental way. Halo typically has two classes of spawns, statics and randoms. With the introduction of Sprint, you now need more random spawns because if they're all statics then sprint just makes it so you can easily set up off one death cycle even if you weren't really in a position to do so. If you & I fought on my Green Box and I killed you, I can assume that you'll likely spawn Court or Shotgun/Mauler area in H3 because those are the two dominant static spawn points on the Map. In the Sprint version of the maps that doesn't really happen, there are a bunch of randoms because without them I can kill you my Green make it to your Green before you even spawn and have the height advantage that I really didn't earn.

Every Sprint map is like this. They're all crazy big and have all these random corridors and boxes and stuff to try and tone down the effects of Sprint, and if you're gonna do all that...Just don't put it in the game at all. Halo was always a game with minimal cover and now cover is EVERYWHERE.

Once you introduce sprint it becomes prohibitively difficult to keep track of and accurately predict player movement; this snowballs into affecting spawn prediction/control, predictive shooting, and predictive grenading of corners/doorways.

Then there are the guns.... I don't understand why this game has so many potential utility weapons in it. Halo at its core has always been a six to eight-gun game. Halo 3 had 28 guns in it if I remember correctly. The guns that mattered?

• BR
• AR
• Snipe
• Rockets
• Shotgun/Mauler/Sword
• Splaser

Every other gun is niche and only useful in like 1% of real-time circumstances. Halo 5 to my knowledge has FOUR so called utility weapons in it.

• BR
• DMR
• Light Rifle
• Pistol

That is ridiculous. The game should only have ONE that is why its called a utility weapon. Thats why every non 343 game only has ONE of them, its supposed to be that way. The whole core of Halo has been that we all start with the same stuff and you can run into someone and deduce that they have 1/6 things on them which 99% of the time is the utility gun. That no longer exists.

All those Spartan Abilities just suck. I can go into this but they are just awful, why are are climbing walls in Halo or doing Shroyukens with Spartan Charge or whatever its called.

The game calling out for you is childish nonsense. Callouts are supposed to be learned, not handed to you. Especially when 99% of them are made up by the community and highly specific and from what I saw of the H5 demo they are wildly generic. If you tell me Someone is at the Walshy on Pit I know EXACTLY where he is. Something random like "Boardwalk" isn't helpful, it is pointless noise.

The game has to change for sure, but they did a bunch of things that to me make no sense and turned me off the series permanently. Halo development continues to be feature-based, rather than gameplay-based, and the games die within six months even with people throwing money at it constantly. Not like it really means anything but unless there's money to be made playing H5, none of the pro's play it. They all Play H3 instead.

Spoiler: More Spoilers

They saw Reach do poorly and decided to add a few features that other FPS games had to try and reach a new market of people who would want to play Halo.

When that didn't work (H4), the next Genius move was to take that to the maximum(because going further and further in the direction of a failure just makes perfect sense) and just flat out copy elements from every other large scale FPS on the market in hopes that fans of said franchises comprised of a lot of people who have not played Halo extensively or haven’t played it at all would gravitate toward it because of those features (“Every modern shooter has sprint we need to have Sprint”. "Look, we added a Destiny-like ground-pound; therefore, Destiny fans will play Halo 5!" “(Insert mechanic here) works in that game, surely it can work in Halo)

People play different FPS games for different gameplay & mechanics by turning Halo into some odd Mish-Mash monster of these other Franchises, and what happens is that Halo loses its appeal of and its identity, along with losing unique gameplay that differentiated it from them monotony of generic "modern FPS" games out there already.

And for all the “Halo needs to evolve folks” (which it was doing just fine evolving prior to this foray into whatever 343 wants to call this and if you really want to discuss it I can), just look at a game like Counter Strike. Counter Strike has been the same game from the get-go, no core mechanics have changed yet its still going. The games as popular as it is because it's NOT Call of Duty, Halo, or Destiny. Just like the reason Halo WAS popular is because it wasn't Counter Strike, Call of Duty, or Quake. They understand that and wont be doing anything to mess that up.

I would completely understand all of the changes that continue to be made to Halo gameplay if they were actually resulting in more sales or continued community engagement after release, but shouldn't the numbers around the last few titles be indicative that they are:

• Not capturing their new target audience
• Pushing away their former audience, which was one the largest and most passionate on the web.

