Halo 4 - Master Chief After Bungie

The only other Halo 4 thread I could find was some weird one from '08 asking if Gearbox was going to make it, so I decided to start fresh to post the new screenshots.

Interesting changes to MC’s armor.

http://gamefanmag.com/gf-previews/bringing-humanity-to-master-chief-halo-4-first-details

■Story wraps around the multiplayer experience for the first time in the franchise.
■Players now control Spartan IV’s, which promise to be just as powerful as Master Chief.
■There is a reason why red and blue soldiers are killing each other.
■Beyond the typical cosmetic customization options, players will be able to augment their Spartan IV’s abilities and weapon loadouts, altering their gameplay styles for the first time.
■A lot of focus has gone into giving players a better sense of weight.
■Audio design has been much improved and really gives a player a sense of where shots are coming from.
■Maps have been built from the ground up.
■The Battle Rifle is back and has been redesigned.
■Two maps have been announced so far: War House and Wrap Around.
■War House takes place in a civilian manufacturing plant that is travelling in a near space orbit above a gas giant. It has a large decorative Cyclops Mark II mech in the center which serves as the focal point for this slayer style map.
■Wrap Around is another small slayer style arena, set in a Forerunner facility, that contains catwalks, ramps, and plenty of man-cannons to keep the action fast and frantic.

Oh dear. Isn’t the purity of Halo’s multiplayer part of the appeal? There’s a reason many Reach players never migrated to MW3 or BF3.

I watched the promo video and they do really like this talking point:

There is a reason why red and blue soldiers are killing each other.

I wonder why they think that matters. Have Halo fans ever complained about it?

I watched the promo video and they do really like this talking point:

There is a reason why red and blue soldiers are killing each other.

I wonder why they think that matters. Have Halo fans ever complained about it?

So I assume it’s okay to discuss Halo 3 spoilers in this thread?

If you haven’t finished Halo 3 and you think you will want to, and don’t want to get spoiled, ignore the rest of my post, and possibly this thread. Get outta here!

Ok, now that they’re gone, I can’t believe I didn’t stick around until the end of the credits in Halo 3. I always stick around to the end of credits in video games. Those sneaky designers always like to put stuff at the end, especially when you finish it on the hardest difficulty like we did. But it was a co-op game with three other people, some of us had other places to be, and it was time to call it quits since we’d just finished the game, so I never even gave it another thought.

I was pretty disappointed with the ending that I saw. Master Chief dead? And after such a mediocre campaign like the one in Halo 3? I didn’t feel like they’d earned it. When you kill off a character, it should be after something… more than what they gave us. So anyway, fast forward to about a year later, someone on Qt3 mentioned that Master Chief was still alive, and I was like “what? Since when?” I thought the game ended with MC’s funeral. And they pointed out a youtube clip of the ending after the credits when you finish on the hardest difficulty.

So MC and Cortana went through the portal and ended up… somewhere in space, where MC put himself into cyro storage, to be woken when needed. And they eventually get to some kind of planet. A very intriguing ending, especially if it means that they’ll now meet a new alien species perhaps, and have no allies for support.

OTOH, the screenshots posted above imply that they encounter humanoids? Perhaps even humans? A forgotten human colony where Reds are fighting Blues? God, that sounds cheesy.

Yeah, I was struck by that as well. Other than RoosterTeeth fans, has anyone really thought there needed to be an in-game explanation of the multiplayer? Was that something Microsoft got in feedback?

Yeah but there is an even larger number of players who never migrated to Reach from MW/BF.

Well, on the bright side, running around and jumping in Halo always felt a bit floaty. So it will be interesting to see that changed.

I really don’t care about red vs blue plotlines. I don’t see any way that that could be done in any sort of realistic fashion without feeling contrived.

This one seems a exclusive one, with the helmet open.

So Master Chief is a hamster?

Best unmasking since Tali.

writers vs marketers?

I didn’t know this either and up until now, I thought Halo 4 was going to employ retconned nonsense or a comic book death, not a true continuation of the story so I had not really been interested. It appears it still isn’t.
I guess now that I think about it, it was also done for their ‘Finish the Fight’ marketing campaign and that’s a little sad.

The book lore has been pretty explicit about how close humans are to the Forerunners in terms of confusing the AI units. Maybe it turns out the Forerunner have been fighting each other in Red vs Blue clans all along while in n-space exile or something… Ugh. JoshV is right. Everything sounds dumb.

They should just go the Team Fortress route and make it goofy ridiculous on purpose.

There’s a reason I stopped playing Call of Duty and now they feel like they need to bring it to my Halo game. I hope they don’t F it up but I’m expecting the worse. Halo was great because essentially everyone was equal. Now it sounds like I’ll be punished for not playing the game 24 hours a day to unlock the better weapons.
What is the red/blue nonsense? Really? I’ve stabbed,naded and sniped over a thousand red, blue and other color combination spartans in the Halo franchise and I have never once wondered why we were fighting. I’m hoping this is just fluff to get people talking.

I guess all perks and starter weapons could be available to players from the off? It works with Reach’s Armour Abilities and with Gears of War’s choice of rifles/shotguns.

This ‘progression’ trope is kind of the worst. Bungie made a few concessions but kept it cosmetic.

"There is a reason why red and blue soldiers are killing each other. "

I guess they don’t like each other?

Yeah, and friendly fire is off.

Well, now that’s all I can see!

I love Halo as much as the next guy, but meh, some of that just sounds like rubbish.

■Story wraps around the multiplayer experience for the first time in the franchise.

Wasn’t this done in Reach? I haven’t played it, but didn’t the story revolve around the various abilities of each team member, which was more or less the conceit for having a more role based multi-player experience?

■There is a reason why red and blue soldiers are killing each other.

Really?! Geez, I hope that’s not what the story revolves around.

■Beyond the typical cosmetic customization options, players will be able to augment their Spartan IV’s abilities and weapon loadouts, altering their gameplay styles for the first time.

That’s not why I play Halo.

■A lot of focus has gone into giving players a better sense of weight.
■Audio design has been much improved and really gives a player a sense of where shots are coming from.

Can’t really whinge at that, but I imagine it’s as much to do with advancement of the franchise/design/technology/budget as anything else.

■Maps have been built from the ground up.

Pretty sure the Halo 3 maps were as well. Oh, they mean they were engineered from the ground up for the multi-player experience, around which the story revolves. As opposed to the Halo 3 maps which were created for the single-player experience then finely honed over many iterations to arrive at the multi-player versions. Whatever.

■The Battle Rifle is back and has been redesigned.

For what, the 3rd time?

BR55 series
XBR55 Battle Rifle - Halo: Contact Harvest-era Prototype Battle Rifle. (not in a game)
BR55 Battle Rifle - Halo 1/2-era Battle Rifle.
BR55HB SR Battle Rifle - Halo 3-era Battle Rifle.

I dunno, Halo without floaty jumps? Jumping fifteen feet into the air, spinning around and emptying an entire clip into someone before landing is a fairly distinctive and significant part of the HALO experience.

Does anyone happen to know the reason behind the floatiness? Was it a decision made based on story setting, a happy accident involving the physics engine, or was it to give players using controllers the time to make precise shots? All of the above?

Probably down to when the first game was developed? It was the Quake 3/Unreal Tournament age.