Shouldn't this be relatively obvious to anyone with a decent analytical mind over there? 343 had the console market cornered on Halo-style gameplay, and instead of continuing to own that gameplay and push that advantage for steady profits, they've chosen to abandon it and go after something they've proven they don't actually fundamentally understand from a good game design perspective.

They can do whatever they want though, the initial sales will ring off and that's cool. I been stopped caring about this and I am better off for it. I squeezed enough out of H3 to be happy forever, its easily the most important video game to me. At least they brought it to Xbox One so good for them I guess and I can continue playing it.

TLDR; Spint sucks and ruins the Halo Triangle and there are too many guns that create fake diversity. And now Master Chief is Spiderman apparently. I really hope yall enjoy it though, I need to see an actual multiplayer video before I can really weigh in, but so far... Nah. Literally, 1 thing looked good and it was nading sword to himself.

 

[blastercombo]

Halo is trash now and has been since reach. That’s just fact. 343 ruined it

 

[dcypoe81]

hyped for Starfield

 

[blastercombo]

WOW. Yall enjoy. Holy.....

They need to make dedicated halo 2 and 3 games. No more MCC mess. I’d be good with that forever. Don’t care if the player base is small

 

[Air Champa]

People have been complaining about Halo's multiplayer since Halo 2 came out. In some folk's mind, Halo 1 is the only real way Halo was meant to be played.

Halo 4 is where I got fed up enough to quit. Did get some amusement out of Reach. It was fun trolling people with armor lock. Came back for Halo 5. That didn't last maybe a month.

A perfect Halo game to me would be Halo 3 gameplay with Halo 2's maps. A lot of Halo 3's maps were trash, especially at launch.

This new game, as long as I can have some fun with it, I don't care what they do. I can probably get some entertainment out of big team games and a Firefight mode if they have one. I've accepted the fact they're never going back to classic Halo again long ago.

 

[Belgium]

I’ll give Halo 5 a chance but I’ll probably hate it. To me Halo died after Halo 3, mostly due to sprint.
I played an ungodly amount of Halo 3, I only played a few hundred matches of Reach, H4 and H5 combined. And most of that is just Reach.

Compared to about 16000 matches of Halo 3

 

[antidope]

H3's Map Pool > H2's. But I hate Lockout and Midship so I am the minority. H3 easily has the best map pool to me.

 

[blastercombo]

I understand games have to change. I also understand that old games are still playable. When the nba wanted a change they added a 3 point line. They ask added rules to limit an inside presence. If 343 was in charge they would of added a water pit, spikes on the ball, and a time where you could physically change the score board. Would that be more “fun for the audience”? Sure, but you changed everything. Games today are made with pro play in mind which means most people will watch it happening. They’ll add as many bells to the game to keep it interesting from a viewers standpoint.

 

[Air Champa]

Doubt any pros are happy with Infinite.

Used to run ranked Big Team Battle with a whole party 6 - 7 nights a week in Halo 2. Those were the days. Team Slayer in that game got so frustrating after a while. You might as well go ahead and quit if the other team controlled the BR/PP combo and sniper on a lot of maps.

Would get back into Halo 3, but I'm so rusty I doubt I'd have any fun getting stomped nearly every game.

 

[RustyShackleford]

Glad you like it, but I couldn't disagree more. Spoilering it cause no ones actually gonna want to read it.

It's as simple as this: 343 is sacrificing Halo's unique qualities & gameplay in order to try to capture as many potential players as possible.

There are a litany of things I can go into as to why this game is terrible, but it all really starts and ends with Sprint. Sprint is easily the single worst thing that happened to Halo. It doesn't belong and its broken the game on a fundamental level from what it used to be.

The addition of sprint in Halo sounded great in theory, but the installment of sprint actually caused negative consequences to the overall health and gameplay of halo. We feel that the negative consequences of sprint outweigh the positives. Our research has found the negative consequences to be:

Spoiler: Spint Is Bad Because

1. Disables attackers- Due to sprints nature, it disables a player’s ability to shoot and sprint at the same time. This makes sprint a defensive tool by nature which leads to the next problem

2. Slower gameplay- Because everyone uses sprint as a defensive tool, it causes lengthy cat and mouse chases dragging out kills when a player should have died. This leads to the next problem

3. Destroys scale- Scale refers to the dimensions of a map, in relation to the dimensions and abilities of a spartan. Here are some examples:

• Distance between cover vs. spartan speed. (this one is very important; too much distance between cover and you can’t move without dying, too little and you can’t kill anything, which is equally as bad)
• Box height vs. spartan & jump height.
• Hallway width vs. grenade explosion radius.
• Average encounter distance vs. melee & average weapon effectiveness range.
• Map & line of sight distance vs. grenade throw distance & weapon range.

By adding sprint, maps must be created different, making the entire scale of the game distorted. This then leads to the next problem

4. Destroys strategic map movement- Smart movement is encouraged with no sprint because every move counts. Players can not sprint out of bad decisions made with poor and unaware map movement.

I will be referencing The Pit (https://halo.fandom.com/wiki/The_Pit) a lot as its the only map that I know of that has a true Sprint remake (it technically has 2) as to why it doesn't work. First and foremost go look at the size of H3 Pit vs the Reach/Halo 4 ones. The size discrepancy is enormous. The latter two maps are huge in comparison, and why is that? Sprint. The inclusion of Sprint makes it so every map has to be enormous being that you can just cover ground in a much faster and quite frankly unnatural manner when referencing how the map was designed. I shouldn't be able to make it from Green Box to the opposite Training in three seconds, that's ridiculous. It creates a lack of penalty for dying because I can just run back to where I died and its like it never happened.

It also affects the spawns in a detrimental way. Halo typically has two classes of spawns, statics and randoms. With the introduction of Sprint, you now need more random spawns because if they're all statics then sprint just makes it so you can easily set up off one death cycle even if you weren't really in a position to do so. If you & I fought on my Green Box and I killed you, I can assume that you'll likely spawn Court or Shotgun/Mauler area in H3 because those are the two dominant static spawn points on the Map. In the Sprint version of the maps that doesn't really happen, there are a bunch of randoms because without them I can kill you my Green make it to your Green before you even spawn and have the height advantage that I really didn't earn.

Every Sprint map is like this. They're all crazy big and have all these random corridors and boxes and stuff to try and tone down the effects of Sprint, and if you're gonna do all that...Just don't put it in the game at all. Halo was always a game with minimal cover and now cover is EVERYWHERE.

Once you introduce sprint it becomes prohibitively difficult to keep track of and accurately predict player movement; this snowballs into affecting spawn prediction/control, predictive shooting, and predictive grenading of corners/doorways.

Then there are the guns.... I don't understand why this game has so many potential utility weapons in it. Halo at its core has always been a six to eight-gun game. Halo 3 had 28 guns in it if I remember correctly. The guns that mattered?

• BR
• AR
• Snipe
• Rockets
• Shotgun/Mauler/Sword
• Splaser

Every other gun is niche and only useful in like 1% of real-time circumstances. Halo 5 to my knowledge has FOUR so called utility weapons in it.

• BR
• DMR
• Light Rifle
• Pistol

That is ridiculous. The game should only have ONE that is why its called a utility weapon. Thats why every non 343 game only has ONE of them, its supposed to be that way. The whole core of Halo has been that we all start with the same stuff and you can run into someone and deduce that they have 1/6 things on them which 99% of the time is the utility gun. That no longer exists.

All those Spartan Abilities just suck. I can go into this but they are just awful, why are are climbing walls in Halo or doing Shroyukens with Spartan Charge or whatever its called.

The game calling out for you is childish nonsense. Callouts are supposed to be learned, not handed to you. Especially when 99% of them are made up by the community and highly specific and from what I saw of the H5 demo they are wildly generic. If you tell me Someone is at the Walshy on Pit I know EXACTLY where he is. Something random like "Boardwalk" isn't helpful, it is pointless noise.

The game has to change for sure, but they did a bunch of things that to me make no sense and turned me off the series permanently. Halo development continues to be feature-based, rather than gameplay-based, and the games die within six months even with people throwing money at it constantly. Not like it really means anything but unless there's money to be made playing H5, none of the pro's play it. They all Play H3 instead.

Spoiler: More Spoilers

They saw Reach do poorly and decided to add a few features that other FPS games had to try and reach a new market of people who would want to play Halo.

When that didn't work (H4), the next Genius move was to take that to the maximum(because going further and further in the direction of a failure just makes perfect sense) and just flat out copy elements from every other large scale FPS on the market in hopes that fans of said franchises comprised of a lot of people who have not played Halo extensively or haven’t played it at all would gravitate toward it because of those features (“Every modern shooter has sprint we need to have Sprint”. "Look, we added a Destiny-like ground-pound; therefore, Destiny fans will play Halo 5!" “(Insert mechanic here) works in that game, surely it can work in Halo)

People play different FPS games for different gameplay & mechanics by turning Halo into some odd Mish-Mash monster of these other Franchises, and what happens is that Halo loses its appeal of and its identity, along with losing unique gameplay that differentiated it from them monotony of generic "modern FPS" games out there already.

And for all the “Halo needs to evolve folks” (which it was doing just fine evolving prior to this foray into whatever 343 wants to call this and if you really want to discuss it I can), just look at a game like Counter Strike. Counter Strike has been the same game from the get-go, no core mechanics have changed yet its still going. The games as popular as it is because it's NOT Call of Duty, Halo, or Destiny. Just like the reason Halo WAS popular is because it wasn't Counter Strike, Call of Duty, or Quake. They understand that and wont be doing anything to mess that up.

I would completely understand all of the changes that continue to be made to Halo gameplay if they were actually resulting in more sales or continued community engagement after release, but shouldn't the numbers around the last few titles be indicative that they are:

• Not capturing their new target audience
• Pushing away their former audience, which was one the largest and most passionate on the web.

Shouldn't this be relatively obvious to anyone with a decent analytical mind over there? 343 had the console market cornered on Halo-style gameplay, and instead of continuing to own that gameplay and push that advantage for steady profits, they've chosen to abandon it and go after something they've proven they don't actually fundamentally understand from a good game design perspective.

They can do whatever they want though, the initial sales will ring off and that's cool. I been stopped caring about this and I am better off for it. I squeezed enough out of H3 to be happy forever, its easily the most important video game to me. At least they brought it to Xbox One so good for them I guess and I can continue playing it.

TLDR; Spint sucks and ruins the Halo Triangle and there are too many guns that create fake diversity. And now Master Chief is Spiderman apparently. I really hope yall enjoy it though, I need to see an actual multiplayer video before I can really weigh in, but so far... Nah. Literally, 1 thing looked good and it was nading sword to himself.

God dammit Anti

You left me no choice...

 

[1995]

Doubt any pros are happy with Infinite.

Used to run ranked Big Team Battle with a whole party 6 - 7 nights a week in Halo 2. Those were the days. Team Slayer in that game got so frustrating after a while. You might as well go ahead and quit if the other team controlled the BR/PP combo and sniper on a lot of maps.

Would get back into Halo 3, but I'm so rusty I doubt I'd have any fun getting stomped nearly every game.

antidope said he would stomp you even if you were fresh as a daisy

 

[Air Champa]

antidope said he would stomp you even if you were fresh as a daisy

Somebody's grandmother could probably stomp me these days.

 

[stay lurkin]

Somebody's grandmother could probably stomp me these days.

Post to avy ratio is top tier

 

[Beruseruku Desu]

Sprint ruined halo. And armor lock + all these new abilities

 

[rbk93]

Even though it wasn't announced, we need a new Splinter Cell.

It's long overdue.

 

[slaughterx]

There's probably one in the works since they're making an anime for Netflix

 

[antidope]

Doubt any pros are happy with Infinite.

Used to run ranked Big Team Battle with a whole party 6 - 7 nights a week in Halo 2. Those were the days. Team Slayer in that game got so frustrating after a while. You might as well go ahead and quit if the other team controlled the BR/PP combo and sniper on a lot of maps.

Would get back into Halo 3, but I'm so rusty I doubt I'd have any fun getting stomped nearly every game.

Play it before it really dies. BTB is all social still but every once in a while you get some good games out of it. You can also force the games to be objective instead of playing Slayer nonstop. Slayer is still terrible compared to objective.